Narrating Boundaries: Framing and Contesting Suffering, Community, and Belonging in Enclaves along the India-Bangladesh Border

This paper explores the politics of community making at the India-Bangladesh border by examining the public and private narratives of history and belonging in a Bangladeshi enclave-a sovereign piece of Bangladesh completely territorially surrounded by India. Drawing on framings of political society, this paper argues that understanding populations at the margins of South Asia and beyond requires attention to two processes: first, to the ways that para-legal activities are part and parcel of daily life; and second, to the strategies through which these groups construct themselves as moral communities deserving of inclusion within the state. Border communities often articulate narratives of dispossession, exceptionality, and marginalization to researchers and other visitors-narratives that are often unproblematically reproduced in academic treatments of the border. However, such articulations mask both the complicated histories and quotidian realities of border life. This paper views these articulations as political projects in and of themselves. By reading the more hidden histories of life in this border enclave, this article reconstructs the notion of borders as experienced by enclave residents themselves. It shows the ways that the politics of the India-Bangladesh border are constitutive of (and constituted by) a range of fractures and internal boundaries within the enclave. These boundaries are as central to forging community-to articulating who belongs and why-as are more public narratives that frame enclave residents as victims of confused territorial configurations. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

PHYLOGENETIC ANALYSES, GENE DOSAGE EFFECT AND SELECTION IN MEMBERS OF THE LATERAL BOUNDARY DOMAIN (LBD) GENES TRANSCRIPTION FACTOR FAMILY

Wood formation is an economically and environmentally important process and has played a significant role in the evolution of terrestrial plants. Despite its significance, the molecular underpinnings of the process are still poorly understood. We have previously shown that four Lateral Boundary Domain (LBD) transcription factors have important roles in the regulation of wood formation with two (LBD1 and LBD4) involved in secondary phloem and ray cell development and two (LBD15 and LBD18) in secondary xylem formation. Here, we used comparative phylogenetic analyses to test potential roles of the four LBD genes in the evolution of woodiness. We studied the copy number and variation in DNA and amino acid sequences of the four LBDs in a wide range of woody and herbaceous plant taxa with fully sequenced and annotated genomes. LBD1 showed the highest gene copy number across the studied species, and LBD1 gene copy number was strongly and significantly correlated with the level of ray seriation. The lianas, cucumber and grape, with multiseriate ray cells showed the highest gene copy number (12 and 11, respectively). Because lianas’ growth habit requires significant twisting and bending, the less lignified ray parenchyma cells likely facilitate stem flexibility and maintenance of xylem conductivity. We further demonstrate conservation of amino acids in the LBD18 protein sequences that are specific to woody taxa. Neutrality tests showed evidence for strong purifying selection on these gene regions across various orders, indicating adaptive convergent evolution of LBD18. Structural modeling demonstrates that the conserved amino acids have a significant impact on the tertiary protein structure and thus are likely of significant functional importance.