Asian Borderlands

Catalog description

How do we study peoples, places, and societies that lie within "borderlands," spaces that either connect or separate larger powers? This course considers that questions through two examples of borderland regions that lie within and between southeast Asia and China. The first is a place that appears on no world map by which scholars now call "Zomia," the densely populated upland regions of mainland Southeast Asia and Southwest China. We will look at different ways studying this "non-place," test the heuristic limits of key analytical categories like nation, state, and citizenship, and explore alternative notions of political and cultural community. The second borderland region is the South China Sea, which others call the Champa Sea, or the Philippine Sea, or the North Natuna Sea. It is a place that few people inhabit, but which has been a crucial source of natural resources and mobility for states and peoples claiming ownership or rights to parts of it. Some fear it may be the flashpoint of a third world war, and how we understand its history may make the difference.