Asia Archives

Invisible Reconstruction

What does it really mean to reconstruct a city after a natural, biological or man-made disaster? Is the repair and reinstatement of buildings and infrastructure sufficient without the mending of social fabric? The authors of this volume believe that the true measure of success should be societal. After all, a city without people is no city at all.
Invisible Reconstruction takes the view that effective disaster mitigation and recovery require interdisciplinary tactics. Historian Lucia Patrizio Gunning and urbanist Paola Rizzi expand beyond the confines of individual disciplines or disaster studies to bring together academics and practitioners from a wide variety of disciplines, comparing strategies and outcomes in different scenarios and cultures from South America, Europe and Asia.

From cultural heritage and public space to education and participation, contributors reflect on the interconnection of people, culture and environment and on constructive approaches to strengthening the intangible ties to increase resilience and reduce vulnerability.

By bringing practical examples of how communities and individuals have reacted to or prepared for disaster, the publication proposes a shift in public policy to ensure that essential physical reinforcement and rebuilding are matched by attention to societal needs. Invisible Reconstruction is essential reading for policymakers, academics and practitioners working to reduce the impact of natural, biological and man-made disaster or to improve post-disaster recovery.

Classics and Race

Classics and Race: A historical reader provides scholars and students with an exploratory intellectual history of the complex relationships between Classics and racist/anti-racist thought-systems. It collects together a series of readings of historical primary sources from the late medieval period until the mid-twentieth century, bringing to light how the classical tradition and post-ancient constructions of race have informed each other. Each reading is accompanied by an essay, written by a leading specialist who offers a discussion of the primary source.

The volume is arranged chronologically, from the late medieval period to the Renaissance, crucial for understanding classical humanism, and on to the eighteenth century with texts foundational to the modern emergence of classical studies as a discipline and its relationship to the transatlantic slave trade. The essays show how the classical tradition has continuously been structured by debates about race, racism and anti-racism. Including voices from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe and North and South America, the essays demonstrate why the primary text is important for understanding this intellectual and cultural history, and the global reach of the classical tradition.

Water Societies and Technologies from the Past and Present

Today our societies face great challenges with water, in terms of both quantity and quality, but many of these challenges have already existed in the past. Focusing on Asia, Water Societies and Technologies from the Past and Present seeks to highlight the issues that emerge or re-emerge across different societies and periods, and asks what they can tell us about water sustainability. Incorporating cutting-edge research and pioneering field surveys on past and present water management practices, the interdisciplinary contributors together identify how societies managed water resource challenges and utilized water in ways that allowed them to evolve, persist, or drastically alter their environment.

The case studies, from different periods, ancient and modern, and from different regions, including the Indus Basin, the Yangtze River, the Mesopotamian floodplain, the early Islamic city of Sultan Kala in Turkmenistan, and ancient Korea, offer crucial empirical data to readers interested in comparing the dynamics of water management practices across time and space, and to those who wish to understand water-related issues through conceptual and quantitative models of water use. The case studies also challenge classical theories on water management and social evolution, examine and establish the deep historical roots and ecological foundations of water sustainability issues, and contribute new grounds for innovations in sustainable urban planning and ecological resilience.

Statecraft and Foreign Policy

Statecraft and Foreign Policy provides an in-depth understanding of India’s rise as an economic and political power and its role in addressing global challenges, from climate change to international trade, security, health and energy. It focuses on India’s statecraft and foreign policy from its independence in 1947 to current politics and policies in 2023 – 75 years later.

The book has three main sections, focusing on the evolution of India’s foreign policy after Independence, its transformation after the Cold War and as India’s economic and political power grew, and India’s engagement with major powers (like the US, China and Russia), neighbouring countries, and international institutions. The analysis draws on International Relations Theory, Foreign Policy Analysis, and the work of classic Indian thinkers like Kautilya. It combines evaluating domestic and international influences on India’s statecraft and foreign policy.

The authors introduce a ‘toolbox’ for studying the making and the outcomes of Foreign Policy based on an analysis of interests, perceptions, and values. This analytical framework goes beyond the Indian case study and can be applied to International Relations, Comparative Politics, and Foreign Policy Analysis.

