인도·남아시아

A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and security across the Bangladesh-India borderlands, by Sahana Ghosh, 2023, Oakland, University of California Press, 295 pp., £25.00, $29.95 (paperback), ISBN 9780520395732 (paperback).A Thousand Tiny Cuts by Sahana Ghosh is an eloquent ethnographic exploration of the India-Bangladesh borderlands. It adds to an existing corpus of literature that deals with anthropological accounts of borders and critical border studies. As the pages chronicle the everyday tales of the border beyond `spectacular violence, the author takes the reader on an evocative journey of simanta jibon, or borderland life, in the Coochbehar district in West Bengal and the adjoining districts of Lalmonirhat and Kurigram in Bangladesh. Drawing on over a decade of research in the northern portions of the Bengal borderland, Ghosh outlines the everyday nature and dynamics of bordering, and the way that it cuts across the intertwined lifeworlds of borderland dwellers, reshaping their physical, social, political and mental landscapes. By following the expansive world of transnational relations on both sides of a seemingly `friendly` border, she analyses how bordering often shifts hierarchies of value through the met- aphor of `tiny cuts`: the multifarious impacts that bordering has on the relational val- ues that shape people`s lives. Methodologically, the author has argued for mobile ethnography as a transnational feminist praxis, using spatial history, walking, com- modity chain analysis, kinship charts, and family histories of migration, to make a case for an anthropology of value-making. These diverse approaches enable Ghosh to investigate unevenness in the borderlands, as it emerges through the intersections of mobility, security, gender, and embodied experience across the many domains of life, which are underpinned by `ordinary eventfulness` (p. 16).