A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands by Sahana Ghosh (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2023)

Reviewed by Fırat Bozçalı, University of Toronto

Sahana Ghosh’s A Thousand Tiny Cuts offers a groundbreaking and deeply insightful approach to the critical study of borders and borderlands. By conceptualizing bordering—the continuous process of border-making—as a form of value-making, Ghosh illuminates how clandestine and otherwise cross-border im/mobilities enable valuations and devaluations. The “a thousand tiny cuts” metaphor powerfully captures these valuations and devaluations, which state authorities impose and borderland residents invest in and reproduce. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork across the increasingly militarized, “friendly” border of India and Bangladesh, Ghosh compellingly demonstrates how borderlands are actively produced as securitized and gendered spaces that have a central role in the very making of the national. Ghosh’s analysis moves beyond instances of spectacular violence to examine subtle, insidious forms of gendered and classed violence that operate through “ordinary eventfulness” (16). Equally significant is Ghosh’s challenge to the reductive binary that frames borderland residents as either victims of state domination or as resisting agents who necessarily contest state bordering. A Thousand Tiny Cuts compels us to understand bordering as a process in which borderlanders are not merely subjected to or opposed to but also actively shape, reinforce, and negotiate. Ghosh’s ethnography profoundly enriches the anthropological study of borders and border enforcement, transnational migration, and contraband economies.

Ghosh’s account presents an impressive ethnography that takes readers from state-imposed checkpoints to the intimate spaces of transnational households, weddings, agricultural fields, warehouses, markets, and small shops that deal in contraband. Each chapter examines a distinct site of value-making: transportation infrastructures, security surveillance by border patrols, cross-border marriages, agrarian production and trade, and men’s diverse practices of laboring and risk-taking. The book creatively introduces “mobile ethnography as a transnational feminist method” (25) and integrates spatial history with tracing the transnational and social lives of commodities, mapping kinship charts, recording family histories of migrant households, and practicing ethnographic walking with interlocutors—all of which immerses the reader in the experiences of bordering and borderlands. Ghosh’s ethnography is further enriched by “photographic practice” (21), which employs a cell phone camera to capture fleeting glimpses of everyday life in the borderlands, that contributes to “narrat[ing] a spatial history of the borderlands” (22).

Ghosh expands on anthropological studies of clandestine economies, particularly contraband trade, by moving beyond “the lens of moral economy” (125), which distinguishes between economic activities that state authorities deem legitimate and those local communities consider legitimate. This lens has been crucial in contesting state-imposed criminalization and emphasizing how contraband economies can be illegal yet licit (Abraham & van Schendel 2005). However, Ghosh reveals its limitations by showing how borderland residents may not simply resist but may actively invest in bordering. Ghosh also challenges the moral economy lens by demonstrating that moral justifications for legally illegitimate mobilities are not exclusive to borderland communities and may be shared and enacted by state authorities. Rather than assume a clear division between the two, for example, Ghosh’s account shows how state officers reinforce heteropatriarchal family ideologies through selectively imposing bordering practices on the basis of passengers’ gender.

Taking the borderlanders’ investment in bordering as a central analytic, Ghosh further demonstrates how borderland residents and clandestine mobility are integral to national economies and the scales and hierarchies of value that sustain them. Ghosh theorizes bordering as a process that produces “hierarchical relations of value” (14) in which certain bodies, spaces, times, and commodities are valued while others are devalued. This theorization leads to an insightful argument: national economies are not merely imagined or established prior to clandestine mobility but are actively produced through it. The argument offers a fresh perspective on anthropological understandings of politics, law, and economy, particularly in relation to arbitrage and trade mobilities (contraband or otherwise). Rather than treat national economies, price differentials, and currency values as pre-existing conditions that incite clandestine movements, Ghosh demonstrates how these movements create and continuously reshape the very conditions they and bordering practices engender.

Ghosh’s account insightfully raises the question of whether multiple, potentially inconsistent forms of bordering coexist—forms that both state authorities and borderland residents invest in—though the account does not fully answer it. Ghosh’s analytically generative framing of bordering as value-making may, in fact, shed light on these overlapping forms and how borderlanders strategically mobilize one to reshape and even occasionally counteract another. Chapter 3, for instance, illustrates how farmers repurpose their fields near the borderline to cultivate ganja and leverage its criminalization—a form of bordering that devalues a specific commodity—to revalue land previously made obsolete by state-imposed militarization, another form of devaluing bordering. Chapter 2 provides another example. Women use sexual jokes to mobilize heteropatriarchal values, as a distinct form of bordering, to unsettle security officers’ authority and, in turn, challenge state-imposed bordering at checkpoints. Rather than suggest a singular, state-imposed bordering logic, these cases reveal overlapping, sometimes contradictory forms of bordering, each shaping distinct regimes of valuation and devaluation. Further theorization of these intersecting logics could deepen critical understandings of how borderland residents and state actors negotiate political, economic, and moral agency beyond a domination-resistance framework.

A Thousand Tiny Cuts is a must-read for scholars, researchers, and students—both undergraduate and graduate—engaged with fields and themes such as the anthropology of politics and law, border and borderland studies, the anthropology of illegality and clandestine economies, political economy, spatial history, critical kinship studies, gender studies, and feminist methodologies. With its ethnographic depth, theoretical rigor, and captivating yet accessible writing, the book makes a groundbreaking contribution to anthropological debates on bordering, mobility, value, and the making of the national. In today’s world of ever-expanding racialized and gendered border security and surveillance regimes, this book is both timely and indispensable for scholarly and non-scholarly audiences alike.

References

Abraham, Itty, and Willem van Schendel. 2005. “Introduction: The Making of Illicitness.” In Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization, edited by Willem van Schendel and Itty Abraham, 1–37. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.