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Across Zomia with merchants, monks, and musk: Process geographies, trade networks, and the Inner-East-Southeast Asian borderlands
Abstract
For several decades, theorists have challenged notions of geographical space as fixed, instead arguing that spatial scales and regional configurations respond to transformations in politics and economies. This has raised questions about permanent regional studies configurations (such as Southeast Asia), sparking the proposal of , an alternative region focusing on Asia process geography s Kham, East Asia s Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces, and Southeast Asia. In doing so, it reveals who traded commodities, on what scales they operated, and how their increasingly complex networks were imbricated with state and local power. These networks linked Zomian communities to Chinese and global transformations and influenced local cultural and political changes, suggesting that studies of mobility can uncover hidden geographies of social, political, and cultural change.
... By framing the region as 'a fragmentalized space of interconnected and interdependent locales and people', Gros makes of Kham 'a good-to-think-with category'; by operating a topological reversal, he invites us to move away from prior preconceptions based on a Lhasa-centric and/or Sino-centric historical perceptions. To 1 On new takes on the historical, cultural, and socio-economic developments of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands, see for instance Hayes (2014), Elliot (2014), Gros (2016), Giersch (2010b;. 2 The same concept applies to the westernmost Himalayan regions of Ladakh and the southernmost areas of Bhutan and Sikkim, which fell into the British India orbit in the nineteenth century (Carrasco 1959, 12-13). ...
... Whilst talking about the Songpan region of northern Sichuan, for instance, Jack Hayes (2014, xviii) offers a new perspective on the interpretation of trade networks, inter-cultural relations, regional economic cycles, and political and religious developments in Kham, by acknowledging their development as the outcome of indigenous efforts rather than the byproduct of external forces. Such a perspective is in continuation with that of Giersch (2010b) who focuses his attention on the foundations of trading networks and their impacts on the socio-political developments of local societies in Kham, seeing trade -and trade flows -as a heuristic device designed to challenge the confines of traditional spatial categories, moving away from preconceived geographical scales, such as civilizations, empires or nations, and regions. ...
... and Southeast Asia had sensibly increased; due to the expansion of the European influence in India, China, and South Asia, borderland regions became more and more involved in global trade flows (Coales 1919;Teichman 1922;van Spengen 2000;Harris 2013;Giersch 2006Giersch , 2010b. Khampa trading families responded to the new market demands by opening branches in some of the most important trade hubs in Tibet, northern India, Sikkim, and Nepal and by shifting their main offices to Lhasa, where they started mingling with the upper strata of the Lhasan society. ...
... By framing the region as 'a fragmentalized space of interconnected and interdependent locales and people', Gros makes of Kham 'a good-to-think-with category'; by operating a topological reversal, he invites us to move away from prior preconceptions based on a Lhasa-centric and/or Sino-centric historical perceptions. To 1 On new takes on the historical, cultural, and socio-economic developments of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands, see for instance Hayes (2014), Elliot (2014), Gros (2016), Giersch (2010b;. 2 The same concept applies to the westernmost Himalayan regions of Ladakh and the southernmost areas of Bhutan and Sikkim, which fell into the British India orbit in the nineteenth century (Carrasco 1959, 12-13). see the Sino-Tibetan borderlands in terms of 'frontier dynamics' accommodates the inherent paradox of Kham, both 'named regional category' and 'heterogenous frontier zone and nexus of power', a grey area where different forms of authority overlapped. ...
... Whilst talking about the Songpan region of northern Sichuan, for instance, Jack Hayes (2014, xviii) offers a new perspective on the interpretation of trade networks, inter-cultural relations, regional economic cycles, and political and religious developments in Kham, by acknowledging their development as the outcome of indigenous efforts rather than the byproduct of external forces. Such a perspective is in continuation with that of Giersch (2010b) who focuses his attention on the foundations of trading networks and their impacts on the socio-political developments of local societies in Kham, seeing trade -and trade flows -as a heuristic device designed to challenge the confines of traditional spatial categories, moving away from preconceived geographical scales, such as civilizations, empires or nations, and regions. ...
