Over the last decade, anthropologists have drawn attention to the disconnect between a political imagination that conceptualizes nation-states’ borders as unambiguous and linear, and the realities of borderlanders’ experience where cultural and social space is frequently folded and overlapping. Through their very focus on hybridity and crossborder linkages, however, border ethnographies have unwittingly given even more weight to linear demarcations—all the while insisting that they are abstract and ideological. In mining the border-as-skin somatic metaphor, this article foregrounds nonvisual bodily senses such as tactility in its analysis and suggests that the inclusion of proximate senses in ethnographies of border encounters offers significant analytical advantages. It moves away from the visuality that dominates political cartography, thus allowing for a more sensuous and synesthetic ethnographic work. Additionally, in heeding the recent research on topologies published by geographers and social theorists, the paper hopes to contribute to the emerging mathematical turn.

National loss of territory is commonly described in corporeal language of mutilation and dismemberment. In this paper I argue that this language is not simply poetic or metaphoric but that it reflects a genuine association between the individual body and the national contours, and that this identification has been greatly facilitated by the emergence of the national map. In revisiting the common trope of the nation-as-body through inclusion of insights from neuroscience, I explore what happens when a lack of fit intervenes between the physical geographical extent of the nation and the mental map held by its inhabitants. Taking Manchuria as my main focus while suggesting a much wider applicability, I suggest that 'lost' territories, no longer included within the national body, remain nonetheless part of a previous national incarnation. As such, they draw national sentiments and affect, eliciting what can be labeled 'phantom pains'.

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The change of script from the traditional bichig to Cyrillic that took place in Mongolia in the 1940s brought Mongols closer to the rest of the Soviet world and effected a break with ethnically and linguistically identical populations beyond the borders. While the political ramifications of this transition have been examined at length, much less attention has been given to the impact that the introduction of a new script has had on Mongolian phonology. This paper examines some of the language ideologies currently prevalent in Mongolia as well as the new language practices that have emerged in the last two decades around the use of Latin.