| In recent years, scholars across disciplines have increasingly turned their attention toward the study of international airports, especially in the context of "security". The regulatory forces that exist in airports are meant to protect political livelihood from perceived foreign threats. These forces manipulate mobility, construct identities, and impact economies. For anthropologists, airports are both physical and symbolic sites of complex social, political, and economic activities. These activities have a tremendous impact on people at local, regional, national, and supra-national scales. Using a broad-based literature review and border theory, this thesis examines several functions of airports as contemporary borders, concentrating on the security apparatus. Building from this view, three aspects of security are highlighted: personal security, economic security, and state security. An examination of airports and the related security initiatives demonstrates how important it is for anthropologists and other scholars to build on existing research through ethnography. |