... As an active member of the Khampa trading communities in Central Tibet, Khatag Dzamyag belonged to the social stratum that Alice Travers (2013, 144) calls 'elite commoners'. 11 By the early twentieth century, the scale of operation of the trade networks connecting Inner Asia to South and Southeast Asia had sensibly increased; due to the expansion of the European influence in India, China, and South Asia, borderland regions became more and more involved in global trade flows (Coales 1919;Teichman 1922;van Spengen 2000;Harris 2013;Giersch 2006Giersch , 2010b. Khampa trading families responded to the new market demands by opening branches in some of the most important trade hubs in Tibet, northern India, Sikkim, and Nepal and by shifting their main offices to Lhasa, where they started mingling with the upper strata of the Lhasan society. ...
... 11 The "new Qing history" that started in the 1990s has led to a substantial revision of the history of the Qing Empire in China and Inner Asia by reconsidering the Manchu's contribution and relationship to Chinese culture, therefore challenging the received wisdom of the Sino-centric model of Confucian cultural unity (Crossley 1999;Dunnell and Millward 2004;Elliot 2001;Rawski 1996). Although there is still a need for in-depth analysis of internal dynamics in the borderland regions, a few works (Atwill 2005;Giersch 2006;Herman 2007) have highlighted border transformation mechanisms, resistance movements, and identity processes and are starting to address the ethnic entanglements brought to the fore by Uradyn Bulag (2007), who stressed the marital, military, economic, and religious components of the Tibeto-Mongolian interface. ...
... For this reason we need to be as critical about frontiers and borderlands as we are about ethnic boundaries (e.g., Barth 1969). To promote a more open-ended understanding, several authors successfully challenge the Sino-centric or Lhasa-centric view of powerful centers and passive indigenous communities and make use of the "middle ground" metaphor developed by Richard White (1991) in the context of the North American frontier to emphasize the negotiations and accommodations that take place (Giersch 2006;Hayes 2014;Tenzin 2014;Tsomu 2009Tsomu , 2015. Similarly, Gerald Roche has argued that the "hyphenated divide, usually some variant of Sino-Tibetan" is a misleadingly simplistic binary that depicts "the 'frontier' … as a fundamentally ethnic one" (2014, 1-2). ...
... Infrastructures became even more crucial, as were sources of revenue and the need to rely on, and reform, the corvée system for transportation (e.g., Lawson 2013). 19 In Kham, where significant wealth came from trade, the broadening of business networks as well as the growing demand for certain goods (wool, musk, and medicinal products, among others) embedded commercial activities in larger forces of change, at regional, national, and global levels (Giersch 2010). In the process, new opportunities arose for some people to play leading political and economic roles, and we see the emergence of "merchants" as significant power brokers in the region. ...
The contributions in this issue focus on the period from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, when this “frontier Tibet” [Kham] formed a middle ground in which local communities, the central Tibetan government (Ganden Phodrang), the Chinese imperial government (Qing), and later the republican authorities negotiated means of accommodation and established new institutions and practices. Against this historical background, the articles address questions of economic history, cultural interchange, and political legitimation and contestation at critical historical junctures. They show in particular how historical developments in trade and commerce are interlaced with notions of wealth and value, and linked to political control and authority. Together they bring new, ethnographically oriented historical studies into the arena of theoretical approaches to borderlands and corridors of contact...
... As this dichotomy has been already extensively discussed in criticism (Jonsson 2010(Jonsson , 2012(Jonsson , 2014(Jonsson , 2017Brass 2012), and its historical accuracy and implied universal validity questioned, challenged, and nuanced (Lieberman 2010;Ma 2013;Formoso 2010;Giersch 2010;Tappe 2018Tappe , 2015Pholsena 2017), I do not want to engage in yet another lengthy discussion on Zomia here. What should be noted, however, is that although Scott's largely historical argument of highlanders' state-evasion strategies ends in the early 1950s, with the rise of more sophisticated state technologies and policies of "enclosure" and "engulfment" (Scott 2009, pp. ...
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.
... While written records on historic forms of ethnic minority practices and forms of exchange are limited (Michaud, 2009;Scott, 2009), official Chinese documents from the first century describe the Yunnan province as populated by numerous ethnic groups who traded in salt, rhinoceros, elephants, textiles and jewellery (Sturgeon, 2005: 44, 127). Elaborating further on the rich histories of these groups is beyond the scope of this article, but examples can be found in the work of many others (Mackerras, 1994;Ireson & Ireson, 1991;Evans et al., 2000;Michaud, 2000;Davis, 2005;Sturgeon, 2005;2013;Walker, 1999;Freeman & Ahmed, 2015). ...
