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.
Author(s): Jelle J.P. Wouters, Michael T. Heneise
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 483
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of illustrations
List of contributors
Chapter 1 Highland Asia as a world region: An introduction
Section 1 Sino-Tibetan Mountains
Chapter 2 The Middle Highlands of modern China as a historical inter-Asian Zomia: Human-nature diversity in the Hengduan Mountains
Chapter 3 Human-nonhuman relations in the making of place in Kham
Chapter 4 Amdo: Social landscapes and change
Chapter 5 The Tibetan frontier: From regional boundaries to disputed borders
Section 2 Central Asian Mountains and Western Himalaya
Chapter 6 The Uyghurs: Conceptual highlanders of Xinjiang
Chapter 7 Kyrgyzstan: Relating to land, nation, and territory
Chapter 8 Pamirs at the crossroads
Chapter 9 Islam in the Trans-Himalayan ecumene
Section 3 Central Himalaya
Chapter 10 Forming communities and negotiating power in a highland borderland: The Bhotiya on the Indo-Tibet border
Chapter 11 Infrastructures of change: Development among pastoralists in Dolpo, Nepal (1990–2020)
Chapter 12 Nepal Central Highland: Resistance and the state
Chapter 13 Ethnographies of the Sherpas in the High Himalaya: Themes, trajectories, and beyond
Section 4 Eastern Himalaya
Chapter 14 Ethnic belonging and the reinvention of tradition in Eastern Nepal
Chapter 15 The desire to be ‘primitive’: The Nepalis of Darjeeling-Sikkim Himalayas and their claims for tribal recognition
Chapter 16 Bhutan: History, scholarship and emerging agency in the Bhutanese narrative
Chapter 17 Arunachal Pradesh: From a nonstate space to a contested state space
Section 5 Bengal-Indo-Burma Highlands
Chapter 18 Highlanders and lowlanders in Bangladesh: Reflections on borders, connectivity, and disconnection in Highland Asia
Chapter 19 Peopling the Yunnan-Bengal corridor: An ethnographic history of the Kuki-Chin-Mizo people
Chapter 20 The uplanders of Tripura: Changing questions of identity
Chapter 21 Migration narratives and ritual regeneration among the Karbi and Tiwa of Highland Assam
Chapter 22 Rethinking ethnographies on Garo Hills
Chapter 23 Ethnic attachments and alterations among Nagas in the Indo-Myanmar borderland
Chapter 24 Gendering Kachinland: Challenging the gender blindness of an ethnographic area in Highland Asia
Section 6 Southeast Asian Massif
Chapter 25 The Wa of the Burma-China borderlands: Identities and polities in the maelstrom of world-system cycles
Chapter 26 Karen – Mobile peoples with prophetic movements in Myanmar and Thailand
Chapter 27 The Uplands of Northern Thailand: Language and social relations beyond the Muang
Chapter 28 Animism and cosmological dynamics in Laos
Chapter 29 From ‘slaves’ to indigenous peoples: Shifting identities in Northeastern Cambodia
Chapter 30 On both sides of the Annamese Cordillera: The Bru of Vietnam and Laos
Chapter 31 Remoteness and connectivity: The variegated geographies of the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau
Chapter 32 Ethnography in the Northern Vietnamese Highlands
Index
