Area Studies at the Crossroads Katja Mielke • Anna-Katharina Hornidge Editors Area Studies at the Crossroads

Knowledge Production after the Mobility Turn Editors Katja Mielke Anna-Katharina Hornidge Bonn International Center for Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Conversion (BICC) Research (ZMT) & University of Bonn, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany Bremen Institute of Sociology Bremen, Germany

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A. Foreword: A Third Wave of Area Studies

Area Studies is an enduring source of fascination. Firstly there are places and intersecting areas to reckon with. With them come languages, literature, nature, cuisine and cultures. And there are also political economies, ecologies, and media. Secondly, there is always something new to think about, for Area Studies cuts across multiple disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Area Studies at the Crossroads bears witness to this cross-disciplinary allure and the enthrallment of working in and through areas. This book also marks a coming of age of what might be conceptual- ized as a third wave in Area Studies. To be sure, the history of different strands of Area Studies varies in their details. Accordingly in the 1960s and 1970s, Southeast Asian Studies was deeply shaped by critical reactions to the Vietnam War and Latin American Studies affected more by radical economic and social ideas than say Slavic Studies or South Asian Studies, which were less caught-up in the tumult. But if we step back and consider Area Studies in a “global” sense (in the old fashioned sense of that word as encompassing the whole of things), the fortunes of its constituents all tend to reflect the changes in the status of Area Studies as a whole. There may have been precursors in classics, philology, and theology, but historically, the first incarnation of Area Studies conscious of itself as a systematic set of sciences coincided with the long nineteenth century’s consolidation of European empires and the stirrings of American and Japanese ones. These were in broad competition with each other and the Romanovs, and most operated at the expense of the declining Mughal, Ottoman, Safavid and Qing empires. Like the British in the century before,

v vi FOREWORD: A THIRD WAVE OF AREA STUDIES

Portugal and Spain lost ground in the Americas, but out of the debris rose a stronger commitment to African empire among the Portuguese and an intense debate about Spain’s role in the world (the intellectual and political currents known in Spain as the generation of 1898), as well as revanchist British imperialism in Asia and Africa. What we might therefore call the first wave of Area Studies saw a proliferation of scholarly centers and learned societies across Europe, usually with close ties to imperial administration. It was served too by emergent modern disciplines, notably anthropology, archaeology, geography, and sciences like tropical medicine and linguistics. The second wave arrived around the mid-twentieth century. Unsurprisingly its leaders, norms, structures and parameters were American. This was the highpoint of Area Studies. It tends now to be seen as a golden age, in terms of funding largesse from rich foundations and bulging state coffers. But equally, it has come to be viewed suspiciously by those critical of its Cold War and universalizing underpinnings. The third wave is conspicuously post-Cold War. As in the chapters that follow here, this reworking of Area Studies displays influences from social and cultural theory, and registers geopolitical and geoeconomic shifts that are yielding a more multipolar world. It is also wrought by other social and political forces (themselves represented as having experienced third waves): democracy, feminism and technology. Each wave, with respect to the one before it, developed in a historical epoch associated with reconfig- urations of space, time and scholarship; the first marked by thenovelty of the telegraph and powered shipping, the second by television and aircraft, and the third by the internet and digitization. The transitions between each wave of Area Studies were marked by contention and a sense of loss of mission or crisis. Hence the end of European empires saw a critique of the gazetteer-style of description that had accompanied exploration and formed the archive of colonial gover- nance. Instead, there was a demand for more analytical Area Studies. The rise of Development Studies and the impacts of modernization theory, as well as a shift from “race” to culture as an explanatory variable inaugu- rated the second wave. Critiques accumulated from the 1970s however, pointing to continuity in the ways that many of Area Studies’ mid-twentieth century categories and assumptions were still rooted in the colonial discourses of its forerunner. As a master’s student in late 1980s England, I recall a slightly older and more traveled (hence in my mind, a wiser) friend knowingly advising me to avoid taking classes from any professor who FOREWORD: A THIRD WAVE OF AREA STUDIES vii called themselves an Orientalist. At graduate school we all read Edward Said’s Orientalism. Then came the end of the Cold War. Areas seemed passé. Globalization was the talk of the town. It has taken a couple of decades for the third wave to come of age. Many of the critiques leveled at its predecessors are still in the air, for Orientalism was back on active service after 9/11 and the legacy of the Cold War division of intellectual labor and areas lingered, although they looked increasingly arbitrary. But fresh approaches have been celebrated, foregrounding connections while challenging Eurocentric assumptions about their geography and histories. The secondary literature on Edward Said is now much larger than his work and postcolonial theory has most likely become more influential than what remains of theories of modernization or dependency. Alternative demarcations of areas are increasingly evident too, as exempli- fied by the debates about the Black Atlantic and the value of concepts like Zomia or oceanspaces. And other areas, which had been partitioned by the Cold War into adjuncts of Soviet or Middle Eastern Studies have seen their legibility remerge in the form of the Persianate and Turkic worlds. In short, this book is very timely. And if, as I believe it will, Area Studies at the Crossroads encourages more scholars to join these ongoing conver- sations or broadens and deepens debate among those who are already part of them, it will have commendably served its purpose.

