Article

Culture & Psychology

2016, Vol. 22(2) 206–215
The borderland ! The Author(s) 2016
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Giuseppina Marsico DOI: 10.1177/1354067X15601199
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University of Salerno, Italy

Abstract
People travel for tourism, for working, for escaping from the home country, for mis-
sionary reasons or for exploring new lands. By so doing, they cross borders which make
their own identity different from the previous state becoming a migrant, an exiled, a
tourist, a helper or a conqueror. Border shows its difficulties in being unambiguously
defined. For instance, to which of the contiguous areas it belongs? Neither one of the
single-bounded regions is sufficient for that. Border is not just a non-place, but is a space
with its own characteristics that makes living there very specific, regulating the dynamic
with the surroundings and even the way of thinking, acting and feeling. Living in a
borderland makes the identity of the inhabitants and their meaning-making process
very peculiar. The way in which the border residents perceive the relationship between
the self, the others and the environment, as well as their process of meaning-making is
unavoidably linked with the existence of the border itself, with all its ambivalent the-
oretical features and practical implications in settling the daily activities and the human
psychological functioning.

Keywords
Borders, border crossing, border-making, belonging, borderland

Borders are ubiquitous. They set, organize and regulate our social and psycho-
logical existence. However, there are specific places, events or conditions that make
evident how borders actually work and all the complexity of the borders’ process.
In my recent trip to Luxembourg, I have experienced the borders in a very
peculiar way. The particular geographical configuration of that area allowed me
to move in and out of Luxembourg, France and Germany in few minutes.
Schengen, is right there. It is a small village located at the triplex border of
Luxembourg–Germany–France, where an agreement was signed in 1985 to elim-
inate border controls within the European Union. The so-called ‘‘Schengen Area’’
became a symbol of freedom of travel and of the elimination of borders in Europe.

Corresponding author:
Giuseppina Marsico, Dipartimento di Scienze Umane, Flosofiche e della Formazione (DISUFF), Università di
Salerno, via Giovanni Paolo II, 132, 84084 Fisciano (SA), Italy.
Email: gmarsico@unisa.it

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Marsico 207

All the emphasis on the positive ideology of the European integration is very pre-
sent there and promoted by some kind of cultural initiative like the European
Museum of Schengen, which reinforces the socio-political message that, through
a contractual agreement, the elimination of borders within the European Union
signals recognition of the fact that the citizens of the participating states belong to
the same space and share the same identity.
Yet, only few kilometers far from Schengen, at the border between France and
Germany, I found an unmistakable symbol of national identity (Figure 1).
Apach is a small French village at the border with Luxembourg and Germany,
where, on the very last square meters before the German territory, lies a miniature
of the Eiffel Tower.
What is the reason for that? Why in the midst of the apology of European
unification trough the elimination of borders, the demarcation still exists?
Borders unite and divide at the same time, and this is the first axiomatic standpoint
we need to keep in mind for understanding the borders phenomena (Marsico,
2013).
Another event which makes evident the complexity of the borders process is that
presented by Cubero, Contreras and Cubero (2016). The authors asked 48 people
from Matamoros (State of Tamaulipas, Mèxico) and 48 people from Brownsville

Figure 1. Tour Eiffel miniature in Apach (France).

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208 Culture & Psychology 22(2)

(Texas, USA) with different educational level how they define the term borders and
how they describe who lives in the border area.
All of the participants were born in those cities and/or they have lived there for
the last 20 years. They were border residents to whom it was asked to illustrate
what does it mean to live on a border. Why this question is so intriguing? It would
be equally interesting to ask two groups of people living in a countryside one
hundred meters far each other what does it mean living there? Maybe not.
What does it make living on a border such a peculiar condition at point to be
elevated to the ‘‘glory’’ of the scientific inquiry? Borders are very paradoxical topic
in their essence: they simultaneously belong to two parts, while being defined by
neither one entirely. This is the second axiomatic standpoint we need to keep in
mind (Marsico, 2013).
In addition, the research carried out by Cubero et al. (2016) showed two very
curious findings. On the one hand, Mexican participants (compared to Americans)
used, more frequently and independently from the educational level, a functional
concept of border, mostly related to their personal experiences. On the other hand,
Americans apparently did not recognize themselves as citizens of the borders. How
it would be possible? Ultimately, both are border residents. Why do they show
these differences in conceptualizing and accounting for borders and the notion of
border’s citizen? Border has a contradictory characteristic: it works in lessening the
ambiguity while heightening ambiguity and this is the third axiomatic standpoint to
keep in mind for understanding the borders phenomena (Marsico, Cabell, Valsiner,
& Kharlamov, 2013).

