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A B S T R A C TDiscourses of the punishing state that circulated in Eritrea at a time when the government had become increasingly coercive were articulated especially clearly in debates over teacher transfers. Teachers imagined the state on the basis of their intimate encounters with its bureaucrats, who were thought of as capable of punishing, manipulating, or being manipulated. In a country once noted for the effervescent, revolutionary celebration of the state's capacity to defend and develop the nation, thinking of the state as pernicious challenged the core tenets of Eritrean nationalism but left intact lingering fantasies of state fairness. By examining the complexity of debates about teacher transfers, I uncover a multifaceted commentary on government power, a dialogue over the nature and meaning of the notion of duty to the nation, and a reworked popular imaginary of the state. [nationalism, state, teachers, Eritrea, bureaucracy, intimacy, citizenship] I n the fall of 2004, in the town of Assab, Eritrea, teachers and students as well as their families and neighbors were anxiously awaiting news about teacher transfers to more remote towns and villages in the Southern Red Sea region, where Assab is located. For weeks, in every house, teashop, and bar I visited, this was the topic of conversation. That fall, several new schools were being opened in the sparsely populated region, and a much larger number of teachers than ever before were being transferred to remote posts. The transfers loomed large in everyone's minds, evoking the specter of a government capable of relocating citizen bodies at will without regard for their well-being or wishes. The transfers were personally troubling to teachers, who would be separated from family for six months at a time or longer and who would have to live without running water and electricity. But, in addition to this sense of individual loss, discussions of transfers among those affected, directly and otherwise, described an increasingly pernicious relationship between government actors and citizens in a way that depicted the state as autocratic and uncaring.One transfer case was particularly controversial. As soon as Abraham, a young university-aged, "national service" science teacher heard that he was to be transferred to the village of Tio, he immediately left Assab and headed for the Eritrean capital, Asmara. 1 Before leaving, he made it clear that he was protesting his transfer, claiming that it was a punishment for having upset local Ministry of Education officials. He believed this punishment to be highly personal. Abraham also stated that his highly placed relatives in Asmara would intervene on his behalf. In a country noted for a lack of what many would term "corruption," Abraham was willing to use his personal connections to counteract what he understood to be a very personal form of punishment. 2 In Eritrea, a country controlled by an authoritarian regime, it was rumored that the government would not hesitate to arrest its citizens for much lesser infract...

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In 1998, seven years after Eritrea's independence from Ethiopia, renewed war between the two countries created rigid borders where fluid boundaries previously existed. This border making was not only an attempt to physically delineate the border between the two countries but was also a symbolic process that attempted to definitively differentiate Ethiopian from Eritrean. However, alternative nationalisms were formed in the spaces that lay in between the two nations by people who inhabited those spaces. The national identities of Eritreans born in Ethiopia, known as Amiches, ran counter to state-produced forms of nationalism in both Ethiopia and Eritrea. Amiches defined their understanding of belonging by imagining attachments to two different national spaces. In this article, I use the concept of liminality to explore the dangers that Amiches experienced when confronted with this border-making process and the sense of community that emerged from their liminal state. [Eritrea, Ethiopia, ethnic cleansing, liminality, nationalism, borders, Amiche] Rupture, Ritual, and the Reshaping of NationalismIn the fall of 1999, I watched as buses and trucks laden with people came pouring into the town of Assab, Eritrea, honking their horns. A police car, siren blaring, preceded them, calling people to come out of their homes, businesses, and schools to welcome the newcomers. The onlookers cheered, clapped, and waved palm fronds and branches from trees. Some of the people inside the buses smiled faintly and waved back, but most looked exhausted. The tops of the buses and the line of trucks that followed were laden with suitcases, furniture, rolls of bedding, and anything else that people had been able to gather together when they were forced out of Ethiopia. These deportees of Eritrean descent had made the grueling journey through the desert from Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, across the front lines between Ethiopia and Eritrea, to Assab, the port town at the southern tip of Eritrea. The political event had the celebratory air of a parade or a festival, yet there was a marked disconnect between the dejected looks on the faces of the passengers and the elation of the onlookers.Whenever a new batch of deportees arrived in Assab, their names were publicly posted outside the locations where they were to be housed. Assab's largest hotels, as well as some unused housing on the outskirts of town, served this need. Assab's Eritrean residents, the majority of whom had relatives in Ethiopia, made the rounds of these makeshift urban "camps" for displaced people, meticulously checking each name, looking for relatives, former neighbors, or friends.The evening following the parade described above, I accompanied two friends, Iyasu and Hailu, 1 teachers in Assab, as they searched for relatives and friends who might have arrived. Like many of Assab's residents, they were Amiches, which meant that they had grown up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and had moved to Eritrea after its independence in 1991. The mood was marked by excitement mixed wit...