What is a border, really? When I grew up in the suburbs of Kansas City, I could see State Line Road out our kitchen window, a street that straddled the border between Kansas and Missouri. I never bothered to wonder how the two states coordinated the street paving, but we were impressed with the idea that we could stand in the middle of the street with a foot in each state, traffic permitting. The border seemed almost invisible. In the rapid development of the Kansas-side suburbs around 1960, homes appeared long before a post office could be established, so mail to our home on the Kansas side of the border was addressed to “Kansas City, 15, Missouri.” (Zipcodes, and a Kansas mailing address, came in 1963.)

More fascinating to me in my teenage years was the fact that Kansas and Missouri had very different liquor laws, and border residents would organize their lives to take advantage of these differences. The under-21 crowd would flock to the Kansas side, where at 18 years old it was possible to go to a beer tavern and drink 3.2% alcohol beer. But no one in Kansas then could order a glass of wine or a cocktail at a restaurant or bar, so for that, the over-21 crowd would flock to Missouri. Missouri also put a lower tax on liquor, with the result that sometimes Kansans who would go to Missouri to by cheaper liquor could get caught transporting liquor over state lines. It was considered a good idea to have a friend in Missouri who could store your liquor if you found yourself being followed by law enforcement.

I remembered State Line Road a couple of months ago when I read about the Slovenia-Croatia border that ran right through a small town tavern. The owner was quoted in the New York Times:

“This is the Balkans, so every little piece of land counts,” said Mr. Kalin, whose father is a Slovene and whose mother is a Croat, and who woke up one day in May 2004 to find that the Slovenian half of his restaurant was in the European Union and the Croatian half was not.

If political borders sometimes lie in the middle of a busy street or even in the middle of a restaurant, there are of course implications for the people living in the border zone even as they may cross the border repeatedly in a single day. But a cultural border can sometimes be found in the middle of a person. Some, like Mr. Kalin are born on the border of their parents’ cultures while others live extensively in other cultures and end up carrying multiple cultural passports, if not actual passports.

I was recently struck when speaking with a colleague about his fascination of living at the cultural borders. I recognized this as the concept often referred to academically as “cultural marginality” — a term that is closely associated with the work of Janet Bennett. (A thoughtful article about these terms was written by Barbara Schaetti of Transition Dyanmics). But as I thought about some of the practical implications of living on a political border where different rules and regulations apply, I understood a bit more about both the freedom of living at the cultural borders and the need for an in-depth understanding of the context that “governs” each side of the border in order to take advantage of that freedom.