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The Maritime Silk Road foregrounds the numerous networks that have
been woven across oceanic geographies, tying world regions together
often far more extensively than land-based routes. On the strength
of the new data which has emerged in the last two decades in the
form of archaeological findings, as well as new techniques such as
GIS modelling, the authors collectively demonstrate the existence
of a very early global maritime trade. From architecture to
cuisine, and language to clothing, evidence points to early
connections both within Asia and between Asia and other
continents-well before European explorations of the Global South.
The human stories presented here offer insights into both the
extent and limits of this global exchange, showing how goods and
people travelled vast distances, how they were embedded in regional
networks, and how local cultures were shaped as a result.
Bordering Tibetan Languages: Making and Marking Languages in
Transnational High Asia examines the complex interactions between
state, ethnic, and linguistic borders in the Himalayas. These case
studies from Bhutan, China, India, and Nepal show how people in the
Himalayas talk borders into existence, and also how those borders
speak to them and their identities. These 'talking borders' exist
in a world where state borders are contested, and which is being
irrevocably transformed by rapid social and economic change. This
book offers a new perspective on this dynamic region by centring
language, and in doing so, also offers new ways of thinking about
how borders and language influence each other.
Northern Laos has become a prominent spot in large-scale, top-down
mappings and studies of neoliberal globalisation and
infrastructural development linking Thailand and China, and markets
further beyond. Yet in the common narrative, in which Laos appears
as a weak victim helplessly exposed to its larger neighbours,
attention is seldom paid to local voices. This book fills this gap.
Building on long-term multi-sited fieldwork, it accompanies
northern Lao cross-border traders closely in their transnational
worlds of mobilities, social relations, economic experimentation
and aspiration. Cross-Border Traders in Northern Laos: Mastering
Smallness demonstrates that these traders' indispensable but often
invisible role in the everyday workings of the China-Laos-Thailand
borderland economy relies on their rhetoric and practices of
'smallness'-of framing their transnational trade activities in a
self-deprecating manner and stressing their economic inferiority.
Decoding their discursive surface of insignificance, this
ethnography of 'smallness' foregrounds remarkable transnational
social and economic skills that are mostly invisible in
Sino-Southeast Asian borderland scholarship.
Flows and Frictions in Trans-Himalayan Spaces traces movements and
connections in a region known for its formidable obstacles to
mobility. Eight original essays and a conceptual introduction
engage with questions of networks and interconnection between
people across a bordered landscape. Mobility among the extremely
varied ecologies of south-western China, Myanmar and north-eastern
India, with their rugged terrain, high mountains, monsoon-fed
rivers and marshy lowlands, is certainly subject to friction. But
today, harsh political realities have created hard borders and
fractured this trans-Himalayan terrain. However, the closely
researched chapters in this book demonstrate that these borders
have not prevented an abundance of movements, connections and
flows. Mobility has always coexisted with friction here, but this
coexistence has been unsettled, giving this space its historical
shape and its contemporary dynamism. Introducing the concept of the
'corridor' as an analytical framework, this collection investigates
mobility and flows in this unique socio-political landscape.
Development Zones in Asian Borderlands maps the nexus between
global capital flows, national economic policies, infrastructural
connectivity, migration, and aspirations for modernity in the
borderlands of South and South-East Asia. In doing so, it
demonstrates how these are transforming borderlands from remote,
peripheral backyards to front-yards of economic development and
state-building. Development zones encapsulate the networks,
institutions, politics and processes specific to enclave
development, and offer a new analytical framework for thinking
about borderlands; namely, as sites of capital accumulation,
territorialisation and socio-spatial changes.
Since the 1990s, the Chinese-North Korean border region has
undergone a gradual transformation into a site of intensified
cooperation, competition, and intrigue. These changes have prompted
a significant volume of critical scholarship and media commentary
across multiple languages and disciplines. Drawing on existing
studies and new data, Decoding the Sino-North Korean Borderlands
brings much of this literature into concert by pulling together a
wide range of insight on the region's economics, security, social
cohesion, and information flows. Drawing from multilingual sources
and transnational scholarship, this volume is enhanced by the
extensive fieldwork undertaken by the editors and contributors in
their quests to decode the borderland. In doing so, the volume
emphasizes the link between theory, methodology, and practice in
the field of Area Studies and social science more broadly.
Imagined Geographies in the Indo-Tibetan Borderlands: Culture,
Politics, Place is an ethnography of culture and politics in
Monyul, a Tibetan Buddhist cultural region in west Arunachal
Pradesh, Northeast India. For nearly three centuries, Monyul was
part of the Tibetan state, and the Monpas - as the communities
inhabiting this region are collectively known - participated in
trans-Himalayan trade and pilgrimage. Following the colonial
demarcation of the Indo-Tibetan boundary in 1914, the fall of the
Tibetan state in 1951, and the India-China boundary war in 1962,
Monyul was gradually integrated into India and the Monpas became a
Scheduled Tribe. In 2003, the Monpas began a demand for autonomy
under the leadership of Tsona Gontse Rinpoche. This book examines
the narratives and politics of the autonomy movement regarding
language, place-names, and trans-border kinship against the
backdrop of the India-China border dispute. It explores how the
Monpas negotiate multiple identities to imagine new forms of
community that transcend regional and national borders.
