Flows and Frictions in Trans-Himalayan Spaces: Histories of Networking and Border Crossing (Asian Borderlands)

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.

Gunnel Cederlöf, Professor of History at Linnaeus University, Sweden, and member of the Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. She studies environmental, legal, and colonial history in India and South Asia. Publications include Founding an Empire on India’s North-Eastern Frontiers, 1790-1840 (2014), Landscapes and the Law (2008) and Ecological Nationalisms (2006 with K. Sivaramakrishnan). Willem van Schendel, Professor of History, University of Amsterdam and International Institute of Social History, the Netherlands. He works with the history, anthropology and sociology of Asia. Recent works include A History of Bangladesh (2020), Embedding Agricultural Commodities (2017, ed.), The Camera as Witness (2015, with J. L. K. Pachuau). See uva.academia.edu/WillemVanSchendel. Willem van Schendel, Professor of History, University of Amsterdam and International Institute of Social History, the Netherlands. He works with the history, anthropology and sociology of Asia. Recent works include A History of Bangladesh (2020), Embedding Agricultural Commodities (2017, ed.), The Camera as Witness (2015, with J. L. K. Pachuau). See uva.academia.edu/WillemVanSchendel. David Ludden, Professor of History, New York University, USA. His research focuses on agrarian Bangladesh and South and Northeast India. His mono_x0002_graphs include India and South Asia (2013), An Agrarian History of South Asia (2011), and among his edited volumes are Making India Hindu (2005) and Reading Subaltern Studies (2002). Jianxiong Ma, Associate Professor in Anthropology, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His work targets the historical formation of the Sino-Myanmar frontier and ecological conditions of cultural diversity and ethnicity in Southwest China. His works include The Lahu Minority in Southwest China (2013) and Reinventing Ancestors (2013, in Chinese). Joy L. K. Pachuau, Professor of History, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Her research includes the socio-cultural history of Northeast India, and the history of religion and society in Portuguese expansion in Asia. Among her publications are Being Mizo (2014) and The Camera as Witness (2015, with van Schendel). Arupjyoti Saikia, Professor of History, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India. He studies early modern and modern environmental and economic history and Assam’s political history. His publications include Forests and Ecological History of Assam (2011), A Century of Protests (2014) and The Unquiet River (2019). Jelle J. P. Wouters, Department of Social Sciences, Royal Thimphu College, Bhutan. He has conducted ethnographic and historical research in the Naga highlands and published on vernacular democracy and elections, political conflict, kinship and identity, and social history. He is author of In the Shadows of Naga Insurgency (2018) and has published widely in international journals. Henrik Kloppenborg Møller, Carlsberg Visiting Research Fellow at Global Sustainable Development, University of Warwick, UK. Møller’s research interests focus on Chinese society and China-Myanmar borderlands, ethnic minorities, markets, cosmology, development, and anthropological theory. His publications include ‘Borderlines, Livelihood, and Ethnicity in the Yunnan-Myanmar Borderlands: A Rohingya Jade Trader’s Narratives’ (2021) Tharaphi Than, Associate Professor, Department of World Languages and Cultures, Northern Illinois University, USA. She studies the intersection of dissent and food, particularly rice, focusing on events causing the 1967 and 1974 Myanmar rice riots. Global collaboration with feminists will result in the volume Field Feminism. Publications include Women in Modern Burma (2014). Htoo May, university student, poet and NGO worker from Sittwe, Rakhine State, Burma. She has lived in a camp for internally displaced people since 2012 when nationalists drove Rohingyas out of Sittwe. She teaches Rohingya children in her camp and contributes to Rohingya poetry blogs. She is a member of the Rohingya Student Union (Sittwe) and a volunteer Burmese_x0002_Rohingya translator.