Kopytoff, Igor. 1999. The Internal African Frontier: Cultural Conservatism and Ethnic Innovation. In Frontiers and Borderlands: Anthropological Perspectives. Ed. Michael Rösler and Tobias Wendl. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

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Kopytoff argues that the fontier, starting already with Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” (1893), is imagined as harbouring change {Kopytoff 1999@30}. While change is undoubtedly a reality, so is continuity. Kopytoff argues that even if “frontiersmen may see themselves as innovators, free to construct what society they will”, there is an element of conservatism that is not to be overlooked:

[Frontiersmen] bring to the task of social construction a given cultural baggage: a technological tradition, assumptions about human nature and the nature of political man, notions of political legitimacy, conceptions of power and authority, principles of institution building, and so on. Much of this cultural baggage - for our purposes, it may be equated with the political culture - is in the form of ideal patterns and ideal institutional models, rather than being a matter, as in the metropole, of active practice. {Kopytoff 1999@33f}

The emergence of new groups and the genesis of ethnicities in the subsaharan frontiers that Kopytoff is concerned with resemble processes in the Himalayas. Consider the privileges of the founding families in places like Walung or Halji, consider stratification by time of arrival, consider ethnogenesis and the possibility to marry in and up – all of this, it seems to me, is also characteristic of many a village in the Tibetan-speaking higher valleys in Nepal.

Is this just a general pattern or observation of how societies form? Or is is really something specific to a “frontier situation”?

Kopytoff claims that there are differences between frontier situations. In the US or South Africa, where white settlers ventured out to take possession of the frontier is different from the cases of the grasslands of subsaharan Africa. The latter are more like the shatter zones as which James Scott describes “Zomia” – zones of refuge open to a variety of immigrants from different places.

Continuity and change do not bite each other. Kopytoff refers to an argument brought forward by Raum (1989) about how continuity and change complement each other:

References

Raum, Johannes. 1989. Historical concepts and the evolutionary interpretation of the emergence of states: The case of the Zulu reconsidered yet again. Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 114:125-138.