A Thousand Tiny Cuts chronicles the slow transformation of a connected
region into national borderlands. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in
northern Bangladesh and eastern India, Sahana Ghosh shows the
foundational place of gender and sexuality in the making and management
of threat in relation to mobility. Rather than focusing solely on border
fences and border crossings, she demonstrates that bordering reorders
relations of value. The cost of militarization across this ostensibly
"friendly" border is devaluation--of agrarian land and crops, of
borderland youth undesirable as brides and grooms in their respective
national hinterlands, of regional infrastructures now disconnected, and
of social and physical geographies disordered by surveillance. Through a
textured ethnography of the gendered political economy of mobility
across postcolonial borderlands in South Asia, this ambitious book
challenges anthropological understandings of the violence of bordering,
migration and citizenship, and transnational inequalities that are based
on Euro-American borders and security regimes.