In recent years there has been wide ranging
academic discussion about the significance of borderlands in South and South-east
Asia. Here are two pieces of news that
may be of interest to Ladakh scholars.
The first concerns a 2013 publication:
David N. Gellner
(ed.). Borderland Lives in Northern South
Asia. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
This is an edited collection which includes
a chapter by IALS member Radhika Gupta on “Allegiance and Alienation: Border
Dynamics in Kargil”.
Other chapters look at Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Nepal,
Bhutan, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland and West Bengal.
The entire book is now available online,
and is free to download. See:
Secondly, the Asian Borderlands Research
Network is organising a conference in Kyrgyzstan in August 2018. The theme is “Ruins,
Revivals and Resources”, and the organisers pose the question:
How are
borderlands in Asia creating alternative spaces for heritages, self-definition
and the extraction of resources? How can these cases serve to rethink social
theories of various kinds?
They have issued a call for panels and
papers by a deadline of October 2017. For more details see: www.asianborderlands.net.
John Bray
