NONSENSE OF BORDER AND ONTOLOGIES IN THE MAKING: PRODUCTION OF DIFFERENCE IN THE BELARUSIAN-LITHUANIAN BORDERLAND

Roman Urbanowicz

doi:10.23858/ethp.2025.46.4030

Published: 2025-12-23

Vol. 46 (2025)

NONSENSE OF BORDER AND ONTOLOGIES IN THE MAKING

Roman Urbanowicz

Ethnologia Polona

Section: Main topic of the issue

https://doi.org/10.23858/ethp.2025.46.4030

Abstract

The social sciences have long established that state borders produce, rather than simply reflect, social and cultural distinctions. Rather than examining the distinctions themselves, this article considers how perspectives on new differences are emerging. The state border between Belarus and Lithuania constitutes a distinctive example of a restricted geopolitical border, the external frontier of the EU, which emerged without any historical precedent and is still perceived as an absurdity by the locals who witnessed its emergence. I argue that the operation of the border’s bureaucracy produces estrangement through specific spatialised regimes of uncertainty, undermining the reproduction of pre-border social connections. This growing alienation is often interpreted within the logic of the “civilisational projects”
– the European one and its Belarusian counterpart – that the border is supposed to represent, sometimes appearing as accounts of substantial incommensurability. In other words, ontologies are produced from nonsense along the Belarusian-Lithuanian state border.

Keywords:

Belarus, Lithuania, state border, Europeanness, production of difference

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Urbanowicz, R. (2025). NONSENSE OF BORDER AND ONTOLOGIES IN THE MAKING: PRODUCTION OF DIFFERENCE IN THE BELARUSIAN-LITHUANIAN BORDERLAND. Ethnologia Polona, 46. https://doi.org/10.23858/ethp.2025.46.4030

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