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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.
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 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.
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.
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