Governing Landscapes: Territorialisation and Exchange at South Asia's Himalayan Frontier

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Adam T. Smith and fellow panellists at the 6th Asian Dynamics Initiative Conference in Copenhagen (2014) for engaging with the idea of ‘Governing Landscapes’. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the Rule and Rupture research programme at the University of Copenhagen for great comments on drafts of the introduction.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Sumit Guha, Environment and Ethnicity in India, 1200–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

2. J. Ferguson and A. Gupta, ‘Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality’, in American Ethnologist, Vol. 29, no. 4 (2002), pp. 981–1002; Liisa Malkki, ‘National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees’, in Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 7, no. 1 (1992), pp. 24–44; and Stuart Elden, ‘Land, Terrain, Territory’, in Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 34, no. 6 (2010), pp. 799–817.

3. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, p. xii.

4. Mary Des Chene, ‘Is Nepal in South Asia? The Condition of Non-Postcoloniality’, in Studies in Nepali History and Society, Vol. 12, no. 2 (2007), pp. 207–23; S. Shneiderman, ‘Are the Central Himalayas in Zomia? Some Scholarly and Political Considerations across Time and Space’, in Journal of Global History, Vol. 5, no. 2 (2010), pp. 289–312; Michael Oppitz, ‘Close-Up and Wide-Angle: On Comparative Ethnography in the Himalayas—and Beyond’, in European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, Vol. 31 (Spring 2007), pp. 156–72.

5. John Agnew, ‘The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of International Relations Theory’, in Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 1, no. 1 (1994), pp. 53–80.

6. Willem van Schendel, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia (London: Anthem Press, 2005); Willem van Schendel and Itty Abraham, Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Jason Cons, Sensitive Space: Fragmented Territory at the India–Bangladesh Border (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016); Townsend Middleton, ‘States of Difference: Refiguring Ethnicity and Its “Crisis” at India's Borders’, in Political Geography, Vol. 35 (2013), pp. 14–24; Jason Cons, ‘Narrating Boundaries: Framing and Contesting Suffering, Community, and Belonging in Enclaves along the India–Bangladesh Border’, in Political Geography, Vol. 35 (2013), pp. 37–46; Sara Shneiderman, ‘Himalayan Border Citizens: Sovereignty and Mobility in the Nepal–Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) of China Border Zone’, in Political Geography, Vol. 35 (2013), pp. 25–36; Tina Harris, ‘Trading Places: New Economic Geographies across Himalayan Borderlands’, in Political Geography, Vol. 35 (2013), pp. 60–8; and David N. Gellner and Willem van Schendel, Borderland Lives in Northern South Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).

7. David Ludden, ‘Spatial Inequity and National Territory: Remapping 1905 in Bengal and Assam’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 46, no. 3 (2012), pp. 483–525; David Ludden, ‘Imperial Modernity: History and Global Inequity in Rising Asia’, in Third World Quarterly, Vol. 33, no. 4 (2012), pp. 581–601; and Rune Bolding Bennike, ‘Textbook Difference: Spatial History and National Education in Panchayat and Present-Day Nepal’, in Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 52, no. 1 (2015), pp. 53–78.

8. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1998); Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed; Shneiderman, ‘Are the Central Himalayas in Zomia?’; Shafqat Hussain, Remoteness and Modernity: Transformation and Continuity in Northern Pakistan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015); J. Michaud, ‘Editorial—Zomia and Beyond’, in Journal of Global History, Vol. 5, no. 2 (2010), pp. 187–214; and Andrej Grubačić and Denis O'Hearn, Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).

9. Rune Bolding Bennike, ‘Governing the Hills: Imperial Landscapes, National Territories, and Production of Place between Naya Nepal and Incredible India!’, PhD Dissertation, University of Copenhagen, 2013, pp. 1–49.

10. James S. Duncan and Nancy Duncan, Landscapes of Privilege: Aesthetics and Affluence in an American Suburb (New York: Routledge, 2004); and Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (New York: Blackwell, 1984).

11. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed.

12. Shneiderman, ‘Are the Central Himalayas in Zomia?’.

13. Elden, ‘Land, Terrain, Territory’, p. 810; and Stuart Elden, ‘Governmentality, Calculation, Territory’, in Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, Vol. 25 (2007), p. 578.

14. Mattias Borg Rasmussen and Christian Lund, ‘Reconfiguring Frontier Spaces: Territorialization and Resource Control’, in World Development, (forthcoming 2017); and Veena Das and Deborah Poole, Anthropology in the Margins of the State (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research/Oxford: James Currey, 2004).

15. Writing on the pre-colonial state in Southeast Asia, James Scott employs a distinction between, on the one hand, the spatially limited hard power of the state based on the forcible extraction of taxes and corvée labour and, on the other, the state's wider-reaching soft power based on the voluntary exchange of commodities. See Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, p. 35. See also T.M. Li, ‘Beyond “the State” and Failed Schemes’, in American Anthropologist, Vol. 107, no. 3 (2005), pp. 383–94; and Grubačić and O'Hearn, Living at the Edges of Capitalism.

16. See also Tirthankar Roy, The East India Company: The World's Most Powerful Corporation (New Delhi: Allen Lane, 2012).

Additional information

Funding

Researcher ID: L-7414-2016.