Going beyond conventional definitions of 'the long term', this book locates the social practice of walling and encirclement in the broadest context of human history, integrating insights from archaeology and anthropology. It locates the essential dynamics of the practice, showing how walling produces a paranoid vision of the world in which whatever falls outside the wall becomes demonised and threatening, and stands in need of ever-renewed attempts to exterminate it. A study of the isolating practice of walling, Walling, Boundaries and Liminality explores the links between the kind of dangerous expansion that walling represents, and its accompanying loss of certainty and inner conviction.