James D. Sidaway Department of Geography National University of Singapore Singapore Acknowledgements

We would like to express our utmost gratitude to several anonymous reviewers, our colleagues from Crossroads Asia for acting as discussion partners over the past three years and Christoph Blumert for his tremen- dous support in preparing this volume. Finally, we thank the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany for the financial and project support that made this work possible.

ix Contents

Part I Area Studies at the Crossroads 1

Introduction: Knowledge Production, Area Studies and the Mobility Turn 3 Katja Mielke and Anna-Katharina Hornidge

The Neoliberal University and Global Immobilities of Theory 27 Peter A. Jackson

Part II To Be or Not to Be Is Not the Question. Rethinking Area Studies in Its Own Right 45

Doing Area Studies in the Americas and Beyond: Towards Reciprocal Methodologies and the Decolonization of Knowledge 47 Olaf Kaltmeier

Area Studies @ Southeast Asia: Alternative Areas versus Alternatives to Areas 65 Christoph Antweiler

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Between Ignoring and Romanticizing: The Position of Area Studies in Policy Advice 83 Conrad Schetter

Part III Knowledge Production after the Mobility Turn 101

Positionality and the Relational Production of Place in the Context of Student Migration to Gilgit, Pakistan 103 Andreas Benz

Red Lines for Uncivilized Trade? Fixity, Mobility and Positionality on Almaty’s Changing Bazaars 121 Henryk Alff

Margins or Center? Konkani Sufis, India and “Arabastan” 141 Deepra Dandekar

Part IV From Local Realities to Concepts and Theorizing 157

The Role of Area Studies in Theory Production: A Differentiation of Mid-Range Concepts and the Example of Social Order 159 Katja Mielke and Andreas Wilde

The Production of Knowledge in the Field of Development and Area Studies: From Systems of Ignorance to Mid-Range Concepts for Global Ethnography 177 Gudrun Lachenmann

New Area Studies, Translation and Mid-Range Concepts 195 Vincent Houben Contents xiii

Mid-Range Concepts—The Lego Bricks of Meaning-Making: An Example from Khorezm, Uzbekistan 213 Anna-Katharina Hornidge

Part V De-Streamlining Academic Society: Pedagogy and Teaching 231

The Case for Reconceptualizing Southeast Asian Studies 233 Cynthia Chou

This Area Is [NOT] under Quarantine: Rethinking Southeast/Asia through Studies of the Cinema 251 Arnika Fuhrmann

Teaching to Transgress: Crossroads Perspective and Adventures in (?)-Disciplinarity 269 Epifania A. Amoo-Adare

Part VI Anticipating the Future of Area Studies 287

Are Transregional Studies the Future of Area Studies? 289 Matthias Middell

Reflecting the Moving Target of Asia 309 Heike Holbig

Concluding Reflections: The Art of Science Policy for 21st Century Area Studies 327 Anna-Katharina Hornidge and Katja Mielke

