Les identités frontalières : les « parentes pauvres » ou les « riches héritières » de la tribu ?
Borders Identities: the "Poor Relatives" or the "Rich Inheritors" of the Tribe?

Summary/Abstract: Our essay is emphasizing how complex the border issue has been in Europe and most particularly in Eastern Europe over the last two centuries. The paradigmatic anxiety brought about by the obsessions of a peripheral cultural identity can be traced on several levels. It highlights the variable meanings of the notion of border and illustrates the ways in which many Eastern European communities locate borders, assign meaning to them and reassert their functions. In this type of cultural process key identifiers of selfhood and self worth are generated by narratives through which people on either side of the border construct their identities by manipulating a set of shared rhetoric. Collective perceptions of borders usually foster conflicting ideologies, rhetorical devices and topoi of the social imaginary. They generate literary programs and they also create symbolic topographies and sites of memory: Apart form this almost all descriptive terms involved in these processes usually convey value judgments. In recent decades, European cartography has become a privileged and flexible instrument of the impetuous offensives launched by all kind of emergent European identities, cultural, social, national, gender etc. Consequently a series of academic disciplines (cultural geography, anthropology, critical postcolonial theories, comparative studies) had provided strong arguments for their campaigns.

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