Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - Highland Connections (Remoteness and Connectivity: Highland Asia in the World)

Teaser

UNTANGLING THE REMOTENESS-CONNECTIVITY NEXUSRemote areas in Asia’s highlands are of great geopolitical concern. What happens at the Afghan-Tajik border, in Kashmir, Tibet or Northeast India has a global impact. Crisscrossed by the fragile borders of rising powers and rich in...

Summary

UNTANGLING THE REMOTENESS-CONNECTIVITY NEXUS
Remote areas in Asia’s highlands are of great geopolitical concern. What happens at the Afghan-Tajik border, in Kashmir, Tibet or Northeast India has a global impact. Crisscrossed by the fragile borders of rising powers and rich in natural resources, a multitude of stakes and analytic positions are attached to these frontiers; they figure as sanctuaries for insurgents, as realms of authentic tribal culture, as trafficking routes for drugs and wildlife parts, or simply as rural peripheries in need of development. Public imaginaries oscillate between these simplistic assessments, policy makers struggle to comprehend the dynamics involved, and local communities continue to feel misunderstood. What is missing is a conceptual framework that puts these assessments and cases in a global context and captures their entanglements. Addressing this challenge is the primary concern of our project.

Remoteness is generally assumed to be the defining condition: the rugged highlands of Asia are considered backward, authentic, or unruly because – for better or worse – they are isolated and far away from developed urban centres and state control. However, state-of-the-art research on circulation and mobility shows that connectivity with the outside world is an essential feature of livelihood strategies in remote areas. They frequently find themselves at the crossroads of intensive exchange of natural resources, labour, capital and manufactured goods. Migrants, smugglers and saints pass through. Geologists, tourists, NGOs, reporters and missionaries come here to look for resources, opportunities, and target groups. Highland Asian livelihoods are shaped as much by connectivity as by remoteness.

Our hypothesis and starting point is that remoteness and connectivity are not two independent features. They constitute each other in particular ways. The primary objective of this project is to explore this nexus of remoteness and connectivity with the aim of gaining a better understanding of Highland Asia in the world and thereby laying the groundwork for a new apprehension of the role and position of remote areas in general.

This project proposes Highland Asia as shorthand for the terrain of inquiry it is concerned with. As defined for the purpose of this project, Highland Asia includes the areas along Asia’s highest mountain ranges, from the Pamirian Knot to the Eastern slopes of the Himalayas. The purpose of Highland Asia is to serve as a vehicle for the study of relations, positionalities and processes that otherwise remain out of sight.

The project is carried out by a team of researchers based at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, LMU Munich (Germany) together with local partners in Tajikistan, China, India, and Nepal. In the first 30 months, we have approached the nexus of remoteness and connectivity through in-depth field work, focussing on four locations in Highland Asia: The Pamirs of Tajikistan and particularly the Wakhan Corridor bordering Afghanistan; the Himalayas of northern Nepal bordering China; Indian-administred Kashmir, and the interface between China’s Yunnan Province and neighboring Myanmar with its rebel-held special regions. Collectively, we have carried out 43 months of fieldwork. Building upon this research on the ground we began thinking these cases in a comparative perspective, giving attention both to the local histories and the larger geo-political processes that engulf all of them.

Our inquiry revolves around two larger sets of questions: first, the socio-spatial relations and asymmetries that contribute to the making and unmaking of remoteness; and second, the mobilities, motives, and opportunities emerging in this the evolving nexus of remoteness and connectivity. We tackled these sets of questions from several angles, three of which are summarized in the following:

1. Connecting Materialities / Material Connectivities: This initiative aimed at co

Work performed

The first 30 months of the project were dedicated to work packages 1 and 2 as described in the Description of Action (DoA).

