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ABSTRACTOver the past two decades, the Yunnan-Myanmar borderlands in Kachin State have become a major investment frontier for large-scale agribusiness. Chinese private capital, supported by state-led opium substitution programs, has turned thousands of hectares of forests into plantations. As in many such cases across Southeast Asia and beyond, this rapid development has come at the expense of local communities and displaced persons relying on these lands for their livelihoods and refuge. Caught between Chinese market expansion, and an ongoing war between the Myanmar Army and the Kachin Independence Organization/Army (KIO/KIA), plantations have become sites of often overlooked confrontations, compromise, and conflict operating behind the more spectacular politics of the grand infrastructures like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in this region. Moving across plantation sites, armed bases and border markets; and building on interviews with Chinese entrepreneurs, Kachin leaders, and farmers, the paper explores how plantations have transformed not only environmental space but also social-political dynamics of Kachin State in ways, we argue, that are more difficult to reverse than previous or ongoing military territorialization. In doing so, we aim to localize and contextualize the plantation as a key force rapidly transforming Asian borderworlds, over which broader socio-political struggles, environmental transformations, nature loss, connectivity and developmental become imbricated with bordering space.

ABSTRACTThe China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is expected to be a “game-changer” for Pakistan’s struggling economy. In China’s Yunnan province, the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar (BCIM) economic corridor promises to revive old forms of connectivity across the region. While both projects feature prominently in Xi Jinping’s signature project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), neither is particularly new. The BCIM dates back to the Kunming Initiative of 1999, while the CPEC was initiated in the early 2010s. Following the development of both projects over the past decade, this paper shows some of the effects of economic corridors on local trade. It argues that, despite claims of inclusiveness, openness and mutual benefit, such projects often achieve the opposite. In Xinjiang, security concerns have curbed opportunities for Uyghur and Pakistani traders to carry out cross-border trade. In Yunnan, a stricter border regime is favoring well-connected elites over local actors who had been engaged in local trade for decades. I thus argue that the corridor-ization of trade along China’s frontiers has brought the end of what I call proximity: the advantages intrinsic to a certain geographical, cultural and historical closeness that used to afford business opportunities to borderland communities.

Abstract:In this article we review the most recent literature on infrastructure in the social sciences and show its relevance for the study of Highland Asia. We consider the spatial, scalar, and temporal aspects of construction and, in so doing, develop new conceptual tools to evaluate the social and political configurations of states and citizens in some particularly “out of the way places.” Importantly, we show that many of the largescale development interventions planned throughout the region defy the “backgroundness” and invisible “infra-ness” normally associated with the term infrastructure, especially with respect to recent social science and history of technology studies scholarship. On the contrary, drawing on Aihwa Ong's concept of hyperbuilding, we argue that many new highways, dams, railroads, and the like are highly conspicuous, both visually and discursively. Long before their actual construction starts, the “infrastructural imaginaries” behind such projects already work as a purported promise for future prosperity and connectivity and lend legitimacy to logics of “the state” in areas historically difficult to access and hard to govern.

In recent contributions to the emerging anthropology of infrastructure, the issue of agency often plays the role of the proverbial elephant in the room—an area that most scholars are reluctant to engage with. In this paper we highlight the implicit dichotomization between human and non-human that characterizes this body of literature. In so doing we approach the question of agency not as a subjective property emanating from a conscious self—what would be very much the way traditional anthropology has come to imagine animism. Rather, by turning such an understanding of agency on its head, we take the animacy of the in-between as the starting point from which life unfolds. According to Tim Ingold’s work on the subject, this view is consistent with the cosmologies of people traditionally described as “animists.” Yet unlike conventional understandings of the term, Ingold describes this ontology as an openness to a world in becoming. Here what brings things into existence is not an animating principle inscribed within them, but rather the potential of the field of relations in which they are embedded. We suggest that this analytical reversal can provide us with a novel framework for the analysis of infrastructures. Accordingly, we argue that roads’ doings cannot be understood as active subjectivity or a function of their material resilience. Instead of connecting, roads should be understood as growing out of connections—as an “in-between” in which their doing is also their undergoing. We will make this argument through ethnographic cases from Pakistan, Nepal, China, Myanmar, and Austria.

AbstractThe Chinese Communist Party has often used history as a tool to serve its political purposes. This article analyzes the ways in which mythological accounts have been manipulated in order to strengthen Beijing’’s control over the restive northwestern province of Xinjiang. Relying on an analysis of various materials (including museum exhibitions, textbooks and travel guides), I explore how the figures of the Queen Mother of the West and King Mu of the Zhou have been used to assert that Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of China since prehistoric times. The materials analyzed treat mythological texts as valid sources of geographical and historical data, whereas Western scholars largely agree that these cannot provide any reliable information of this kind. In accordance with the tradition of early commentators, I define this approach as euhemeristic, in that it treats mythological accounts as a reflection of historical events.