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Sites of Asian Interaction: An introduction*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2012

TIM HARPER  and
SUNIL S. AMRITH
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Extract

Recent work in history, anthropology, and related disciplines has opened up new ways of thinking about inter-Asian connections. The contributors to this issue aim to ground these themes in a concerted focus on particular spaces or sites. We suggest that sites can, in themselves, be constitutive of particular modes of Asian interactions. Much recent literature on Asian transnationalism has focused on Asian elites and on textual modes of interaction, notably focusing on the writings of pre-eminent Asian intellectuals and literary figures. In thinking about spaces of interaction, we aim to broaden the focus of discussion to include non-elite Asians and their interactions with each other. By focusing on spaces—real and virtual—these papers begin to conceive of new ways of capturing changing geographical imaginations and the fluidity of borders and boundaries across Asia.

Type
Introduction
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 2: Sites of Asian Interaction , March 2012 , pp. 249 - 257
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 Ho, Engseng, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

2 The authors are coordinating a new research programme on ‘Sites of Asian Interaction’, based at the Centre for History and Economics, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, which seeks to develop some of the ideas proposed in this special issue. The project website can be found at: http://www.histecon.magd.cam.ac.uk/sai/index.html, [accessed 13 January 2012].

3 For further discussion of this point, see van Schendel, Willem, ‘Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia’, in Kratoska, Paul H., Raben, Remco and Nordholt, Henk Schulte (eds), Locating Southeast Asia: Geographies of Knowledge and Politics of Space (Singapore: Ohio University Press/NUS Press, 2005)Google Scholar; and Scott, James C., The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009)Google ScholarPubMed.

4 Furnivall, J. S., Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948)Google Scholar.

5 Levi-Strauss, Claude, ‘History and Anthropology’, in Levi-Strauss, Claude, Structural Anthropology, Volume 1, trans. Jacobson, Clair and Shoepf, Brooke Grundfest (New York: Basic Books, 1963)Google Scholar.

6 Kahn, Joel, Other Malays: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Malay World (Singapore: NUS Press, 2006), pp. 167–68Google Scholar.