1 - Mobility

Summary

In the nineteenth century, concerns about intensifying interregional and global mobility prompted impassioned debates in many countries about where, how, and by whom the boundaries were to be drawn that demarcated the individual from the state, the nation from the world. This chapter examines these debates in a number of sites across Asia, specifically in the context of epidemics and the entanglement of different kinds of circulation that they brought into view: the traffic of disease, the transference of people, goods, and capital, and the dissemination of knowledge and technical expertise. In what ways did epidemics foreground economic and social networks? How were different species of mobility encouraged, regulated, or prevented? What kinds of violence did epidemics induce, particularly in relation to conflicts over freedom, power, and sovereignty?

It is, perhaps, too easy to think of mobility solely in relation to trade, migration, and the spread of disease – in other words, as an outward diffusion or expansion that impacts upon a more-or-less static ‘target’ society. According to this view, mobility is conceived as an exceptional process, in contrast to the fixed locations from which – and to which – the person or thing is moving. Mobility has tended to be understood ‘through the same analytical lens’ of global flows, with the mobile contrasted to the static. It has also been associated with the transition from a world where modernizing institutions were able to fix identities and relations, to one that is increasingly mobile and therefore hard to order. The argument has been made that global capitalism, coupled with new information technologies, has produced an unsettling new fluidity: ‘liquid modernity.’ Modern life is characterized by a fundamental inconstancy – by ‘fragility, temporariness, vulnerability and inclination to constant change.’

Studying epidemic episodes in the past may help us to rethink this binary between mobility and fixity, localization and transnational connection, past and present. As the anthropologist James Clifford has suggested, we might begin to re-conceptualize mobility by reflecting on the processes of human movement or travel inherent in culture. ‘Practices of displacement,’ Clifford proposes, may be thought of ‘as constitutive of cultural meanings rather than as their simple transfer or extension.’ In each of the three cases presented in this chapter, I elaborate on this insight by exploring epidemics in relation to different kinds and scales of mobility.