Work Package 1:
The objective of this work package was to explore the nexus of remoteness and connectivity in four transnational settings in Highland Asia. Two vectors of inquiry guided our approach: a) socio-spatial relations and asymmetries; and b) mobilities, motives and opportunities.
Activities in WP1 included:
1. Preparations: an extensive literature review has been conducted, and in a series of eight team meetings we re-read and discussed key works to build a common intellectual base for our endeavour. We also entered into official collaborations with partner institutions in the study area. Research visas and access to the field are covered under a MoA with the Tajik Academy of Sciences, a LoA with the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Nepal, and a cooperation agreement with the Yunnan University of Finance and Economics in China.
2. Field work: In the first 2.5 years of the project, we carried out a total of 43 months of field research (See part B, section 3.1. for a list of “research expeditions”). Based on a mix of qualitative methods (participant observation, interviews, archival work), field research was also guided by two novel methodological approaches: co-itinerant ethnography to follow actors and capture the sociopolitical reality of trade and mobility, and special attention to “material sediments” to work toward an “archeology of the contemporary”.
3. Preliminary analysis of interviews, field notes, documents and visual material. This preliminary analysis was discussed during extensive de-briefing sessions during our field meetings (Milestones 1–4, see below).
There were four milestones in WP1, covering the four extended on-site team meetings, one in each field location in order to increase the team’s collective knowledge of the different field sites. These on-site field workshops took place in August 2015 (Ladakh, Kashmir), December 2016 (Kanchenjunga area, Nepal), and August/September 2017 (Tajik Pamirs and Yunnan). To increase cross-linkages within Highland Asia and benefit from the perspectives of our local partners in the field, we invited our research affiliates to these events, bringing Chinese associates to Nepal and Tajikistan, and Tajik colleagues to Nepal and China. The design of these collective on-site meetings proved tremendously fruitful and helped advance our collective understanding of the dynamics at stake in the nexus of remoteness and connectivity.

Work Package 2:
The objective of WP2 was to generate an ethnographically grounded, comparative model of remoteness and connectivity based on the insights of WP1 and the findings with regard socio-spatial relations, and the dynamics, motives and directions of mobility. The activities in WP2 mainly consisted in organizing and attending academic events and writing papers. These activities also feed into WP3, which is concerned with the project’s wider goal of rethinking the role and position of seemingly remote peripheries in a globally connected world. The following is a list of events that we organized or participated in, and the papers presented:
- October 2015: Neighbouring China: What does China’s rise mean for people living along its borders? - Paper by Martin Saxer presented at the Asia Center, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, summing up the first insights of research in Tajikistan and Nepal. http://highlandasia.net/events/1510sussex.html
- November 2015: Remoteness & Connectivity – Highland Asia in the World: Presentation of project and team in the “Oberseminar”, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, LMU Munich.http://highlandasia.net/events/1511oberseminar.html
- November 2015: Material, Experience, and the Mobile. First workshop of the research initiative “Connecting Materialities / Material Connectivities”, convened by Martin

Final results

Building on empirical research carried out in WP1, incipient concepts of the nexus of remoteness and connectivity have emerged. These revolved around explorations of infrastructure, mobility, debt, conservation, heritage making and development and reflect on the asymmetric connection that define the role and position of seemingly remote Highland Asian places in the world at large. A number of productive conceptual notions, such as “pathways” or “curation” emerged in these first 30 months of the project, pushing the debate forward.
As our major activities – the work on the return of remoteness, infrastructure, and materiality/connectivity – have involved scholars working in a variety of contexts around the globe, we have made substantial progress toward the overarching aim of the project, namely to develop a radically new understanding of seemingly remote areas around the globe. This goal, which is the main focus of WP3, is what we will continue to pursue over the second half of the project’s duration. Apart from many publications in the pipeline at this stage and the outreach activities to make them accessible to a wider audience, we plan a final multi-day symposium in 2019 to bring these strands together with the ambition to leave a lasting mark on the debate around partial globalization in our current era, that is, a form of globalisation, that works as much from the edge as it does from the centre. This notion of globalisation benefits tremendously from an anthropological perspective that is equally informed by the legacies of the discipline and an analysis of the current world disorder from the margins.

Website & more info

More info: http://highlandasia.net.