Drawing on the weak presence of problematizations of the spatial and temporal in some ethnographies of borders, this article advocates more attention to the border-space and ways in which it can be more effectively temporalized. It argues that it is not sufficient to recognize ‘space’ as an implicit characteristic of borders and advances an argument for seeing the border-space as ‘becoming’, in contrast to a largely agreed understanding of that space as ‘dwelling’. Using this distinction between two kinds of space with different possibilities of temporalization and politicization, the argument goes on with two theoretico-methodological scenarios for the border-space: the actor-network theory and Max Gluckman’s situational and processual analysis. It is argued that while the first imagines network and fluid spaces, coexistent with the regional ones, the latter offers a spatiotemporal genealogy of practices through events. Overall, the article opens a debate about seeing the border-space as ‘becoming’ by addressing a series of questions. Is the border-‘becoming’ a fully spatiotemporal politics in which the state is not necessarily a central actor? Is this mode of ontologization played in great part by events set at different scales useful to the anthropology of borders?
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