China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has become the lodestar of Beijing's efforts to increase its global political and economic influence. This article interrogates BRI discourse, arguing that the normative adoption of BRI narratives as a means for making sense of connectivities between China and other places risks producing new forms of epistemic violence against subaltern populations. The empirical focus of this paper is on China-Laos relations, and the epistemic positioning of highland ethnic minority groups in northern Laos. This context offers a valuable case study for examining BRI discourse due to: (a) the profound effects of Chinese investment in Laos; (b) the geostrategic importance of Laos as a BRI 'gateway' between China and Southeast Asia; (c) the deep histories of ethnic minority engagements across China and Laos; and (d) the limited extant research on both China-Laos relations and the more localized effects of Chinese actors within the highland border regions.
... We apply a critical remote sensing approach [71] integrating satellite imagery and qualitative data drawn from a review of scholarly and gray literature and ethnographic fieldwork in Myanmar, where one of the article's authors has conducted research on development, environment, and governance since 2013 with attention to resource frontiers in the country's borderlands [72]. Our research brings geospatial data into conversation with debates on borderlands, contested authority, and territory [73][74][75] to offer two main contributions. Empirically, we build a more complete picture of the fractious geopolitics of development in Myanmar and its borderlands, highlighting the continued importance of resource extraction as well as the recent impacts of forced migration and internal displacement. ...
A critical remote sensing approach illuminates the geopolitics of development within Myanmar and across its ethnic minority borderlands. By integrating nighttime light (NTL) data from 1992–2020, long-term ethnographic fieldwork, and a review of scholarly and gray literature, we analyzed how Myanmar’s economic geography defies official policy, attesting to persistent inequality and the complex relationships between state-sponsored and militia-led violence, resource extraction, and trade. While analysis of DMSP-OLS data (1992–2013) and VIIRS data (2013–2020) reveals that Myanmar brightened overall, especially since the 2010s in line with its now-halting liberalization, growth in lights was unequally distributed. Although ethnic minority states brightened more rapidly than urbanized ethnic majority lowland regions, in 2020, the latter still emitted 5.6-fold more radiance per km2. Moreover, between 2013 and 2020, Myanmar’s borderlands were on average just 13% as bright as those of its five neighboring countries. Hot spot analysis of radiance within a 50 km-wide area spanning both sides of the border confirmed that most significant clusters of light lay outside Myanmar. Among the few hot spots on Myanmar’s side, many were associated with official border crossings such as Muse, the formal hub for trade with China, and Tachileik and Myawaddy next to Thailand. Yet some of the most significant increases in illumination between 2013 and 2020 occurred in areas controlled by the Wa United State Party and its army, which are pursuing infrastructure development and mining along the Chinese border from Panghsang to the illicit trade hub of Mongla. Substantial brightening related to the “world’s largest refugee camp” was also detected in Bangladesh, where displaced Rohingya Muslims fled after Myanmar’s military launched a violent crackdown. However, no radiance nor change in radiance were discernible in areas within Myanmar where ethnic cleansing operations occurred, pointing to the limitations of NTL. The diverse drivers and implications of changes in light observed from space emphasize the need for political and economically situated remote sensing.
... Such connections, Saxer shows, usually take place through pathways: socioeconomic constellations inscribed in the particular terrain of the highlands. This experience of connectivity along pathways is as defining for these rugged peripheries as their perceived remoteness (van Spengen 2000;Giersch 2010;Harris 2013). Oftentimes proximity to a particular pathway was more meaningful, for instance, than belonging to a particular state. ...
In this article we review the most recent literature on infrastructure in the social sciences and show its relevance for the study of Highland Asia. We consider the spatial, scalar, and temporal aspects of construction and, in so doing, develop new conceptual tools to evaluate the social and political configurations of states and citizens in some particularly “out of the way places.” Importantly, we show that many of the largescale development interventions planned throughout the region defy the “backgroundness” and invisible “infra-ness” normally associated with the term infrastructure, especially with respect to recent social science and history of technology studies scholarship. On the contrary, drawing on Aihwa Ong's concept of hyperbuilding, we argue that many new highways, dams, railroads, and the like are highly conspicuous, both visually and discursively. Long before their actual construction starts, the “infrastructural imaginaries” behind such projects already work as a purported promise for future prosperity and connectivity and lend legitimacy to logics of “the state” in areas historically difficult to access and hard to govern.
