Borderland Breccia: The Mutant Hero in the Historical Imagination of a Central-African Diamond Frontier
Author(s)
Boeck, Filip de
Abstract
The ethnographic setting of this paper is a contemporary diamond frontier along the borderline between Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire). The diamond frontier described here is not only an intermediate geographical reality on the periphery of two different states. The frontier-setting which I will deal with in this chapter is also a state of mind. It provides a physical and mental landscape in which local and global imaginaries meet and, eventually, merge. The frontier presented here is thus not only political or economical, but above all socio-cultural, in an inventive pot-pourri between ‘rural’ and ‘urban’, local and global, ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ categories, practices, mentalities, relationships and belief systems.