Praise for Statecraft and Foreign Policy

‘Mitra, Schottli, and Pauli have crafted a remarkably deep analysis of India’s foreign policy. They have not only reviewed the details of India’s foreign affairs, itself no small task, but they have done so in an analytic framework grounded in a profound evaluation of the intertwining of domestic and foreign policy choices and compunctions. As contemporary India has emerged as one of the world’s great powers – great in every sense of that term – this book is essential reading for policymakers, diplomats, scholars, and students of Indian affairs and world affairs. Statecraft and Foreign Policy is a tour de force that will define how we think of India in global politics for decades to come!’ Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Julius Silver Professor of Politics, New York University, USA

‘A sweeping overview, in holistic perspective. Covers independent India’s 75 years, narrating policy development and diplomatic actions. Incisive, balanced, and insightful.’ Kisan S. Rana, Emeritus Professor and Former Ambassador of India to Germany

‘This book offers both a wide compass of Indian foreign policy across its 76 years but also a focused lens that assesses change and continuity across different periods and varied dimensions of foreign policy. Domestic and international variables are brought together in the analysis with a focus on how the Prime Ministers think about and visualize their foreign policies. Each chapter provides a synoptic assessment including additional readings making it an excellent reference that brings analysis of foreign policy up to date. The discussions of India’s multilateral engagements on trade, climate change and international negotiations is a valuable addition to usual bilateral discussions of foreign policies.’ Aseema Sinha, Wagener Chair of South Asian Politics and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College in California, USA

‘The authors have done the almost-impossible – they have provided a synopsis of the most important phases, relationships, and issues that mark the country’s policies beyond its borders. And they have done it engagingly and with sophistication…free of jargon and abstruse theorizing, and yet with a penetrating point of view.’ Professor Kanti Bajpai, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore

Reframing the Ethnographic Museum

Since the later part of the twentieth century, ethnographic museums have come under increasing scrutiny, and many have reflected on and changed their presentation as they questioned collections so often made by colonial officials and explorers. Now is a good time to explore whether new developments in display and cultural politics provide a viable future for ethnographic museums. In particular, policies for restitution by colonial era institutions create a changed landscape for ethnographic display both in the countries from which they originate and in former colonising states.

Reframing the Ethnographic Museum presents a wide range of cultural settings across the world where ethnographic displays have appeared in their local circumstances. Non-European museum strategies raise new problems but also new solutions. Nationalism has been especially significant in museology in Asia, and in Africa new museum objectives have emerged. They share a problematic future in a digital age when the aura of artefacts is challenged by digital repositories and a public less willing to travel to visit original objects. Authors in this book grapple with the new complexities facing them as curators in the contemporary world.

Packaged Plants

Packaged Plants offers an absorbing ethnography and cultural history of how the production and consumption of plants for food and medicine has gone through ‘metabolic rifts’, increasingly processed into commodities with adverse impact on health and aggravating existing economic and social inequities. The book also describes ultra-processed foods that are linked to metabolic syndrome, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity.

Divided into three parts, the first part presents a comprehensive historical analysis of the socio-metabolic shifts leading to the loss of plant sovereignty in the Philippines. It scrutinizes colonial influences, urbanization, nutritional policies, scientific research programs and neoliberal marketing strategies that have paved the way for the proliferation of packaged plant-based products passed as food or medicines. The second part delves into contemporary socio-metabolic dynamics within Puerto Princesa, interweaving urban political ecology frameworks with medical anthropological perspectives. It elucidates the precarious circumstances of daily life in a boomtown, compelling individuals to invest in supplements and engage in resource-intensive multi-level marketing endeavours.

The third and final part sheds light on efforts to reclaim plant sovereignty, including a resurgence of backyard farming in response to food insecurity exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Through meticulous research and insightful analysis, Packaged Plants offers a compelling exploration of the intersectionality between health, economics and environment in the Filipino context.