Borders in contemporary theory of cultural psychology

Border is a problematic object from the psychological point of view. What is it?
How it works and how it is perceived? Border is the developmental conceptual
place that accounts for processes of continuity and discontinuity, conflict and
negotiation, innovation and reproduction in living open systems. Borders deal
with both the modification of the environments where we live and with our iden-
tities and psychological functioning.
Border is a place of tension and pacification, of meeting and possible clash.
A border demarcates what is possible to know, to do or to say and what is not
allowed to. A border defines what is crossable and what is not even approachable.
It divides the order on the one side and the chaos on the other.
Traditionally, a border is understood as something in between two or more sites.
In this sense, the border evokes the idea of differences and possible difficulties in
interaction between contexts. Even if the border implies the idea of separation, it is
also ‘‘the point of contact’’ of different settings. The borders divide and connect
simultaneously, and this ambivalent nature allows to cope with intrinsic continuity/
discontinuity dynamics among social places.
According to Herbst’s co-genetic logic (1993), the phenomenon and its context
cannot be separated. They emerge, exist and vanish together. When we draw a

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Marsico 209

circle on a piece of paper, we create a triplet {outside<>border<>inside} and not

one single thing (what we commonly label circle by focusing only on the inside of
the figure). In this triplet, all of the parts come into being at the same time and
disappear simultaneously when we eliminate the border. The ‘‘outside’’ is the inev-
itable context for the ‘‘inside’’, and the border is what both separates and unifies
them (Valsiner, 2014). Borders create discontinuity and connection between two
related fields that acquire their signification through their relationships.
This double function of borders is a crucial feature for treating the notion of
‘‘context-boundedness’’ in Cultural Psychology (Marsico, Dazzani, Ristum, &
Bastos, 2015).
At the most abstract level, we can assert the possibility of various conceptual-
izations of the borders between different discernible contexts, from a complete
separation to permeable contact (in analogy with the cell membrane), to the exist-
ence of a zone in between of co-existence and co-development in time—while
sharing significant mutualities (Marsico et al., 2013).

Exploring the borderland

I must admit that, while reading the Cubero et al. (2016) paper, I was getting more
and more curious so I tried to complement what they discussed with some add-
itional notion about that specific border’s context, so I diligently collected some
very basic notions.
Metamoros is located south of the city of Brownsville, which is situated at the
southernmost tip of Texas. The Rio Grande River separates United States and
Mexico in that area. It would be possible to define this area as a borderland where
there are two adjacent areas divided (and simultaneously connected) by a river.
I have also learnt that there exist three international bridges crossing the USA–
Mexico border between the two cities, allowing the daily transit from one side to
the other. Those few additional information offer some clues for enlarging Cubero
et al.’s (2016) contribution, by focusing more on the theoretical properties and
processes of border-making and border-maintaining.
Cubero et al. (2016) are mainly interested in describing the role played by
schooling and cultural origins in the formation of the concepts of ‘‘border’’ and
‘‘citizen of the border’’. In doing that, the authors discussed the difference between
everyday and scientific concepts. Then, they introduced notions as activity settings,
discourse modes, and types of thinking. The results of their empirical investigation
are consistent with the psychological literature (Bruner, 1990, 1996, 2001; Luria,
1976; Tulviste, 1999; Vygotsky, 1986) that showed that different levels of education
and socio-cultural settings have an impact on the performance of the people.
Undoubtedly, Cubero et al.’s research sheds a light on the effect border context
has on the formation of the cognitive processes. But what is missed is an explan-
ation of how it happens. In order to answer this question we need to take into
account the specificity of borders’ notion, moving from how people talk about
borders to how borders regulate their psychological life.