... Such connections, Saxer shows, usually take place through pathways: socioeconomic constellations inscribed in the particular terrain of the highlands. This experience of connectivity along pathways is as defining for these rugged peripheries as their perceived remoteness (van Spengen 2000;Giersch 2010;Harris 2013). Oftentimes proximity to a particular pathway was more meaningful, for instance, than belonging to a particular state. ...
In this article we review the most recent literature on infrastructure in the social sciences and show its relevance for the study of Highland Asia. We consider the spatial, scalar, and temporal aspects of construction and, in so doing, develop new conceptual tools to evaluate the social and political configurations of states and citizens in some particularly “out of the way places.” Importantly, we show that many of the largescale development interventions planned throughout the region defy the “backgroundness” and invisible “infra-ness” normally associated with the term infrastructure, especially with respect to recent social science and history of technology studies scholarship. On the contrary, drawing on Aihwa Ong's concept of hyperbuilding, we argue that many new highways, dams, railroads, and the like are highly conspicuous, both visually and discursively. Long before their actual construction starts, the “infrastructural imaginaries” behind such projects already work as a purported promise for future prosperity and connectivity and lend legitimacy to logics of “the state” in areas historically difficult to access and hard to govern.
... Such connections, Saxer shows, usually take place through pathways: socioeconomic constellations inscribed in the particular terrain of the highlands. This experience of connectivity along pathways is as defining for these rugged peripheries as their perceived remoteness (van Spengen 2000;Giersch 2010;Harris 2013). Oftentimes proximity to a particular pathway was more meaningful, for instance, than belonging to a particular state. ...
In this article we review the most recent literature on infrastructure in the social sciences and show its relevance for the study of Highland Asia. We consider the spatial, scalar, and temporal aspects of construction and, in so doing, develop new conceptual tools to evaluate the social and political configurations of states and citizens in some particularly “out of the way places.” Importantly, we show that many of the large-scale development interventions planned throughout the region defy the background-ness and invisible “infra-ness” normally associated with the term infrastructure, especially with respect to recent social science and history of technology studies scholarship. On the contrary, drawing on Aihwa Ong’s concept of hyperbuilding, we argue that many new highways, dams, railroads, and the like are highly conspicuous, both visually and discursively. Long before their actual construction starts, the infrastructural imaginaries behind such projects already work as a purported promise for future prosperity and connectivity and lend legitimacy to logics of the state in areas historically difficult to access and hard to govern.
... The Kachins, Mizos, and Nagas had been excluded from whatever opportunities the state could have brought by colonial policies and discourses. 22 And in the same breath, the colonial encounter had undercut their transregional connections and split them apart, through a border that negated their presence in order to produce a neat divide between India and Burma. ...
Between 1942 and 1945, the Patkai mountains of Assam and Manipur became India’s front line against Japan. This article charts the concatenation of political, cultural, and socio-economic transformations that the Second World War caused in a region that colonial authorities had tried to cordon off. The conflict had push-and-pull effects on the Patkai, intensifying direct state penetration yet reviving long-standing transregional ties with Tibet, China, and Southeast Asia. When ‘national’ borders appeared with Burma and India’s independence two years later, the effect was jarring. As such, the war was a watershed in the postcolonial evolution of northeastern India and northwestern Burma.
... The next major migration occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, bringing speakers of various forms of Western (Oirat) Mongol (Roche 2016). In addition to these "longer distance, unidirectional, en masse types of movement" (Huber 2012: 99), small numbers of Armenians (Richardson 1981), Gujaratis, Russians (Schram 2006), Kashmiris, and Shaanxi traders (Giersch 2010), among others, migrated to urban centers in Tibet without establishing permanent settlements. ...
Tibet's linguistic diversity is undergoing drastic transformations in the twenty-first century. In this article, I begin my examination of this issue by outlining the extent of Tibet's linguistic diversity, including not only its numerous Tibetic languages, but also its non-Tibetic minority languages. Using a "language ecology" approach, I examine the mechanisms that have produced and maintained this diversity, as well as the ways this diversity was spatially and socially patterned. I argue that these processes and patterns were largely maintained up until the twenty-first century, when the Chinese state's program to "Open the West" unleashed an ideologically driven modernization program on Tibet, radically altering its language ecology. I argue that the present trends emerging from this process are likely to continue throughout the twenty-first century, resulting in both language loss and the emergence of new languages, leaving the overall language ecology fundamentally altered by the beginning of the twenty-second century. It is hoped that this article will not only provide a useful framework for future discussions on linguistic diversity in Tibet, but will also focus attention on the challenges facing individual languages in Tibet today.
