"Transborder" Exchanges of People, Things, and Representations

The intertwined history of Sudan and Ethiopia in the late nineteenth century has received relatively little attention in the literature, and the few studies that focus on Sudanese-Ethiopian relations in the Mahdist period (1885-1898) consist of political histories fed by military and diplomatic events.1 Most of these otherwise valuable works lack transboundary perspectives that examine interaction and exchange patterns in specific border zones of Sudan and Ethiopia. Border studies dealing with this part of Africa certainly do exist; the historical and anthropological essays edited by Donald Donham and Wendy James more than twenty years ago analyze processes through which southern …