INTRODUCTION: RETHINKING THE'FRONTIER'IN AMAZONIA AND SIBERIA: EXTRACTIVE ECONOMIES, INDIGENOUS POLITICS AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS

The adage that anthropology is comparative if it is anything at all has been tested in recent years to great effect, particularly on the theme of the body (Gregor & Tuzin 2001; Lambeck & Strathern 1998), and with greater confidence than a decade previously (Holy 1987). The body provides a useful starting point for cross-cultural comparison because there can at some level be said to be a common factor: the physically existing, universal human body. While this apparent universality and constancy of the body may be questioned in the light of ethnographic evidence, and the body can be politicised in differing ways, when politics and history themselves are made into the points of comparison a new and somewhat different challenge is set. To compare frontiers, as the theatres in which cultural difference is played out, constitutes a doubly comparative scenario, as each case being compared involves the meeting of social groups and their own mutual comparison as an exploration of mutual similarity and difference. The comparison of frontiers thus involves the comparison of sets of political relationships, as the variable ways in which subjects relate to others.