Asian Borderlands. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press [distributor], 2018. 256 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$115.00, cloth. ISBN 978-90-8964-982-9.
In this richly ethnographic work, editor Caroline Humphrey embarks upon an examination of “the different ‘shapes’ of trust among people” (28) in the vast borderlands that span the frontier between the Russian Far East and northeastern China. Nine ethnographic case studies discuss the question of how socially productive mistrust and distrust are in the context of problematic transborder environments beset by doubts and misunderstandings. By adopting an unabashedly economic-anthropological focus, the fresh material contained in this book transmits an understanding of the social, moral, and political dimensions of small-scale economic activities in a region too often characterized merely by its exotic (dys)functionality for geographically distant centres which struggle to consolidate their sovereignty through border control regimes. From Vladivostok to Manchuria and onwards to remote locations on the Mongolian border, the contributors succeed in providing invaluable and fresh data largely unavailable to scholars who are unfamiliar with the history of suspicion and border securitization that pervades this far-flung region.
The work’s greatest strength lies in deploying the tools of ethnography to illustrate “the habitual ways of life of different cultures, political structures, inherited ideological shibboleths, indigenous trust-related concepts, stereotypes about others, and the local value systems that shape the motives people have for cooperating with others” (13). The case studies contained here draw from a wide range of sub-genres that belong firmly within the larger field of social anthropology. The contents include discussions of kinship and the role of ethnic ascription and heritage in cross-border relationships (Bayar on mediators and “relatives” at the Inner Mongolian-Mongolian border; Park on “trust and treachery” between ethnic Koreans in China and in Russia), the appropriation of urban spaces by border dynamics (Peshkov on the semiotics of space in the Chinese border town of Manzhouli; Humphrey on precarious transactions in Vladivostok’s real-estate business), analyses of practiced economic networks (Holzlehner on informal trading regimes that transcend the Russian state; Ryzhova on e-commerce and the role of borderlander mediation in overcoming geographical and legal logistical bottlenecks; Safonova, Sántha, and Sulyandziga on the dynamics of the “untrustworthy” jade business), and examinations of linguistic phenomena that inform bordered lifeworlds (Namsaraeva on vocabularies of trust and their effect on economic encounters; Martin on modes of trust and faith that clash, compete with or exclude each other). The twin themes of “border economics” and “trust/distrust” provide a thread that ties all contributions together, thereby showing “how trust and mistrust are deployed in both making and transcending boundaries” (9).
In her cogent introduction, Humphrey rightly chooses to focus on providing an introduction to the anthropology of distrust and how it calls into question presumptions of “trust” as a virtue. It is from this point of view that she proffers a short yet precise discussion of theories of trust/mistrust as informed by psychology, sociology, philosophy, and political science. This is followed by intriguing insight into economic practices that focus on the social dimensions of actual trade taking place across Russia’s Far Eastern borders. Her delineation of a typology of exchange, infrastructures, and actors is particularly welcome in a volume that rests on qualitative observation rather than quantitative economic data.
This edited volume is very much a study focused on socio-economic lifeworlds that centre on Russia (a notable exception here, however, is Bayar’s discussion of truckers from Inner Mongolia), and it succeeds in providing data on the importance of how differences in values and expectations serve to inform bordered local livelihoods. However, in terms of examining borderland dynamics from the vantage of both sides of a border with a “long historical legacy of mistrust between the peoples inhabiting them” (9), this work as a whole offers only tantalizing glimpses of the Chinese Other. The border itself, as a locus of institutions and practices, is approached from a predominantly Russian point of view, and all contributions in the work are embedded in Russian-language literature, thereby providing an invaluable resource to scholars beyond Russia. Yet, this makes the absence of Chinese materials all the more striking (although Namsaraeva’s contribution on the landscapes of distrust provides a crucial account of both sides of this frontier). Within the wider research genre of border studies, this work excels at injecting a long-overdue anthropological sensitivity towards the everyday insecurities experienced by borderland actors into scholars’ understanding of frontier economics, even if it largely upholds disciplinary and linguistic boundaries which foil true cross-border comparativity.
The ethnographic data on the importance of (mis)trusting relationships in small-scale economic activities are unique and thought-provoking. The high price of the book (US$115) is not entirely justified by the number and quality of its illustrations, but its generous availability in Open Access is most welcome. For a readership less familiar with the methodologies of conducting participant observation in politically fraught borderlands, slightly more detailed methodological reflections would have served to round off this collection as a textbook example of the immense value of generating insight into (post-)socialist peripheries derived from on-the-ground anthropological fieldwork.
Steven Parham
University of Bern, Bern