Asian Borderlands. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press [distributor], 2017. 310 pp. (Maps, B&W photos., illustrations.) US$115.00, cloth. ISBN 978-94-6298-192-8.
In recent years, attention to borderlands across Asia has flourished. From academic conferences such as the semi-annual meeting of the Asian Borderlands Research Network to widespread debates in popular and academic media about China’s international development program known as the Belt and Road Initiative, unprecedented interest is now directed to what is happening across the borderland spaces of the Eurasian continent. Throughout the trans-Himalaya—where the largest nations on earth intersect with the world’s highest mountains and its greatest rivers—the entanglements of everyday life, state power, international development, and natural resource management are particularly complex and acute. As billions of people face uncertain futures under the anthropogenic threats of climate change and authoritarian regimes extend political reach into historically non-state spaces of Asia, political economic and socio-cultural questions abound with respect to transformations characterized by shifting landscapes of territory and modernity.
The new edited volume, Trans-Himalayan Borderlands, co-edited by Dan Smyer Yü and Jean Michaud, takes up such concerns and, in so doing, makes a timely and important contribution to broader conversations about the politics and materialities of life throughout what Jason Cons identifies as “sensitive” borderland spaces of Asia (Jason Cons, Sensitive Space, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016). Taking the trans-Himalaya as a “multistate margins,” this edited volume emerges from and builds upon a number of previous research conferences convened between 2013 and 2015 at the New School, Yale University, and Yunnan Minzu University. With an emphasis on “connectivity,” “inclusion,” and “new voices,” the current text is shaped by a “reconceptualization of Himalayan Studies, on how the practices of modernization have complicated the meanings of traditional modes of being and premodern interregional commerce, and how the transborder effects of state-building engender the simultaneity of border making and borderland residents’ agentive responses to challenges and opportunities” (13). Reflecting the cross-disciplinary thrust of the prior conferences and conversations, the text is strongly interdisciplinary in scope and draws from anthropology, environmental studies, ethnology, human ecology, geography, history, religious studies, and Tibetology, as well as wider academic and policy-oriented interests.
The co-editors frame the collections of chapters around several key themes that resonate with broader scholarship on the Himalaya, Southeast Asian Massif, and Zomia: borders; identity; place; territory; and geopolitics. However, in a deliberate move to further shift foci on borders from static to active sites of intersection, the volume is also carried and conditioned by an emphasis on “trans,” “signifying shifting frontiers, territories, flows, networks of trade and pilgrimage, and spatial engagements of empires and states in both historical and modern terms” (17). Positioned between an Introduction and Conclusion respectively authored by the two editors, the text comprises twelve empirical research chapters divided into two “transthematic” parts with distinct transregional and theoretical subthemes: Territory, Worldviews, and Power Through Time and Livelihood Reconstructions, Flows, and Trans-Himalayan Modernities. As the editors state at the outset, and reflected in the collection of contributions, the text provides a transboundary and transregional study of an “ethnoculturally and ecologically coherent but geopolitically demarcated world area” (17).
In addition to the editors’ key chapters that conceptualize and frame central processes and experiences of territorialization in trans-state spaces of the Southeast Asian Massif (Michaud, chapters 1) and Indo-Tibetan Interface (Yü, chapter 3), Sara Shneiderman (chapter 2) brings focus on more personalized “properties of territory” in Nepal that occur both ontologically and linguistically in post-war and post-earthquake periods of restructuring. Beyond these examinations of worldviews, livelihood structures, and state-making, the volume also grounds its studies in the stuff of everyday life and multivalent materialities of borderlands flows of trade, consumption, and contestation. From Tibetan wine production (Brendan Galipeau, chapter 9) and De’ang tea (Li Quanmin, chapter 10) to colonial mercantilism in British East India (Gunnel Cerderlöf, chapter 5) and contemporary cardamom cash cropping (Sarah Turner, chapter 12), the studies collectively paint a broad and vivid picture of the particularities of borderland life and trans-state experiences across space and time in the trans-Himalaya. Moreover, the text engages past and present ecological histories and environmental concerns, including Hildegard Diemberger’s study (chapter 4) of the production of Buddhist books about—and across—sacred, transnational landscapes of Kyirong, Tibet and Georgina Drew’s analysis of the contestations that circulate around international regimes of water control and large-scale hydropower development in India (chapter 6).
Through these valuable conceptual and empirical contributions, Trans-Himalayan Borderlands joins a growing body of literature that continues to expand our knowledge of the dynamic, contested, and critical realities of everyday life in the borderlands of Asia, both within and beyond post-colonial contexts. While this scholarship includes a number of recent edited volumes, most importantly the Routledge Handbook of Asian Borderlands (Alexander Horstmann, Martin Saxer, and Alessandro Rippa, London: Routledge, 2018) and Borders and Mobility in South Asia and Beyond (Md. Azmeary Ferdoosh and Reece Jones, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), Yü and Michaud’s contribution is particularly useful for the student and scholar of the Himalayan region as well as broader spaces of highland Asia. In addition to situating the book’s studies and arguments both conceptually and territorially within ongoing debates about Zomia (Willem van Schendel: “Geographies of knowing, geographies of ignorance: Jumping scale in Southeast Asia,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, no. 20 [2002]; James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), the text also provides a more comprehensive understanding of the particularities of material and ecological life in what have been previously (and perhaps problematically) posited as the “non-state” spaces of upland Asia.
While the text is indeed valuable, this reviewer was struck by some internal errors both stylistic and substantive and which complicate the contribution overall. For example, while identifying the year of the Shimla Accord as 1941 instead of 1914 could be a minor editorial mistake, the error is compounded by additional reference to the Sino-Indian wars that “broke out 20 years later” (15). Such an imprecise chronology inadvertently erases a much longer and complex period between the two events—in 1914 and 1962, respectively—and in so doing diminishes deeper understandings about one of the most significant “border making” periods in the history of the Sino-Indian trans-Himalayan border regime. Moreover, while the title and arguments are deliberately framed as “trans-Himalayan,” it is also curious that only 4 or 5 of the chapters are situated as case studies in areas conventionally held to comprise the Himalaya region “proper”—that is, the geographic expanse running across the mountain ranges from Namche Barwa in southwest China to Nanga Parbat in northern Pakistan and bound by the great turns in the Brahmaputra/Yarlung Tsangpo and Indus Rivers, respectively. Considering that another 7–8 chapters forming the majority of the text are located in upland Southeast Asia (southern Yunnan and highland Laos, Vietnam, or Thailand)—or what Michaud terms the Southeast Asian Massif (James Michaud, “Editorial: Zomia and beyond,” Journal of Global History, no. 5 [2010])—this reader remains curious why the book claims a primary focus on the trans-Himalaya instead of a spatial identifier more attuned to Zomian or Southeast Asian borderland contexts.
These concerns aside, the text nevertheless provides an important contribution to borderland studies in general and, more specifically, supports a better understanding of the ongoing transformations to everyday life, resource governance, state power, modernity, and territoriality at the crossroads of highland Asia.
Galen Murton
James Madison University, Harrisonburg, USA