The Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia is the first comprehensive
and critical overview of the ethnographic and anthropological work
in Highland Asia over the past half a century. Opening up a grand
new space for critical engagement, the handbook presents Highland
Asia as a world-region that cuts across the traditional divides
inherited from colonial and Cold War area divisions - the Indian
Subcontinent/South Asia, Southeast Asia, China/East Asia, and
Central Asia. Thirty-two chapters assess the history of research,
identify ethnographic trends, and evaluate a range of analytical
themes that developed in particular settings of Highland Asia. They
cover varied landscapes and communities, from Kyrgyzstan to India,
from Bhutan to Vietnam and bring local voices and narratives
relating trade and tribute, ritual and resistance, pilgrimage and
prophecy, modernity and marginalization, capital and cosmos to the
fore. The handbook shows that for millennia, Highland Asians have
connected far-flung regions through movements of peoples, goods and
ideas, and at all times have been the enactors, repositories, and
mediators of world-historical processes. Taken together, the
contributors and chapters subvert dominant lowland narratives by
privileging primarily highland vantages that reveal Highland Asia
as an ecumune and prism that refracts and generates global history,
social theory, and human imagination. In the currently unfolding
Asian Century, this compels us to reorient and re-envision Highland
Asia, in ethnography, in theory, and in the connections between
this world-region, made of hills, highlands and mountains, and a
planetary context. The handbook reveals both regional commonalities
and diversities, generalities and specificities, and a broad
orientation to key themes in the region. An indispensable reference
work, this handbook fills a significant gap in the literature and
will be of interest to academics, researchers and students
interested in Highland Asia, Zomia Studies, Anthropology,
Comparative Politics, Conceptual History and Sociology, Southeast
Asian Studies, Central Asian Studies and South Asian Studies as
well as Asian Studies in general.
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