Pamirian Crossroads and Beyond

Pamirian Crossroads and Beyond PDF Author: Hermann Kreutzmann
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004704361
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 763

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Book Description
In Pamirian Crossroads and Beyond Hermann Kreutzmann offers insights in his fieldwork-based research in High Asia during four decades. A human-geographical perspective is pursued in which case studies about colonial and post-colonial boundary-making, exchange relations of mountain communities across international borders, the transformation of agricultural and pastoral practices and the effects of modernisation strategies in neighbouring countries are centred in the Hindukush, Wakhan Quadrangle, Pamirian Crossroads, Karakoram Mountains and Himalaya. Empirical evidence is augmented by in-depth archival research, thus allowing a perspective from the 19th to the 21st century. By shifting the focus to mountain peripheries and emphasising spaces in between urban centres of power in Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, and the Central Asian Republics different arenas of confrontation and effective changes emerge.

Pamirian Crossroads and Beyond

Pamirian Crossroads and Beyond PDF Author: Hermann Kreutzmann
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004704361
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 763

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Book Description
In Pamirian Crossroads and Beyond Hermann Kreutzmann offers insights in his fieldwork-based research in High Asia during four decades. A human-geographical perspective is pursued in which case studies about colonial and post-colonial boundary-making, exchange relations of mountain communities across international borders, the transformation of agricultural and pastoral practices and the effects of modernisation strategies in neighbouring countries are centred in the Hindukush, Wakhan Quadrangle, Pamirian Crossroads, Karakoram Mountains and Himalaya. Empirical evidence is augmented by in-depth archival research, thus allowing a perspective from the 19th to the 21st century. By shifting the focus to mountain peripheries and emphasising spaces in between urban centres of power in Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, and the Central Asian Republics different arenas of confrontation and effective changes emerge.

Beyond the Silk Roads

Beyond the Silk Roads PDF Author: Magnus Marsden
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108976506
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Small-scale traders play a crucial role in forging Asian connectivity, forming networks and informal institutions separate from those driven by nation-states, such as China's Belt and Road Initiative. This ambitious study provides a unique insight into the lives of the mobile traders from Afghanistan who traverse Eurasia. Reflecting on over a decade of intensive ethnographic fieldwork, Magnus Marsden introduces readers to a dynamic yet historically durable universe of commercial and cultural connections. Through an exploration of the traders' networks, cultural and religious identities, as well as the nodes in which they operate, Marsden emphasises their ability to navigate Eurasia's geopolitical tensions and to forge transregional routes that channel significant flows of people, resources, and ideas. Beyond the Silk Roads will interest those seeking to understand contemporary iterations of the Silk Road within the context of geopolitics in the region. This title is also available as Open Access.

Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia

Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia PDF Author: Jelle J.P. Wouters
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000598586
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia is the first comprehensive and critical overview of the ethnographic and anthropological work in Highland Asia over the past half a century. Opening up a grand new space for critical engagement, the handbook presents Highland Asia as a world-region that cuts across the traditional divides inherited from colonial and Cold War area divisions - the Indian Subcontinent/South Asia, Southeast Asia, China/East Asia, and Central Asia. Thirty-two chapters assess the history of research, identify ethnographic trends, and evaluate a range of analytical themes that developed in particular settings of Highland Asia. They cover varied landscapes and communities, from Kyrgyzstan to India, from Bhutan to Vietnam and bring local voices and narratives relating trade and tribute, ritual and resistance, pilgrimage and prophecy, modernity and marginalization, capital and cosmos to the fore. The handbook shows that for millennia, Highland Asians have connected far-flung regions through movements of peoples, goods and ideas, and at all times have been the enactors, repositories, and mediators of world-historical processes. Taken together, the contributors and chapters subvert dominant lowland narratives by privileging primarily highland vantages that reveal Highland Asia as an ecumune and prism that refracts and generates global history, social theory, and human imagination. In the currently unfolding Asian Century, this compels us to reorient and re-envision Highland Asia, in ethnography, in theory, and in the connections between this world-region, made of hills, highlands and mountains, and a planetary context. The handbook reveals both regional commonalities and diversities, generalities and specificities, and a broad orientation to key themes in the region. An indispensable reference work, this handbook fills a significant gap in the literature and will be of interest to academics, researchers and students interested in Highland Asia, Zomia Studies, Anthropology, Comparative Politics, Conceptual History and Sociology, Southeast Asian Studies, Central Asian Studies and South Asian Studies as well as Asian Studies in general.

