TY - JOUR AU - Pétric, Boris PY - 2014/11/17 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Madeleine Reeves. Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014 JF - Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research JA - Laboratorium VL - 6 IS - 3 SE - Book Reviews DO - UR - https://www.soclabo.org/index.php/laboratorium/article/view/484 SP - 137-139 AB - <p>The British social anthropologist Madeleine Reeves offers a fascinating book, both in terms of the data it contains and the issues it raises. Engaging a qualitative approach to studying the border in post-Soviet Central Asia, she examines more broadly the metamorphosis of the contemporary state. She first reminds us that administrative boundaries between Soviet republics are part of a political context developed during a period where the “scientific state” distinguished spaces and groups and transformed identities by using social sciences and statistics. This complex inheritance is now managed in a new context, where the nation-state appears as the global political norm and tries to match ethnic/national boundaries with political boundaries.</p> ER -