The formal demarcation of what is today the Burma-China border began following the British conquest of Upper Burma from the Konbaung dynasty in 1885 and the signing of international agreements with the Qing Empire (1886, 1894, 1897), the process only completed in the 1960s. Around the turn of the century and into the twentieth, therefore, the highlands between British Burma and Qing (later Republican) China remained a contested ‘borderland’; specifically, one over which successive lowland states had never been able to exert direct control – a space James C. Scott and others have named ‘Zomia’ – but toward which they had been expanding by the mid-nineteenth century (if not earlier). This article looks not at the ways in which Zomia’s inhabitants contested this expanding state authority, which has been the focus of most work on this space, but how the British pressed their territorial claims over part of this contested borderland vis-à-vis the Chinese. Salt was a monopoly of both the Government of India (of which Burma was a province until 1935) and the Qing and Republican states. Smuggling – trade, to British eyes – salt from Burma into China thus undermined Chinese sovereignty qua the expression of the latter’s monopoly powers. Complaints about smuggling were met with ‘masterly inactivity’, not only because the colonial administration was weak in Upper Burma and along the frontier, but also because it meant the British imperial state could permit the expansion of ‘legitimate’ trade and thereby contest Chinese sovereignty qua its territorial claims over the borderland. In contrast to other works positing that smuggling over defined borders undermined state power, this article shows how a permissive attitude to complaints about smuggling undergirded British sovereignty and was very much part of the making of the border.
Small-scale traders play a crucial role in forging Asian connectivity, forming networks and informal institutions separate from those driven by nation-states, such as China's Belt and Road Initiative. This ambitious study provides a unique insight into the lives of the mobile traders from Afghanistan who traverse Eurasia. Reflecting on over a decade of intensive ethnographic fieldwork, Magnus Marsden introduces readers to a dynamic yet historically durable universe of commercial and cultural connections. Through an exploration of the traders' networks, cultural and religious identities, as well as the nodes in which they operate, Marsden emphasises their ability to navigate Eurasia's geopolitical tensions and to forge transregional routes that channel significant flows of people, resources, and ideas. Beyond the Silk Roads will interest those seeking to understand contemporary iterations of the Silk Road within the context of geopolitics in the region. This title is also available as Open Access.
Small-scale traders play a crucial role in forging Asian connectivity, forming networks and informal institutions separate from those driven by nation-states, such as China's Belt and Road Initiative. This ambitious study provides a unique insight into the lives of the mobile traders from Afghanistan who traverse Eurasia. Reflecting on over a decade of intensive ethnographic fieldwork, Magnus Marsden introduces readers to a dynamic yet historically durable universe of commercial and cultural connections. Through an exploration of the traders' networks, cultural and religious identities, as well as the nodes in which they operate, Marsden emphasises their ability to navigate Eurasia's geopolitical tensions and to forge transregional routes that channel significant flows of people, resources, and ideas. Beyond the Silk Roads will interest those seeking to understand contemporary iterations of the Silk Road within the context of geopolitics in the region. This title is also available as Open Access.
It is difficult to expound in any pithy fashion on the imprint that James C. Scott's work has had on writing history in the orbit of Asia. Where to start? From The Moral Economy of the Peasant all the way to Against the Grain , Scott's work has found receptive and fertile ground among his peers in Asian studies, who have often proudly pointed out to their non-Asianist colleagues that Scott is “one of their own.” This has certainly been true “internally” as well, in the ways that Southeast Asianists have spoken to their fellow professionals in the larger, allied subdisciplines of South and East Asian studies. It does not matter that Scott's books have touched on a wide variety of subjects: the central concerns with power, agency, space, and the essence of a shared humanity have all resonated with his professional interlocutors.