Pamirian Crossroads

Pamirian Crossroads PDF Author: Hermann Kreutzmann
Publisher: Harrassowitz
ISBN: 9783447104494
Category : Borderlands
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Mapping the Pamirs and Wakhan mountain areas in High Asia, the author researches marginal border areas of Afghanistan, Pakistan, China and Tajikistan and how they were used by the Kirghiz and Wakhi peoples over time. Both archival and published textual, photographic and cartographic resources are used to illustrate this exploration of remote Asian mountain areas in the context of boundary-making, crossroads, communities, and migration.

Hunza Matters

Hunza Matters PDF Author: Kreutzmann Hermann
Publisher: Harrassowitz
ISBN: 9783447113694
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 570

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Book Description
Since the mid-19th century, boundary-making in the Pamirian Crossroads had involved the redefining of contested spheres of influence between Great Britain and Russia. Remote mountain microstates had enjoyed a comparatively high degree of autonomy from their immediate neighbours. The incorporation of the Hunza Valley into the British-Kashmirian realm followed a successful military intervention. The colonial project has significantly affected living conditions in the Hunza Valley. 0Hunza matters addresses the transformation from four perspectives. First, the changing physical infrastructure are analysed from a road perspective. Initially, pack animals and porterage were involved in crossing high passes. Daring geostrategic projects emerged, shedding light on early plans for connecting British India with China by motor road. Much later the Karakoram Highway was built. The latest stage of infrastructure development is the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. Second, environmental resource utilisation strategies have changed over time. Emphasis has shifted from a predominantly agriculture-based economy towards a market-oriented income generation including extractivism, remittances and services. Third, bordering and ordering is strongly linked to actors and factors. Fourth, new light is shed on prevalent myths that are associated with Alexander the Great and the Silk Roads, longevity and an ideal state. A developmentalism discourse has been transformed in Chinese occupation narrative. All four perspectives are displayed on the basis of archival evidence that has been collected from a wide range of sources, augmented by empirical material collected during four decades.

An Anthropology of Intellectual Exchange

An Anthropology of Intellectual Exchange PDF Author: Jacob Copeman
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1805390708
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Dialogues, encounters and interactions through which particular ways of knowing, understanding and thinking about the world are forged lie at the centre of anthropology. Such ‘intellectual exchange’ is also central to anthropologists’ own professional practice: from their interactions with research participants and modes of pedagogy to their engagements with each other and scholars from adjacent disciplines. This collection of essays explores how such processes might best be studied cross-culturally. Foregrounding the diverse interactions, ethical reasoning, and intellectual lives of people from across the continent of Asia, the volume develops an anthropology of intellectual exchange itself.

