Popular Press
Anthropology and the Proliferation of Border Walls
American Anthropological Association
(2021)
Abstract
1 Mobility is a natural human behavior that walls
attempt to void. Currently, capital and commodities move
more freely than people. Walls create unequal mobility in
which privileged and functional workers pass. Those who
are not allowed to pass face the payment of large sums
and debt to human smugglers, and risk physical injury and
death in the dangerous journey around walls. Walls—and,
more widely, restrictions, checkpoints, and barriers—have
cut off normal social-cultural ties across regional and local
border communities that depend on informal mobility.
2 Limiting mobility chips away at human rights.
Enclosures set limits on basic and meaningful human
goals and needs: to gain a livelihood, seek asylum, or
avoid danger. But there is also a “domino effect” when
people do not even try to move through walls and other
barriers, despite fear of persecution and hope for a
better life. They recognize that the path to such hopes is
physically dangerous, and often lined with victimizers. The
accumulation of waiting people in camps and towns in the
midst of danger and extreme exploitation, and even the
trips never taken, despite compelling reasons, need much
more penetrating attention.
3 Walls politicize space. Symbolic or political drivers, such
as nativism, underlie and are the foundation of walls. The
discrepancy between official formal policy claims for a
supposed need of walls and the actual reality and results
of walls spotlight the political symbolism embedded in the
ideology of walls: An enclosed inside distinguished from
an “othered” outside, or a “threatening other” contained
from spilling out. Walls are often implemented after
periods of “crisis,” mostly national, but also class-based in
the case of gated communities. This includes the closure
that concentrates refugees and asylum seekers into camps
and settlements.
4 Walls are not limited to human-made physical
barriers. Obstacles to entry include checkpoints on
movement paths or belts of concentrated enforcement
near boundaries. New detection technologies, “virtual
walls,” identify moving people and conveyances, and
aim to inhibit them. Geographic obstacles, such as the
Mediterranean Sea or perilous deserts, may be used as
barriers by design. Walls are materialized forms of spatialsocial
exclusion, deployed unequally against some but not
all people.
5 Placing rigid barriers across the landscape obstructs
ecology. The result of such physical borders is a disruption
to breeding diversity for many moving animals; habitat
destruction through wall building itself; and rechanneling
or blocking the flow of surface water. These walls also
damage cultures tied to the freeflow of ecology.
6 Walls have important effects on health. People are
harmed by actually trying to cross a border (sometimes
falling from the wall, or being shot at by border guards),
but walls also bar people from seeking out better
healthcare services.
Keywords
- borders,
- walls,
- well-being
Disciplines
Publication Date
2021
Citation Information
Josiah Heyman, Roberto Alvarez, Julie Peteet and Reinhard Bernbeck. "Anthropology and the Proliferation of Border Walls" American Anthropological Association (2021) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/josiah_heyman/4/