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210 Culture & Psychology 22(2)

As Cubero et al. (2016) show, Mexicans are more personally involved into all the
aspects related to the border. For many of them, the border organizes their lives
under different points of view: from the professional aspects (i.e. getting a job in
USA) to the intimacy of the family relations (i.e. the everyday life in the domestic
context).
Mexicans cross the borders and the act of crossing borders makes them different
(Marsico, 2013, 2014). They are involved in a daily or periodic migration more than
Americans, because they need to find better life conditions ‘‘out there’’, on the
other side of the river. For them, the border is asymmetric but permeable (Marsico,
2011). This condition is incorporated in the Mexican way of life. They are con-
scious to be inhabitants of a borderland. Nevertheless border – and border crossing
– makes evident the cultural discontinuity in the continuity of their life and calls for
a kind of narrative argumentations (instead of a scientific concepts) which is the
most fitting mode of thinking, since it is able to account for both the situatedness
and the subjectivity of the person at the border (Bruner, 1991, 2004).The narrative
thinking reverberates all the borders’ human drama.
Yet, borders could acquire different meaning for the people who live in the two
contiguous areas. Cubero et al. (2016) show that, despite the American participants
are citizens of the borderland, they do not recognize the border as having two
parts. This is because they do not cross the border, and they do not need to
search for better living conditions ‘‘over there’’. They do not feel, even temporarily,
the sense of estrangement, uncertainty and foreignness.
The shift in people’s place means primarily entering a new symbolic realm, and
encountering a new cultural texture where different social norms, moral values and
religious orientations are in place. Crossing borders entails a remake of your iden-
tity – as a migrant, exiled, explorer, tourist or commuter. For the American par-
ticipants, border is asymmetric but non-permeable. Border is a place for keeping
distance and marking the differences. They basically consider the border in oppos-
itional terms (inside vs. outside), while Mexicans’ way of living on border incorp-
orates the inside and the outside.
Emphasizing the border’s function of demarcation a differentiation, Americans
try to reduce or negate the inherent ambivalence of border which simultaneously
unites and divides, and in doing that, they reinforce the insideness, rather than the
outsideness or the betweeness (Marsico et al., 2015).

Still on the border

All these complex phenomena lead to the theoretical problem – that was also one of
our initial axioms – to which of the parts the border belongs: to one part, to both
parts, to neither Border is not entirely definable by only one part, but it is intrin-
sically dialogical (Varzi, 2013). After all, Matamoros and Browsville exist with
their own peculiarities exactly because they are part of the borderland. In other
words, they exist as they are because of the border. Following Herbst’s co-genetic
logic (1993), they emerge, exist and, eventually, disappear together. What would

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Marsico 211

happen if an agreement between Mexico and USA governments redraws the pol-
itical map annexing Brownsville to the Mexican territory? This borderland con-
stituted by two different cities and a border (the river) in between would lose its
socio-cultural configuration, with many relevant effects on people’s daily life there
(sufficient is to think to all the sort of legal problems regarding the border entrance
and the border control that might be eliminated).
It does not automatically mean the emergence of the sense of we-ness, as the
example of the Tour Eifel in Apach (Figure 1) or, in an opposite vein, the fall of the
Berlin wall clearly shows. Besides, redrawing the border somewhere else would
recreate the same Inside<>Outside dynamic configuration. This is due to the the-
oretical properties and processes of border-making and border-maintaining. The
human capability of creating borders serves the function to turn what is chaotic
and continuous into what is (at least temporarily) stable and discrete.
The border construction is based on three sub-processes: meaning-making, dis-
tinction-making and value-adding. Through this three-phase psychological process,
individuals try to articulate, differentiate and hierarchically organize the relation-
ship with the others and the environments. Thus, borders are artifacts constructed
by human beings to modulate the relationship with the fluid, dynamic and ambigu-
ous environment (Marsico et al., 2013), but in so doing all the intricate theoretical
issues of what the border is and what the border entails become terrifically evident.
This increased ambiguity of the borderland, or what can be called ‘‘the space in
between’’ (Marsico, 2011), leads to the paradoxical characteristic of borders and
border-construction (that was also another of our initial axioms): building a border
to lessen ambiguity in the fluid and dynamic world, but heightening ambiguity in
the construction and imposition of the border through the unknown (and rarely
investigated) qualities of the borderland.
An investigation into the borderland has resulted in three contradictory
characteristics (which were also the three axiomatic standpoints from the
very beginning): (1) the border separates while unifying, (2) the border increases
ambiguity while decreasing ambiguity and (3) the qualities of the borderland are
determined not by the parts but by the borders that make the parts mutually
related.1
Interestingly enough, these theoretical features of borders work both in case of a
natural border or an artificial one. While the former, also called in mereotopolo-
gical terms2 bona fide – are based on some objective discontinuity or qualitative
heterogeneity, the latter – or fiat – is the result of conventional demarcations, of
political, social and administrative agreements (Smith, 1997; Smith & Varzi, 2000;
Varzi, 1997, 1998, 2013). An example of the first kind is exactly the Rio Grande
river that separates (and connects) Matamoros and Brownsville (Figure 2) while a
fiat border is, for instance, the imaginary line in the middle of the Mediterranean
Sea which runs the border between Italy and Africa. Although artificially produced
by human action and invisible in the landscape, it has practical effects in the man-
agement of our individual and collective existence (think to the borders control in
preventing the illegal immigration).

