| An exiled people, carried within its collective memory the history of its own nomadic past and the longing for a promised land that it could call home. The Genesis and Exodus narratives that constitute the written record of that history have served to provide a highly systematized mapping of bodies, memories, and lands. By examining the theological paradigms by which these inscriptions are informed, this thesis questions the adequacy, or relevance, of contemporary border practices being based on such divisive assumptions. It critically examines the adoption of the border as a metaphor for purity and order and a barrier against impurity and chaos.;The Christian apostles and church fathers considered their task to be the universalizing of this kind of clarity between the righteous and the damned. It has been a thoroughly colonizing legacy that underwrote conquest, absolutism, the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century, and current border practices. The thesis explores Buddhism as an alternative ontology and, in this context, examines the processes of cultural accumulation.;Amidst the resulting accretions and centralizations, and in response to the neo-Kantians who informed his thinking, Mikhail Bakhtin proposed a corrective set of paradigms. In place of political fear he upheld the laughter of the people. Rather than the seriousness of a system of victims and victors, he advocated a dialogism of answerability---"what should I do when faced with someone who can answer back?";National borders have operated on the basis of outdated and divisive assumptions of order and chaos. A new generation of thinkers, some of them referencing Bakhtin's work, provide support here for "escaping" systems of rigid exclusion/inclusion. The national border is a public sphere and best practices ought to apply. They are practices that invite a "step-by-step transition from autonomy to intimacy, from intrusion to community."... |