Humans and elephants have historically shared the forested mountain ranges of Zomia, a geography defined by the regular movement of people and an ecology shaped by the movement of its elephant population. This article will examine how free-roaming elephant pathways facilitated human mobility in the highlands defining the Indo-Myanmar border. It will analyze the more-than-human agency that emerges when following elephant trails and the varying role this forest infrastructure might have played in the social and political history of the region. The article will explore two historical examples. First, the migration of a Lisu community in Upper Myanmar who utilized elephant paths to navigate their passage. Second, how the British Empire exploited a network of elephant-human tracks to subjugate the peoples living in Mizoram, northeast India. In these regions the patterns of migration, history of colonization, and identities and practices of communities must be understood in relation to wild elephants.
The paper critically interrogates a central paradox in India’s emerging border discourse. Although a feel-good narrative of rethinking borders as bridges, it has been curiously resistant to step away from the reductionist logic of borders as barriers. The paper argues that this dualism can be traced to conflicting geopolitical and sociological notions of the international that have resulted in a range of contradictions and distortions at the borders. The paper will engage with the puzzle as to why the trans-Himalayan trader, historically the central protagonist has today become a rather forlorn metaphor of a conflicted discourse. It will draw inferences based on field observations in Dharchula, an ancient trading town in northern India located on the trans-Himalayan trading routes with Nepal and China. These offer interesting insights on how state power and regulation as well as new border alignments have affected everyday lives at the borders. The paper concludes by arguing for discursive cross-fertilizations as first steps towards recognizing the borderlands as the agentive sites that they are.
en Since the 1990s, several ‘special zones’ have appeared along China's border with Myanmar and Laos. Often described as lawless enclaves of vice, gambling and smuggling, the study of those spaces has focused mostly on their exceptionality and ambiguous form of sovereignty. However, rather than simply keeping the state out, those special zones bring the state in, through investments, infrastructures and deals with government officials. Through an analysis of the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone, in northern Laos, this paper argues that it is precisely through the ambiguous presence of the state that these spaces manage to maintain a unique level of autonomy. Moving from James Scott's famous discussion of highland communities in Southeast Asia, I term this Zomia 2.0: a modern attempt to keep the state out at the edges of Asia's greatest power, characterised as much by political remoteness as by neoliberal connectivity.
Zomia 2.0: labellisation de l’isolement et connectivité néolibérale dans la zone économique spéciale du triangle d’or au Laos
fr Depuis les années 1990, plusieurs « zones franches » sont apparues le long de la frontière entre la Chine, le Myanmar et le Laos. Souvent décrites comme des enclaves hors la loi, domaines du vice, du jeu et de la contrebande, l’étude de ces espaces s’est surtout intéressée à leur caractère exceptionnel et à leur forme de souveraineté ambiguë. Néanmoins, plutôt que de simplement maintenir l’État à l’écart, ces zones franches l’y font entrer par le biais d’investissements, d’infrastructure et de marchés conclus avec des autorités gouvernementales. À travers une analyse de la zone économique spéciale du Triangle d’Or, dans le nord du Laos, le présent article affirme que c’est précisément grâce à la présence ambiguë de l’État que ces espaces parviennent à conserver un niveau d’autonomie unique. M’appuyant sur la célèbre discussion de James Scott des communautés des hauts plateaux en Asie du sud‐est, je propose le terme de « Zomia 2.0 » : une tentative moderne de maintenir l’État à la périphérie de la plus grande puissance asiatique, caractérisée autant par l’isolement politique que par la connectivité néolibérale.
Between the early twentieth century and the 1960s, the Indian state began to incorporate the easternmost Himalayas. This article illuminates this state-making process by examining its material and communicative culture, embodied in tour diaries. These diaries were not private reflections written during one's spare time but the compulsory output of administrative tours. Often followed by more reflective notes, their perceived insights were used to determine local or general policy changes. Drawing on a literature that sees paperwork as constitutive of bureaucracy, this article argues that tour diaries exemplified and buttressed a certain form of frontier governance, marked by itinerancy and personalization well into independence. In their historical development, their language and materiality, their administrative usage, tour diaries embodied more than anything else the contingent, spatially uneven, and fractured nature of Indian state-making in the Himalayas, revealing the importance of process geographies anchored in paperwork circulation for its sustenance. Transmitted whole or extracted into policy files, diaries tied wandering officers together in a distinctive community of practice, policies, and ideas – preserving the fiction of the frontier state as a coherent whole in uncertain circumstances. As much as through maps, regulations, and routes, the frontier was made through writing.