Index 345 Notes on Contributors

Henryk Alff was trained as human geographer and as a specialist in Russian literature and the cultures and languages of Central Asia, in Potsdam, Berlin, Almaty and Dushanbe. He has spent extensive periods on field research, particularly in Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan, during his doctoral and postdoctoral proj- ects, using a mix of qualitative (ethnographic) and quantitative methodologies. He was a member of the competence network Crossroads Asia at the Centre for Development Studies (ZELF) of Freie Universität Berlin between 2011 and 2016, and is currently a fellow at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Studies in Leipzig. Alff’s work is firmly grounded in the post-disciplinarity and Area Studies debate, and he has a particular interest in the epistemological value of knowledge production from an actor- and place-based perspective. Furthermore, he is currently investigating the multi-dimensionality of spatial production as an important theo- retical contribution to “rethinking Area Studies.” Epifania A. Amoo-Adare has a PhD in Education from University of California, Los Angeles, and is also a RIBA part II qualified architect with diverse, postdisci- plinary interests in critical pedagogy, critical social theory, critical spatial literacy, Cultural Studies, decoloniality, international educational development, Mobility Studies, “Third World” feminisms, and Urban Studies. She has worked as an educator and researcher for over 18 years, acquiring certain socio-spatial insights into locations within North America, Europe, the South Caucasus, the Middle East, and Asia. Within research, her areas of work include education program evaluation, as well as studies in gender, globalization, social development and urbaniza- tion issues. Her experiences as an educator include managing multi-year education programs in a post-conflict context. Amoo-Adare is specifically interested in how individuals, especially women, critically read and negotiate the politics of space, as

xv xvi Notes on Contributors well as rewrite it (including as fictional and factual texts). This interest resulted in her dissertation on Asante women’s critical spatial literacy within urbanity. Christoph Antweiler is an anthropologist teaching Southeast Asian Studies at Bonn University, Germany. Before entering the fields of anthropology and con- structivist humanities he had studied geosciences and paleontology, both being sciences oriented toward understanding natural history. In his view, anthropology is itself cross-disciplinary and inclined toward a holistic approach. Thus he takes a realist stance implying an explicit search for general models. Institutionally, Antweiler is acting from a Western position within Southeast Asian Studies, even if Germany may be a marginal place within Southeast Asian Studies. Despite current critiques on science, he defends analysis and the search for general insights, empha- sizing that the search for universal knowledge is no Western peculiarity but a general human endeavor. Being culturally insiders or outsiders to an area entails no truth criteria whatsoever. Any attempt at inter-subjective insights implies that methods, concepts and results should be valid across genders as well as across cultures. Andreas Benz is a lecturer and senior researcher in human geography at Augsburg University, Germany. After studying human geography, political sciences and Islamic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and Albert-Ludwigs- Universität Freiburg, he entered the transdisciplinary field of Development Studies for his PhD on opportunities and constraints of education for rural development and livelihoods in Northern Pakistan at the Centre for Development Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, which he completed in 2011. Following an actor-centered qualitative approach, his work is informed by critical theories on development, social inequality and socio-spatial positionality, allowing a critical stance toward modernist visions of development. In recent years he developed a strong interest in the role which social networks, migration, multi-local livelihood strategies and translocal geographies play in facilitating processes of social, cultural and economic change. Since 2010 he has engaged with these topics as a member of the BMBF- funded competence network Crossroads Asia: Conflict, Migration, Development. Cynthia Chou holds the C. Maxwell and Elizabeth M. Stanley Family Chair of Asian Studies and is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iowa. After obtaining her Master’s degree in social anthropology from the National University of Singapore, she continued her education at the University of Cambridge, where she received her PhD in social anthropology in 1992. Three years of post-doctoral research in the International Institute for Asian Studies at Leiden, the Netherlands, launched her academic career. She habilitated at the University of Copenhagen in 2011. Both intellectually and administratively, she has gained a large reservoir of expertise from Asia and Europe in dealing with Asian Studies programs and their particularities—among others she initiated and coordinated a full degree program Notes on Contributors xvii in Southeast Asian Studies in Copenhagen. In early 2016, she joined the University of Iowa to further the teaching and scholarship on Asia. Deepra Dandekar is an Associate Member of the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context,” at University of Heidelberg, Germany. She has conducted research on religion, gender and politics in South Asia, and has published work on women’s reproductive health, childbirth rituals and deities, and more recently on Sufi shrines and narratives of Muslim migration and travel in the Indian Ocean. Her current research and forthcoming publications locate the question of Sufi Muslims within contexts of political minoritization, contextualizing Muslim literature and ethnography within the analytical framework of Hinduism, Indian nationalism and the political impositions of Hindutva. Dandekar is currently trans- lating a nineteenth-century biography written in the vernacular, describing the Christian conversion of an influential missionary from colonial Maharashtra. Arnika Fuhrmann is an interdisciplinary scholar of Southeast Asia, working at the intersections of the region’s aesthetic and political modernities at Cornell University. Her research models a Cultural Studies approach that is simultaneously anchored in thorough linguistic, cultural and historical knowledge of “area.” After completing Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema (2016), an investigation of religion, sexuality, person- hood and notions of collectivity in contemporary Thai cinema, her current research project, “Digital Futures,” examines how the study of new media allows for a perspective on the political public sphere that transcends commonplace distinc- tions between liberalism and illiberalism. This project intersects with her interests in the transformation of cities in contemporary Asia. Having worked in Asia, Europe, and the U.S., Fuhrmann stresses both geographically and theoretically comparative frameworks in order to make Area Studies knowledge relevant to inquiry in the humanities and social sciences more broadly. Heike Holbig is a Professor of Political Science with a focus on Chinese and East Asian Area Studies at Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main, and a senior research fellow at the GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies in Hamburg, Germany. Trained in Chinese Studies, Japanese Studies, European Studies and economics in Erlangen-Nürnberg, Beijing, Heidelberg and Berlin, her academic work is located at the intersections of the humanities and social sciences. Her research interests include political legitimacy, ideological change and shifting state- society relations in contemporary China, as well as comparative authoritarianism and the protection of weak social groups and interests in East Asian societies. In her approach to Area Studies, she strives to bring the involved epistemic communities into a productive dialogue with each other by applying the insights of various cultural turns to the social sciences and by critically reflecting the fashions and trends in Cultural Studies from a social science perspective. xviii Notes on Contributors