Migration and borders are at the center of political debates in
South Asia and around the world as more people migrate in search of
safety and opportunity. This book brings a deep engagement with
individuals whose lives are shaped by encounters with borders by
telling the stories of a poor Bangladeshi women who regularly
crosses the India border to visit family, of Muslims from India
living in Gulf countries for work, and the harrowing journey of a
young Afghan man as he sets off on foot to Germany. The
international and interdisciplinary work in this book contributes
to this moment by analyzing how borders are experienced by migrants
and borderlanders in South Asia, how mobility and diaspora are
engaged in literature and media, and how the lives of migrants are
transformed during their journey to new homes in South Asia, the
Middle East, North America, and Europe.
The societies in the Himalayan borderlands have undergone
wide-ranging transformations, as the territorial reconfiguration of
modern nation-states since the mid-twentieth century and the
presently increasing trans-Himalayan movements of people, goods and
capital, reshape the livelihoods of communities, pulling them into
global trends of modernisation and regional discourses of national
belonging. This book explores the changes to native senses of
place, the conception of border - simultaneously as limitations and
opportunities - and what the authors call "affective boundaries,"
"livelihood reconstruction," and "trans-Himalayan modernities." It
addresses changing social, political, and environmental conditions
that acknowledge growing external connectivity even as it
emphasises the importance of place.
The first English-language book to focus on northeast Sino-Russian
border economies, Trust and Mistrust in the Economies of the
China-Russia Borderlands examines how trans-border economies
function in practice. The authors offer an anthropological
understanding of trust in juxtaposition to the economy and the
state. They argue that the history of suspicion and the securitised
character of the Sino-Russian border mean that trust is at a
premium. The chapters show how diverse kinds of cross-border
business manage to operate, often across great distances, despite
widespread mistrust.
For the nations on its borders, the rapid rise of China represents
an opportunity-but it also brings worry, especially in areas that
have long been disputed territories of contact and exchange. This
book gathers contributors from a range of disciplines to look at
how people in those areas are actively engaging in making
relationships across the border, and how those interactions are
shaping life in the region-and in the process helping to
reconfigure the cultural and political landscape of post-Cold War
Asia.
While India has been a popular subject of scholarly analysis in the
past decade, the majority of that attention has been focused on its
major cities. This volume instead explores contemporary urban life
in a smaller city located in India's Northeast borderland at a time
of dramatic change, showing how this city has been profoundly
affected by armed conflict, militarism, displacement, interethnic
tensions, and the expansion of neoliberal capitalism.
Kashmir as a Borderland: The Politics of Space and Belonging across
the Line of Control examines the Kashmir dispute from both sides of
the Line of Control (LoC) and within the theoretical frame of
border studies. It draws on the experiences of those living in
these territories such as divided families, traders, cultural and
social activists. Kashmir is a borderland, that is, a context for
spatial transformations, where the resulting interactions can be
read as a process of 'becoming' rather than of 'being'. The
analysis of this borderland shows how the conflict is manifested in
territory, in specific locations with a geopolitical meaning,
evidencing the discrepancy between 'representation' and the
'living'. The author puts forward the concept of belonging as a
useful category for investigating more inclusive political spaces.
This book presents a close look at the growth, success, and
proliferation of ethnic politics on the peripheries of modern South
Asia, built around a case study of the Nepal ethnic group that
lives in the borderlands of Sikkim, Darjeeling, and east Nepal.
Grounded in historical and ethnographic research, it critically
examines the relationship between culture and politics in a
geographical space that is home to a diverse range of ethnic
identities, showing how new modes of political representation,
cultural activism, and everyday politics have emerged from the
region.
Across the Chinese borderlands, investments in large-scale
transnational infrastructure such as roads and special economic
zones have increased exponentially over the past two decades. Based
on long-term ethnographic research, Borderland Infrastructures
addresses a major contradiction at the heart of this fast-paced
development: small-scale traders have lost their historic strategic
advantages under the growth of massive Chinese state investment and
are now struggling to keep their businesses afloat. Concurrently,
local ethnic minorities have become the target of radical
resettlement projects, securitization, and tourism initiatives, and
have in many cases grown increasingly dependent on state subsidies.
At the juncture of anthropological explorations of the state,
border studies, and research on transnational trade and
infrastructure development, Borderland Infrastructures provides new
analytical tools to understand how state power is experienced,
mediated, and enacted in Xinjiang and Yunnan. In the process, Rippa
offers a rich and nuanced ethnography of life across China's
peripheries.
