Many people seek to carve out a space for themselves independently of the existing social and political realities of which they are a part. Through a range of ethnographical cases, the book addresses the innovative and complex ways in which social groups show the ability to position themselves between cultures, states, moralities, or local communities and state authorities, thus creating new opportunities for agency in the modern world. As an analytical term, alternative spaces designate "in-between" spaces rather than oppositional structures and are as such both "inside" and "outside" their constituent elements.

In the 1890s, the Danish lieutenant Ole Olufsen set out to lead two expeditions to Tsarist Central Asia. Exploring areas that were still blank on European and Russian maps, the participants spent more than a year traveling on horseback in the pamirs and adjacent valleys bordering Afghanistan, China, and British India. Esther Fihl offers an in-depth study of these Danish expeditions and presents the magnificent collection of objects brought back to the National Museum of Denmark. Drawing on diaries, reports, and published works and a scrutiny of the guiding principles for their collecting of objects, she demonstrates how these explorers portrayed the cultures encountered. This work is a treasure for anyone interested in Central Asia, early anthropological theory, material culture, or European travel literature. They lived with Kyrgyz nomads who carved out an existence for themselves above the tree line with their sheep, goats, and yaks. Traveling along the river Pandsh, they were the first Europeans to collect ethnographical information on the transhumant pastoralists in the elevated valleys bordering Afghanistan. On the steppes of the western lowlands, the Danish expeditions stopped in Samarkand, Khiva, and Bukhara, commercial hubs on the old Silk Road. As official guests of both the emir of Bukhara and the khan of Khiva, they studied the handicrafts of the bazaars and the irrigation agriculture practiced by the Tajiks and Uzbeks. On visits to Merv they also spent time with Turkmen nomadic tribes who had only recently been fighting the Russian colonial power.

Through ethnographical cases, this book examines the ways in which social groups position themselves between cultures, states, moralities, and local/state authorities, creating opportunities for agency. Alternative spaces designate in-between spaces rather than oppositional structures and are both inside and outside their constituent elements.

In 1620 the first Danish settlement on the Indian subcontinent was established in the small fishing village of Tranquebar facing the Indian Ocean on the Coromandel Coast of south India. For the next 225 years, until it was sold to the British in 1845, Tranquebar functioned as a colonial trading station under the Danish flag. From 1784 onwards the Danish governor of Tranquebar lived in a grandiose and beautiful mansion built in a unique style of colonial architecture. This book uses that particular house as a prism through which the authors present and analyse such topics as the architecture and furnishing of the building; the emotions of feeling both at home and away experienced by the governors and their families; the cultural encounters and exchanges that took place between residents of the house and their Indian staff as well as the broader Indian community of traders, temple priests and princely delegates; the intricate political landscapes all governors had to navigate, balancing pressures from other powers in the area, both Indian and European; and the status of Tranquebar as a representative of Denmark injected into an Indian setting dominated by castes suspended in complicated webs of economic exchange and rituals of rank and identity. Presenting stories from Danish Tranquebar, a minor player on the Indian continent, the book is able to apply new analytical perspectives to international politics and alliances on the Indian subcontinent during this period and to nuance the study of cultural contacts with Europea study which has generally been determined by the predominance of British colonialism. The book feeds into the growing international interest in the study of places with rich colonial and postcolonial histories, not only in India but all over the world.