Anna-Katharina Hornidge is Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Bremen as well as Head of Department of Social Sciences and of the Working Group Development and Knowledge Sociology at the Leibniz-Center for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT), Bremen. Hornidge was trained in sociology and Southeast Asian Studies in Bonn, Berlin and Singapore. In 2007 she received her doctorate on “Knowledge Society. Vision and Social Construction of Reality in Singapore and Germany” from the Technical University of Berlin. In 2008, Hornidge wid- ened her geographical research focus from Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia to include Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Some of her research on global discourses of knowledge and their local consequences in Southeast and Central Asia formed part of her post-doctoral degree (habilitation), entitled “Discourses of Knowledge—Normative, Factual, Hegemonic,” with a venia legendi in development research from the University of Bonn in 2014. Hornidge took on the scientific coordination of the competence network Crossroads Asia at the Center for Development Research, University of Bonn, from September 2012 until she became Head of Department and eventually left for Bremen in 2015. As scientific coordinator she was responsible for designing the network’s strategy for conceptu- alizing and synthesizing the conducted research, as well as for network representa- tion, financial management and donor communication. Vincent Houben is a Professor of Southeast Asian History and Society at Humboldt University Berlin. He was trained in history and Indonesian languages at Leiden University, the Netherlands, where he received his PhD in 1987 on the basis of a study of indirect rule in Central Java in the mid-nineteenth century. After becoming a Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at Passau University in 1997 and starting to work at Berlin in 2001, he has extended his expertise to other parts of Southeast Asia and moved beyond history as a discipline. Since 2004, when he became Director of the Institute of Asian and African Studies at Humboldt University, he has been actively intervening in debates on Area Studies and has published several articles on the issue. He is a main proponent of the so-called new Area Studies approach, which tries to combine area-based research with transdisciplinary and global perspectives. Peter A. Jackson is Emeritus Professor of Thai History and Cultural Studies at the Australian National University’s College of Asia and the Pacific. Over the past 30 years, he has written extensively on modern Thai cultural history, with special interests in religion, sexuality and critical approaches to Asian histories and cultures. Jackson was editor-in-chief of Asian Studies Review, the flagship journal of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, from 2009 to 2012 and he is a member of the editorial collective of Hong Kong University Press’s Queer Asia monograph series. His most recent books are: The Ambiguous Allure of the West: Traces of the Colonial in Thailand (with Rachel Harrison, 2010), Queer Bangkok: 21st Century Notes on Contributors xix