Moral Economic Transitions in the Mongolian Borderlands

Since the early 1990s, Mongolia began its hopeful transition from socialism to a market democracy, becoming increasingly dependent on international mining revenue. Both shifts were promised to herald a new age of economic plenty for all. Now, roughly 30 years on, many of Mongolia’s poor and rural feel that they have been forgotten.
Moral Economic Transitions in the Mongolian Borderlands describes these shifts from the viewpoint of the self-proclaimed ‘excluded’: the rural township of Magtaal on the Chinese border. In the wake of socialism, the population of this resource-rich area found itself without employment and state institutions, yet surrounded by lush nature 30 kilometres from the voracious Chinese market. A two-tiered resource-extractive political-economic system developed. Whilst large-scale, formal, legally sanctioned conglomerates arrived to extract oil and land for international profits, the local residents grew increasingly dependent on the Chinese-funded informal, illegal cross-border wildlife trade. More than a story about rampant capitalist extraction in the resource frontier, this book intimately details the complex inner worlds, moral ambiguities and emergent collective politics constructed by individuals who feel caught in political-economic shifts largely outside of their control.

Offering much needed nuance to commonplace descriptions of Mongolia’s post-socialist transition, this study presents rich ethnographic detail through the eyes and voices of the state’s most geographically marginalized. It is of interest not only to experts of political-economy and post-socialist transition, but also to non-academic readers intrigued by the interplay of value(s) and capitalism.

Developing Theatre in the Global South

Drawing on new research from the ERC project ‘Developing Theatre’, this collection presents innovative institutional approaches to the theatre historiography of the Global South since 1945. Covering perspectives from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Eastern Europe, the chapters explore how US philanthropy, international organisations and pan-African festivals all contributed to the globalisation and institutionalisation of the performing arts in the Global South. During the Cultural Cold War, the Global North intervened in and promoted forms of cultural infrastructure that were deemed adaptable to any environment. This form of technopolitics impacted the construction of national theatres, the introduction of new pedagogical tools and the invention of the workshop as a format. The networks of ‘experts; responsible for this foreground seminal figures, both celebrated (Augusto Boal, Efua Sutherland) but also lesser known (Albert Botbol, Severino Montano, Metin And), who contributed to the worldwide theatrical epistemic community of the postwar years.

Developing Theatre in the Global South investigates the institutional factors that led to the emergence of professional theatre in the postwar period throughout the decolonising world. The book’s institutional and transnational approach enables theatre studies to overcome its still strong national and local focus on plays and productions, and connect it to current discourses in transnational and global history.

Covid’s Chronicities

COVID-19 continues to cause severe morbidity and ongoing mortality. Covid’s Chronicities documents the shifts that have occurred in the face of the pandemic, the state and community responses to it, its continuing toll on health services, economies and communities, and its compounding effects on people’s health, lives and livelihoods.

This volume draws on research from across Europe, North and Latin America, Asia and Africa, providing surprising contrasts and consistencies of experience. As the pandemic has shifted from urgency to chronic unpredictability, everywhere people have struggled to make sense of state actions in infection control, testing strategies and the roll out of vaccines, and to remake social life. The contributing authors illustrate with poignancy how chronic social problems and pandemic effects have worked bidirectionally, compounding multiple inequalities and exacerbating, for some, despair and disassociation. They also demonstrate the ingenuity of communities – of Indigenous ways of knowing and providing care in some settings, and elsewhere, the power of robust local community networks and informal innovations. While this book exposes the pandemic’s exploitation of deep structures of state and societal neglect, and describes the resultant morass, it also illustrates the determination and imaginations of caring communities to withstand Covid’s harms.

An Anthropological Approach to mHealth

This book proposes a radically different anthropological approach to the development and dissemination of mobile health (mHealth), a rapidly growing sector in healthcare. An Anthropological Approach to mHealth is based on ten 16-month ethnographies in settings across Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America that showed how conventional health apps may be irrelevant particularly for older people. Instead, the studies found that many people use their mobile and smartphones for health purposes to a surprising extent. They take the communicative apps they have become comfortable with, such as LINE, WeChat and WhatsApp, and are highly creative in turning them into their own health apps. These are the practices from which this book seeks to learn, in what we call a ‘smart-from-below’ approach.

This body of research also provided many additional insights, including the consequences of googling for health information, the role of the smartphone in specific settings such as an oncology clinic in Chile or tele-psychotherapy in Uganda, and the lessons learnt during Covid-19 around the problems in self-tracking. Overall, the authors show how an anthropological approach situated in the observation of everyday life can be the foundation for an alternative but highly promising perspective on the future of mHealth.