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212 Culture & Psychology 22(2)

Figure 2. Map of Matamoros–Bronwsville borders.1

Despite the negotiated feature of the fiat border, its power is not less binding
than a natural border. This is even more evident in the case of the referred
‘‘Schengen Area,’’ which is the result of a contractual agreement with the conse-
quence of creating free movement of people within European countries, but also
new external borders. The triplet Outside <>Border<> Inside (Herbst, 1993) is
replaced with great impact at very many different levels: from the subjective or
affective ways of experiencing that phenomenon (who and where the foreigner is?)
to the societal level (entry procedures, visa controls, new European agencies for
borders control, etc.).
All this shows the sophisticated capability of humans in border-making. Once
personal and collective borders are constructed they begin to mediate the relation-
ship between the person and the environment, and meaningfully guide behavior
and mental functioning (Valsiner, 1999, 2007).

Concluding remarks
People travel for tourism, for working, for escaping from the home country, for
missionary reasons or for exploring new lands. By so doing, they cross borders

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Marsico 213

which makes their own identity different from the previous state – becoming a
migrant, an exiled, a tourist, a helper or a conqueror.
Border shows its difficulties in being unambiguously defined. For instance, to
whose of the contiguous areas it belongs? Neither one of the single-bounded region
is sufficient for that. Border is not just a non-place (Augè, 1992), but is a space with
its own characteristics that make living there very specific, regulating the dynamic
with the surroundings and even the way of thinking (Cubero et al., 2016), acting
and feeling.
Living in a borderland makes the identity of the inhabitants and their meaning-
making process very peculiar. The way in which the border residents perceive the
relationship between the self, the others and the environment (Tateo, 2014; Tateo &
Marsico, 2013), as well as their process of meaning-making (De Luca Picione &
Freda, 2015) is unavoidably linked with the existence of the border itself, with all its
ambivalent theoretical features and practical implications in settling the daily activ-
ities and the human psychological functioning.
In this article, I have tried to argue about the profound and constitutive role
played by borders and border construction in regulating the relationships in the
human psyche and societies.
Yet, the heuristic power of border is still to be totally displayed.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.

Acknowledgments
In the last months, the Mediterranean Sea has been the stage of the umpteen sorrowful
tragedies of migrants from Africa to the Italian cost. They cross the borderland of the
sea with the greatest sense of uncertainty not only for what it will be the final landing
place, but for their own lives while crossing. In their attempt to reach the outpost of the
Europe, they strive for getting a better living condition. Very often the sea swallows up their
dreams. All the hopes and the desperation of those thousand of humans are deeply acknowl-
edged here.

Notes
1. Map of Matamoros–Bronwsville Borders. International Boundary Commission United
States and Mexico. Map Division, 1935, Lib. of Cong. Web. 7 May 2015, http://
www.loc.gov/item/98686043/
The Library of Congress is providing access to these materials for educational and
research purposes and is not aware of any U.S. copyright protection (see Title 17 of
the United States Code) or any other restrictions in the Map Collection materials.

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214 Culture & Psychology 22(2)

2. Mereotopology is the qualitative mathematical perspective – part of topology – on the

issue of borders in the abstract sense (Smith, 1997; Varzi, 1998).

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Author biography
Giuseppina Marsico is an Assistant Professor of Development and Educational
Psychology at the Department of Human, Philosophic and Education Sciences
(DISUFF), at the University of Salerno (Italy) and Adjunct Professor at PhD
Programme in Psychology, Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil. She
has 15 years of research experience, with a proven international research network.
Her research track includes studies on developmental risk at school, youth devi-
ance, school–family communication, boundaries and contexts. She is Editor of the
Book Series Cultural Psychology of Education (Springer), Associate Editor of
Cultural & Psychology Journal (Sage) and member of the editorial board of several
international academic journals (i.e. ‘‘Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science’’,
Springer). She also edited the book ‘‘Crossing Boundaries. Intercontextual dynamics
between Family and School’’ (Information Age Publishing).

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