I compare and contrast two "southwestern"" frontiers: the southwestern United States. long northeast New Spain (short hand: New Mexico) and southwest China (short hand: Yunnan). Both have been. and even today remain. frontier zones. In the 2]51 century both are also important borderlands for two of the most important players in the modern world-system. the United States and China. They share a historical orientation to the areas outside of the two states into which they were ultimately incorporated. Both brought a great deal of new practices and ideas into the incorporating states. They serve to give deep historical backgrounds which put discussions of contemporary globalization in perspective. This comparison also makes clear that the concepts of nation-state and precise borders are typically modern and that setting precise borders is a continuing project. even while borderlands remain. like the frontiers that preceded them. frontier zones. These comparisons may also yield insights into world-system expansion and incorporation.
Since independence in 1948, Burma has suffered from many internal conflicts. One of the longest of these has been in the Kachin State, in the north of the country where Burma has borders with India to the west and China to the east. This book explores the origins of the armed movement that started in 1961 and considers why it has continued for so long. The book places the problems that have led to hostilities between the political heartland of Burma and one of its most important peripheries in a longer perspective than usual. It explains how the experience of globalisation and international geopolitics from the late eighteenth century onwards produced the local politics of exclusion and resistance. It also uses detailed ethnographic research to explore the social and cultural dynamics of Kachin ethno-nationalism, providing a rich analysis that goes beyond the purely political. This analysis also provides new insights on the work of Edmund Leach and recent representations of Zomia proposed by James C. Scott. The research draws upon an extensive range of sources, including archival materials in Jinghpaw and an extensive study of ritual and ritual language. Making a wide variety of cross-disciplinary observations, it explains in depth and breadth how a region such as the Kachin State came into being. When combined with detailed local insights into how these experiences contributed to the historical development of modern Kachin ethno-nationalism, the book encourages new ways of thinking about the Kachin region and its history of armed resistance.
Global processes and encounters with modernity have led to unique development patterns in ethnic minority areas in China. Rubber tree planting and rubber production, for example, have forged a link between tropical jungle villages like Mandi in Xishuangbanna (Yunnan Province) and China’s booming car industry, and even the wider capitalist world system. As a result, the Dailue ethnic minorities in Mandi have experienced a social change from mechanical solidarity in rice agriculture to organic solidarity in market economic conditions. Such changes also expose Dailue society to increasing “modern” social risks, and this, in turn, has influenced religious practices. The traditional guardian spirit cults of the house (dubula hen), village (dubula ban) and region (dubula moeng) are held responsible for social risk management in Dailue culture. The increasing social risks have compelled people like the Dailue from Mandi to question and revisit the predicament of their folk religion, revealing the ongoing importance of spirit cults.
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This editorial develops two themes. First, it discusses how historical and anthropological approaches can relate to each other, in the field of the highland margins of Asia and beyond. Second, it explores how we might further our understandings of the uplands of Asia by applying different terms such as , the , the Himalayan region Himalayan Massif Zomia s latest book, The art of not being governed: an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia. Through a discussion of the notion of Zomia, I will reconsider certain regarding highland Asian studies. In the process, I seek to contribute to disembedding minority studies from the national straitjackets that have been imposed by academic research bounded by the historical, ideological, and political limits of the nation-state.
Conversion of China's monetary and fiscal systems to a silver standard led to a doubling in the value of silver in China vis-à-vis the rest of the world by the early sixteenth century. Heightened profit opportunities induced an unprecedented surge in silver production in Spanish America and in Japan. Destined ultimately for China, tens of thousands of tons of silver passed through Europe via long-distance maritime and overland trade routes. Fifty tons of silver annually also reached China via the Pacific Ocean after the founding of the Spanish city of Manila in 1571. Japan exported huge quantities of silver to China until the late seventeenth century. New American crops were also introduced to Chinese agriculture via the Manila galleons, contributing to a doubling or more of Chinese population in the eighteenth century. Silver demand grew along with China's population, which in turn led to a fifty percent silver price premium in China. Largely in response to buoyant demand, more Mexican silver was produced during the eighteenth century than had been produced by all of Spanish America during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries combined. Subsequently, during the second half of the eighteenth century, a "tea and opium cycle" propelled British fortunes in Asia. Economic, environmental, and demographic histories must not be viewed as independent phenomena. It is a mistake to view societies around the world as independent of or weakly connected to global forces. All heavily populated continents have been deeply connected since the sixteenth century.