Frontier Tibet: Patterns of Change in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands
addresses a historical sequence that sealed the future of the
Sino-Tibetan borderlands. It considers how starting in the late
nineteenth century imperial formations and emerging nation-states
developed competing schemes of integration and debated about where
the border between China and Tibet should be. It also ponders the
ways in which this border is internalised today, creating within
the People's Republic of China a space that retains some
characteristics of a historical frontier. The region of eastern
Tibet called Kham, the focus of this volume, is a productive lens
through which processes of place-making and frontier dynamics can
be analysed. Using historical records and ethnography, the authors
challenge purely externalist approaches to convey a sense of Kham's
own centrality and the agency of the actors involved. They
contribute to a history from below that is relevant to the history
of China and Tibet, and of comparative value for borderland
studies.
Kingship and Polity on the Himalayan Borderland explores the modern
transformation of state and society in the Indian Himalaya. Centred
on three Rajput led-kingdoms during the transition to British rule
(c. 1790-1840) and their interconnected histories, it demonstrates
how border making practices engendered a modern reading of
'tradition' that informs communal identities to this day.
Countering the common depiction of these states as all-male,
caste-exclusive entities, it reveals the strong familial base of
Rajput polity, wherein women - and regent queens in particular -
played a key role alongside numerous non-Rajput groups. Drawing on
rich archival records, rarely examined local histories, and nearly
two decades of ethnographic research, it offers an alternative to
the popular and scholarly discourses that developed with the rise
of colonial knowledge. The analysis exposes the cardinal
contribution of borderland spaces to the fabrication of group
identities. This book will interest historians and anthropologists
of South Asia and of the Himalaya, as well as scholars working on
postcolonialism, gender, and historiography.
Critical Intercultural Communication Pedagogy constructs a
theoretical frame through which critical intercultural
communication pedagogy can be dreamed, envisioned, and realized as
praxis. Its chapters provide answers to questions surrounding the
relationship of intercultural communication pedagogy to critical
race theory, queer theory, critical ethnography, and narrative
methodology, among others. Utilizing a diverse array of theoretical
and methodological approaches within critical intercultural
communication research, this collection is creatively engaging,
theoretically innovating, and pedagogically encouraging.
Working at the intersections of cultural anthropology, human
geography, and material culture, Tina Harris explores the social
and economic transformations taking place along one trade route
that winds its way across China, Nepal, Tibet, and India.
How might we make connections between seemingly mundane daily life
and more abstract levels of global change? Geographical Diversions
focuses on two generations of traders who exchange goods such as
sheep wool, pang gdan aprons, and more recently, household
appliances. Exploring how traders "make places," Harris examines
the creation of geographies of trade that work against state ideas
of what trade routes should look like. She argues that the tensions
between the apparent fixity of national boundaries and the mobility
of local individuals around such restrictions are precisely how
routes and histories of trade are produced.
The economic rise of China and India has received attention from
the international media, but the effects of major new
infrastructure at the intersecting borderlands of these
nationstates--in places like Tibet, northern India, and Nepal--have
rarely been covered. "Geographical Diversions" challenges
globalization theories based on bounded conceptions of
nation-states and offers a smaller-scale perspective that differs
from many theories of macroscale economic change.
Working at the intersections of cultural anthropology, human
geography, and material culture, Tina Harris explores the social
and economic transformations taking place along one trade route
that winds its way across China, Nepal, Tibet, and India. How might
we make connections between seemingly mundane daily life and more
abstract levels of global change? Geographical Diversions focuses
on two generations of traders who exchange goods such as sheep
wool, pang gdan aprons, and more recently, household appliances.
Exploring how traders "make places", Harris examines the creation
of geographies of trade that work against state ideas of what trade
routes should look like. She argues that the tensions between the
apparent fixity of national boundaries and the mobility of local
individuals around such restrictions are precisely how routes and
histories of trade are produced. The economic rise of China and
India has received attention from the international media, but the
effects of major new infrastructure at the intersecting borderlands
of these nationstates - in places like Tibet, northern India, and
Nepal - have rarely been covered. Geographical Diversions
challenges globalization theories based on bounded conceptions of
nation-states and offers a smaller-scale perspective that differs
from many theories of macroscale economic change.
Critical Intercultural Communication Pedagogy constructs a
theoretical frame through which critical intercultural
communication pedagogy can be dreamed, envisioned, and realized as
praxis. Its chapters provide answers to questions surrounding the
relationship of intercultural communication pedagogy to critical
race theory, queer theory, critical ethnography, and narrative
methodology, among others. Utilizing a diverse array of theoretical
and methodological approaches within critical intercultural
communication research, this collection is creatively engaging,
theoretically innovating, and pedagogically encouraging.
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