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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2019
This article asks what can be learned about affinity and alterity by considering how villagers and state troops collectively live in remote and often dangerous borders. Situating this question along South Asia's longest international boundary—the India-Bangladesh border—I query the political possibilities of conviviality that bear upon altering notions of reciprocity, exchange, and trust, and which have not attracted the attention of either urban or border scholars. I argue that reciprocal webs of exchange brought Garo matrilineal kinship and Christian religiosity into relations with seemingly impersonal worlds of state control and border rule. The exchange of valued domestic objects, and the broader set of political and gendered affinities that surrounded these, are evidence of the border's changing role and temporality in mitigating difference and danger. Although these relations are embedded in the history of border-making in the Garo Hills, recent national security measures and border infrastructures have disrupted prior exchanges. These have disembedded the troops from their immediate rural environment in attempts to contain trans-border relationships.
Acknowledgements: I thank the participants and organizers of the Social Science Research Council's Fifth Inter-Asian Conference, the ‘Shifting Significations of Borders in Contemporary South Asia and the Americas’ seminar co-organized by the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University and the Anthropology Colloquium, Macquarie University. I especially thank Madeleine Reeves, Magnus Mardsen, Itty Abraham, Yasmin Cho, and Kavita Punjabi. I am grateful to Eli Elinoff, George Jose, Rakesh Kumar, and the Modern Asian Studies reviewers for their valuable suggestions.
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