Anthropology Seminar Series:

Lines of Sight

Speaker: Rihan Yeh, University of California, San Diego

Host: Dr Sophie Chao

A02, Room 441 and Zoom: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/83442050011

The US-Mexico border, this talk argues, and perhaps contemporary borders more generally are crucially conformed by the orchestration of lines of sight around and across them. These lines of sight form patterns that relate people to each other as subjects and objects of viewing, as exchanging mutual gazes, and many variations in between. This talk sketches the historical accretion of sightlines at the border between Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, California, as well as some of their warpings and reconfigurations in the ethnographic present.

Rihan Yeh is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at UCSD. She studies the effects of the Mexico-US border on public life in Tijuana; her first book is titled Passing: Two Publics in a Mexican Border City (2018).

Main image by Tada Images on Adobe Stock: A double border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, separating San Diego and Tijuana, is seen from the Border Field State Park in San Diego, California.