Environmental Humanities in Central Asia

Environmental Humanities in Central Asia PDF Author: Jeanne Féaux de la Croix
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000983196
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
This book is the first collection to showcase the flourishing field of environmental humanities in Central Asia. A region larger than Europe, Central Asia possesses an astounding range of environments, from deserts to glaciated peaks. The volume brings into conversation scholarship from history to social anthropology, demonstrating the contribution that interdisciplinary and engaged research offers to many urgent issues in the region: from the history of conservationism to the tactics of environmental movements, from literary engagements with ‘pure nature’ to the impact of fossil fuel extraction. The collection focuses on the Central Asian republics of the former USSR, where a complex layering of nomadic and sedentary, Turkic and Persianate, Islamic and Soviet cultures ends up affecting human relations with distinct environments. Featuring state-of-the-art contributions, the book enquires into human-environment relations through a broad-brush typology of interactive modes: to extract, protect, enspirit and fear. Broadening the scope of analysis beyond a consideration of power, the authors bring into focus alternative local cosmologies and the unintended consequences of environmental policy. The volume highlights scholarship from within Central Asia as well as expertise elsewhere, offering readers diverse modes of knowledge-production in the environmental humanities. This book is an important resource for researchers and students of the environmental humanities, sustainability, history, politics, anthropology and geography of Asia, as well as Soviet and Post-Soviet studies.

Mapping Transition in the Pamirs

Mapping Transition in the Pamirs PDF Author: Hermann Kreutzmann
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319231987
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
By emphasizing on the Pamir region a comprehensive overview of path-dependent and recent developments in a remote mountain region is provided in this book. Overall neglect in the mountainous periphery is contrasted by shifting the centre of attention to the Pamirs situated at the interface between South and Central Asia. From colonial times to now there has been a debate on grasping and locating the area. Here field-work based contributions are collected to provide a variety of perspectives on the Pamirs highlighting transformation and transition in Post-Soviet societies as well as in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The similar ecological environment across borders features the common ground while analyzing development processes in a set of case studies that aim at highlighting certain aspects of regional development.

The Art of Symbolic Resistance

The Art of Symbolic Resistance PDF Author: Joanne N. Smith Finley
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004256784
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
Against the background of the Ürümchi riots (July 2009), this book provides a longitudinal study of contemporary Uyghur identities and Uyghur-Han relations. Previous studies considered China’s Uyghurs from the perspective of the majority Han (state or people). Conversely, The Art of Symbolic Resistance considers Uyghur identities from a local perspective, based on interviews conducted with group members over nearly twenty years. Smith Finley rejects assertions that the Uyghur ethnic group is a ‘creation of the Chinese state’, suggesting that contemporary Uyghur identities involve a complex interplay between long-standing intra-group socio-cultural commonalities and a more recently evolved sense of common enmity towards the Han. This book advances the discipline in three senses: from a focus on sporadic violent opposition to one on everyday symbolic resistance; from state to ‘local’ representations; and from a conceptualisation of Uyghurs as ‘victim’ to one of ‘creative agent’.

Wakhan Quadrangle

Wakhan Quadrangle PDF Author: Hermann Kreutzmann
Publisher: Harrassowitz
ISBN: 9783447108126
Category : Badakhshān (Afghanistan)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Wakhan Quadrangle became an arena of colonial competition when four powers - Afghanistan, China, Great Britain and Russia - struggled for dominance in a remote mountain region where only scattered communities lived in a challenging environment - called the "Great Game". Prior to this, various international travellers had been sent out, commissioned to record routes, military details and strategic information for the respective parties in the contest. Among the explorers were so-called indigenous intermediaries who were trained in measuring geodetic parameters and who noted down their observations about the customs, culture and economy of the people. They were expected to be knowledgeable in terms of linguistic skills and cultural practices and were less likely than their colonial masters to arouse suspicion. Munshi Abdul Rahim was an explorer who was sent to Wakhan and Badakhshan in 1879-1880 by the first British Political Agent in Gilgit. His report, reprinted in facsimile, is the centerpiece of this book. It was written during a crucial period for Wakhan that resulted in the imperial division of the formerly independent principality into two parts and the flight and migration of a large share of its inhabitants. His account is preceded by an introduction to the "Great Game" and its implications for the Central Asian interface. Munshi Abdul Rahim's narrative serves to discuss the function of providers of 'political' and 'non-political' information, i.e. the distinction between exploration and espionage from colonial times to the present day. The comments and interpretations are embedded in archival research and fieldwork done by the author over 40 years.