Full Description
Focusing on the geographies between the Mekong and the Indus, this book brings objects to the centre of enquiry in the understanding of modern Asian frontiers. It explores how a range of objects have historically been significant bearers and agents of frontier making. For instance, how are objects connected to aspects of state making, social change, everyday life, diplomacy, political and ecological worlds, capital, forms of violence, resistances, circulations, and aesthetic expressions?
This book seeks to interrogate and understand the dynamism of frontiers from the vantage point of objects such as salt, rubber, tea, guns, silk scarves, horses, and opium. It attempts to explore objects as sites of encounter, mediation, or dislocation between the social and the spatial. The book not only locates objects in the specificities of frontier spaces, but it also looks at how they are produced, circulated, and come to be intricately linked to a wide range of people, institutions, networks, and geographies. In the process, it explores how objects traverse and come to inhabit multiple historical, cultural, and geographical scales.
This book will be of interest to researchers and academics working in areas of history, social and cultural anthropology, Asian studies, frontiers and borderland studies, cultural studies, political and economic studies, and museum studies.
Contents
List of illustrations/maps. List of tables. List of contributors. Acknowledgement. Introduction: Objects of Frontiers LIPOKMAR DZÜVICHÜ AND MANJEET BARUAH Part I: Commodities, resource frontiers and state making 1 Trans-Indus Salt: Objects, Resistance and Violence in the North-West Frontier of British India SAMEETAH AGHA 2 'Objects' of Appropriations: Locating Material Efficacies of Rubber in the Northeastern Resource Frontier of British India, 1810-1906 APARAJITA MAJUMDAR 3 Tibetan Materiality versus British 'Ornamentalism': Diplomacy, Objects and Resistance in the Imperial Archive EMMA MARTIN Part II: Networks, things and violence 4 From Highlands to Lowlands: The Pu'er Tea Trading Network and Ethnic-Group Interactions in the Southern Yunnan Borderlands (1662-1796) KUNBING XIAO 5 Embracing the Black and White Gold: The Shift and Continuity of the Core Objects in the Tropical Yunnan Borderlands DIANA ZHIDAN DUAN 6 Guns, Gifts and Guerrillas: Knowledge and Objects during World War Two in the Indo-Myanmar (Burma) Frontier ADITYA KIRAN KAKATI Part III: Regions, cultures and connections 7 A Spot of Enlightenment: Tea as a Fuel for Connectivity in Himalayan Buddhist Cultures KALZANG DORJEE BHUTIA and AMY HOLMES-TAGCHUNGDARPA 8 Objects in the Border Poetry of North East India and Southwest China MARK BENDER Afterword: The Flow of Objects at the Political Edges: A Postscript GUNNEL CEDERLÖF. Bibliography. Index