Historians of Southeast Asia have been inspired by Fernand Braudel's classic The
Mediterranean because of its focus on the sea and multidisciplinary approach, and because it seems to solve two recalcitrant historiographical problems: the definition of time and space, and the reconciliation of local identities and external influence. But while Braudel's prose and intellectual ambition are justly seen as inspiring, conceptual confusion and analytic evasion limit his contribution.
Five species of musk deer (Forest musk deer Moschus berezovskii, Alpine musk deer M. sifanicus, Black musk deer M. fuscus, Himalayan musk deer M. chrysogaster and Siberian musk deer M. moschiferus) occur throughout 17 provinces in China, and all were listed in the second category of the Chinese State Key Protected Wildlife List in 1998. Among these species, the Forest musk deer has the widest distribution, and its population is estimated at about 100,000–200,000 individuals in the wild. Additionally, there are about 100,000 Alpine musk deer and 2000 Siberian musk deer. As for the Black musk deer and Himalayan musk deer, which occur only in parts of Yunnan Province and Tibet, their populations remain unknown but they can be estimated to be rare due to their narrow and limited distribution. Furthermore, there are some 1900 musk deer kept in farms in China. Generally, the musk deer population has been declining due to over-hunting for musk and to loss of habitats. However, the Chinese government is greatly concerned with wildlife protection today. A series of laws and regulations have been launched and many natural reserves and national parks have been established as refuges for this animal, most of which, are within the musk deer's range, and should have positive effects for musk deer conservation.
"This is the as-told-to political autobiography of Phüntso Wangye (Phünwang), one of the most important Tibetan revolutionary figures of the twentieth century. Phünwang began his activism in school, where he founded a secret Tibetan Communist Party. He was expelled in 1940, and for the next nine years he worked to organize a guerrilla uprising against the Chinese who controlled his homeland. In 1949, he merged his Tibetan Communist Party with Mao's Chinese Communist Party. He played an important role in the party's administrative organization in Lhasa and was the translator for the young Dalai Lama during his famous 1954-55 meetings with Mao Zedong. In the 1950s, Phünwang was the highest-ranking Tibetan official within the Communist Party in Tibet. Though he was fluent in Chinese, comfortable with Chinese culture, and devoted to socialism and the Communist Party, Phünwang's deep commitment to the welfare of Tibetans made him suspect to powerful Han colleagues. In 1958 he was secretly detained; three years later, he was imprisoned in solitary confinement in Beijing's equivalent of the Bastille for the next eighteen years. Informed by vivid firsthand accounts of the relations between the Dalai Lama, the Nationalist Chinese government, and the People's Republic of China, this absorbing chronicle illuminates one of the world's most tragic and dangerous ethnic conflicts at the same time that it relates the fascinating details of a stormy life spent in the quest for a new Tibet."
Globalising tendencies have transformed the forms and organisation of business networks. This is particularly true in the rapidly developing Asia-Pacific region where ethnic-based modes of business organisation prevail. Chinese business networks, for example, are posited to play a leading role in propelling the forces of regionalisation in the Asia-Pacific. In this paper, we explore the relationships between globalising tendencies and the changing form of Chinese business networks. We discuss how Chinese business networks, traditionally conceptualised as closed and internally shaped owing to a variety of historically and geographically specific factors, are being (re)shaped by an array of actor-networks with an international business dimension. Groups of actor-networks associated with international finance, the international business media, and multilateral institutions are engaging with Chinese business networks. Through their capacity to enrol relevant Chinese firms into their actor-networks, the international business community is forging changes in some business practices, while also reinforcing other business practices. At the most basic of levels, though, the reshaping of Chinese business practices has been driven by the desire of large Chinese firms to access the financial resources that flow through the global financial system. That such a situation should arise is not surprising given the nature of profits that have been generated from the development process in Asia-Pacific over the past two decades (before the onset of the Asian economic crisis). In the context of the reworking of global capitalism, and the reshaping of subglobal capitalisms, such a relational approach to analysis of economic organisation may help shed some light on the networks that bind together actors and institutions over time and space in uneven (albeit evolving) relations of interdependence.