This book presents a close look at the growth, success, and proliferation of ethnic politics on the peripheries of modern South Asia, built around a case study of the Nepal ethnic group that lives in the borderlands of Sikkim, Darjeeling, and east Nepal. Grounded in historical and ethnographic research, it critically examines the relationship between culture and politics in a geographical space that is home to a diverse range of ethnic identities, showing how new modes of political representation, cultural activism, and everyday politics have emerged from the region.
"The book, using a small group of left-wing student activists as a prism, explores the complex politics that underpinned the making of nation-states in Singapore and Malaysia after World War Two. While most works have viewed the period in terms of political contestation groups, the book demonstrates how it is better understood as involving a shared modernist project framed by British-planned decolonization. This pursuit of nationalist modernity was characterized by an optimism to replace the colonial system with a new state and mobilize the people into a new relationship with the state, according them new responsibilities as well as new rights. This book, based on student writings, official documents and oral history interviews, brings to life various modernist strands - liberal-democratic, ethnic-communal, and Fabian and Marxist socialist - seeking to determine the form of post-colonial Malaya. It uncovers a hitherto little-seen world where the meanings of loud slogans were fluid, vague and deeply contested. This world also comprised as much convergence between the groups as conflict, including collaboration between the Socialist Club and other political and student groups which were once its rivals, while its main ally eventually became its nemesis"--Publisher's description.
Historically treated as an amorphous borderland and marginal to the understanding of democratic politics and governance in South Asia, Southeast Asia and northern Asia, the Himalayan region, in the last 50 years, has become an ‘active political laboratory’ for experiments in democratic structures and institutions. In turn, it has witnessed the evolution of myriad political ideologies, movements and administrative strategies to accommodate and pacify heterogeneous ethnic-national identities. Routeing Democracy in the Himalayas highlights how, through an ongoing process of democratisation, the Western liberal ideologies of democracy and decentralisation have interacted with varied indigenous politico-cultural ideas and institutions of an ethnic-nationally diverse population. It also reviews how formal democracy, regular elections, local self-governing structures, protection of the rights of minorities and indigenes, freedom of expression, development of mass media and formation of ethnic homelands — all have furthered participatory democracy, empowered the traditionally marginalised groups and ensured sustainable development to varying degrees. The book provides ethnographic and historical vistas of democracy under formation, at work, being contested and even being undermined, showing how democratisation thematically stitches the independent Himalayan nations and the Indian Himalayan states into a distinctive regional political mosaic. Combining new perspectives from comparative sociology, political anthropology and development studies, the volume will be useful for policy makers, as well as specialists, researchers and students in sociology, anthropology, area studies, development studies, and Tibet and Himalayan studies.
Development Zones in Asian Borderlands maps the nexus between global capital flows, national economic policies, infrastructural connectivity, migration, and aspirations for modernity in the borderlands of South and South-East Asia. In doing so, it demonstrates how these are transforming borderlands from remote, peripheral backyards to front-yards of economic development and state-building. Development zones encapsulate the networks, institutions, politics and processes specific to enclave development, and offer a new analytical framework for thinking about borderlands; namely, as sites of capital accumulation, territorialisation and socio-spatial changes.
Ethnic Inequality in the Northeastern Indian Borderlands analyses the relationship between symbolic violence, inequality and ethnicity, and addresses the question of unequal integration of small ethnic groups into state structures by using the Limbus of the Northeastern Indian borderlands as a case study. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence, the author argues that the ethnicization of the Limbus has been associated with the devaluation of their cultural identity, which was itself first constructed and naturalized by the same process of ethnicization. The book is a pioneering work in terms of the application of Bourdieu’s sociology to Northeast India and the theoretical interpretation of ethnic inequality in Northeast India. In addition, the book contributes to the overall understanding of the constant structural identity of symbolic violence and its varying manifestations. Exploring the symbolic dimensions of power relations within state structures, this book will be of interest to a wide readership from various disciplines including area studies, global studies, comparative studies, borderland studies, inequality studies, sociology, anthropology and political science.
This book analyses what Myanmar's struggle for democracy has signified to Burmese activists and democratic leaders, and to their international allies. In doing so, it explores how understanding contested meanings of democracy helps make sense of the country's tortuous path since Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy won historic elections in 2015. Using Burmese and English language sources, Narrating Democracy in Myanmar reveals how the country's ongoing struggles for democracy exist not only in opposition to Burmese military elites, but also within networks of local activists and democratic leaders, and international aid workers.
Darjeeling occupies a special place in the South Asian imaginary with its Himalayan vistas, lush tea gardens, and brisk mountain air. Thousands of tourists, domestic and international, annually flock to the hills to taste their world-renowned tea and soak up the colonial nostalgia. Darjeeling Reconsidered rethinks Darjeeling’s status in the postcolonial imagination. Mobilizing diverse disciplinary approaches from the social sciences and humanities, this definitive collection of essays sheds fresh light on the region’s past and offers critical insight into the issues facing its people today. While the historical analyses provide alternative readings of the systems of governance, labour, and migration that shaped Darjeeling, the ethnographic chapters present accounts of dynamics that define life in twenty-first century Darjeeling, including the Gorkhaland Movement, Fair Trade tea, indigenous and subnationalist struggle, gendered inequality, ecological transformation, and resource scarcity. The volume figures Darjeeling as a vital site for South Asian and postcolonial studies and calls for a timely reexamination of the legend and hard realities of this oft-romanticized region.
Bringing together a group of both international and Malaysian scholars, this book offers an up-to-date and broad analysis of the contemporary state of Malaysian politics and society. Transcending disciplinary boundaries, it offers a look at Malaysian politics not only through the lens of political science but also anthropology, cultural studies, international relations, political economy and legal studies touching on both overlooked topics in Malaysian political life as well as the emerging trends which will shape Malaysia's future. Covering silat martial arts, Malaysia's constitutional identity, emergency legislation, the South China Sea dilemma, ISIS discourse, zakat payment, the fallout from the 1MDB scandal and Malaysia's green movement, Illusions of Democracy charts the complex and multi-faceted nature of political life in a semi-authoritarian state, breaking down the illusions which keep it functioning, to uncover the mechanisms which really underlie the paradoxical longevity of Malaysia's political, economic and social system.
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.
The Annual Review of Comparative and International Education 2019 examines the field of comparative and international education by bringing together scholars, professionals, and other stakeholders to investigate recent developments in the field that are relevant to contemporary and future educational reform and applications worldwide.
