Convenors
Anuradha Sen Mookerjee - National Centre for Human Settlements and Environment, IndiaMélanie Vandenhelsken - Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences
Aditya Kiran Kakati - International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden
Long Abstract
The study of borderlands in South Asia has highlighted that these societies are not self- contained units contiguously mapped over state territory but include political, economic and cultural networks that often overlap territorial borders.
The re-orientation of the scholarly focus on borderland lives reveals complexities and contradictions with discourses of state and territoriality, while shedding light on the borderlands as a social space, which borderlanders infuse with meaning and alternative forms of spatialisation. With space in the borderlands “forever taking on new shapes” (van Schendel 2005), new perspectives emerge for reconceptualising borderlands.
This panel seeks to enrich this discussion by broadening an exclusively territorial focus to reflect upon borderlands as both ‘perceived space’ and ‘lived space’ that is expressed and performed (Lefebvre 1974). For example, conceptualisation of the ‘village’ as a flexible set of social relations rather than as a fixed point on a map by Shneiderman (2015), and of ‘imagined geography’ being constituted through “the idea of alliance or unity among populations who otherwise live separate existences”, by Gohain (2020) offer interesting methods for reflection to de-territorialize borderlands.
This panel calls for papers across disciplines that reflect on borderlanders’ view of the borderlands: how they experience and imagine it, how borders enfold the lives and times of those historically and presently connected with the space and how practices and meanings in South Asian borderlands have been changing over time. Innovative elements of the panel include looking at the South Asian borderlands as space constituted by:
- Memories of significant events among borderland people
- Local forms of spatialisation
- Social and spatial mobilities, and their effect on citizenship
- Social and local practices of statehood
- Historical records
- Transboundary rivers and riverine communities
- Human/non-human relations
