‘Nationalism’ is a contentious and often unanalyzed abstraction, generally treated as something ‘imagined’ or otherwise located on maps, in flags and other symbols, and in collective memory. Between Frontiers restores the nation to the social field from which it has been abstracted by looking at how the concept shapes the existence of people in border zones, where they live between nations.

Noboru Ishikawa grounds his study in the boundary that separates Malaysian from Indonesian territory in western Borneo. His book explores how states materialize their territoriality and how people strategically situate themselves as members of a local community, nation and ethnic group within that territory. Scholars across the humanities and social sciences will learn much from this masterful linking of history and ethnography, and of macro and micro perspectives.

’This is such a marvellous book. I love the way it brings a structural analysis of capitalism and the state into a deep reading of history and ethnography. The international politics, smuggling, ethnic formation, asymmetrical labor migration, and ’location work’ found on isolated and little-known Cape Dato typify the striking particularity of transnational modernity. I will enjoy teaching it and will recommend it to many - far beyond the boundaries of SE Asian studies.’ Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (University of California, Santa Cruz)

’Ishikawa has a deep and long-term knowledge of his subject. The mixture of historical, anthropological, and sociological approaches is inspiring, and Ishikawa mixes these genres skilfully. A detailed and impressive thick description permeates the book from the first page to the last, but it is also theoretically sophisticated. This combination sets it apart from quite a few other studies that accomplish one or the other but not both.’ Eric Tagliacozzo (Cornell University)

Noburu Ishikawa is an Associate Professor at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University. As a social anthropologist, he has maintained a strong interest in political economy and relationships between humans and the environment in insular Southeast Asia, thus exploring social forces shaping the region through the articulation of history and ethnography both from macro and micro perspectives. His analysis of these forces in both their local and global contexts and in how they interact was important in his earlier study of globalization in Asia and Africa and flows through to this study. Dr Ishikawa’s research interests and publications have largely focused on nation and identity, transnationalism (especially in the borderlands of western Borneo), the social history of a riverine society in northern Sarawak, the political economy of the Malay world, commodity chains connecting Southeast Asia and Japan, and the socio-cultural construction of “nature” in the industrialized environment of Southeast Asia.