Markets, Media and Rights (2011), and First Queer Voices from Thailand: Uncle Go’s Advice Columns for Gays, Lesbians and Kathoeys (2016). Olaf Kaltmeier is Chair for Ibero-American History at Bielefeld University. As Director of the Center for InterAmerican Studies (CIAS) and of the research program “The Americas as Space of Entanglement” he is concerned with the rethinking of the Americas beyond traditional Area Studies. With studies in sociology, social anthropology, geography, Cultural Studies, and history he embodies trans- disciplinarity, which is also expressed in the organization of the research group “E pluribus unum?” at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research. Since the mid- 1990s, Kaltmeier has been working with indigenous movements and communities in Latin America, especially in Chile, Bolivia and Ecuador. This research with indigenous leaders and intellectuals has shaped and sharpened his claim for decolonization not only of the political field, but also of knowledge. Gudrun Lachenmann is Emeritus Professor of Sociology of Developing Countries and Gender at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. As a research fellow in the Africa division of the German Development Institute Berlin, she became engaged in interdisciplinary and multiregional work contexts beyond academia, and carried out studies with the United Nations Development Programme and the World Health Organization. Her academic work is based on extensive empirical research, mainly in francophone Africa, and focuses on sociology of knowledge and methodologies interfacing with social anthropology. By cooperating with local researchers and transnational epistemic communities on topics such as local econ- omy, social movements, and decentralization, Lachenmann kept in contact with the development cooperation world. She was active in transnational research cooperation making permanent efforts to bring these two knowledge fields of scientic research and practice together, for example regarding critique of methodologies on evaluation, furthering qualitative approaches and promoting global sociology in a research project on translocal female knowledge spaces, and with a particular focus on women in Islamic countries. Matthias Middell studied history at Leipzig University from 1981 to 1985 and went on to become a research student in the field of French Revolutionary Studies, defending his dissertation on the history of counterrevolution in France, 1788–1792, in July 1989. After research stays in France and Italy, he became managing director of Leipzig’s interdisciplinary Centre for Advanced Studies where he launched a transnational consortium offering a Master’s program in Global Studies in 2005 and a transregional PhD program in 2001. Having completed a habilitation on world history writing in the twentieth century he became Professor of Cultural History in 2007, Director of University of Leipzig’s Global and European Studies Institute in 2008 and of its Centre for Area Studies in 2010. With his col- league Ulf Engel, he launched in 2012 M.A. and PhD programs on Peace and xx Notes on Contributors

Security in Africa at Addis Ababa University. Since 2013 he has been spokesperson of the Graduate School Global and Area Studies in Leipzig, and since 2016 of the Collaborative Research Centre “Respatialization under the Global Condition.” As editor of the journal Comparativ. Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte and in various functions in international organizations he supports the collaboration of Area Studies specialists and global historians. Katja Mielke is a senior researcher at the Bonn International Center for Conversion, a peace and conflict research institute. With interdisciplinary training in social sciences, and East European and Central Asian Studies, she was one of the initiators of the Germany-wide research network Crossroads Asia for rethinking Area Studies. Her academic interest as a member of this research network addressed the nexus between socio-cognitive and spatial (im-)mobili- ties, as well as mobilization dynamics, looking especially at the positionalities of minoritized and marginalized societal groups in urban Pakistan and Afghanistan. In her PhD research on power relations in rural northeast Afghanistan, Mielke developed the approach to establish and investigate flexible research units according to the people’s everyday interactions in a particular social field, thus taking emic spaces of interaction as spaces/areas where empirical research is based (study sites). Conrad Schetter is Professor for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Bonn and Director of the Bonn International Center for Conversion. In his academic career, Schetter has always taken an interdisciplinary approach, which means, in his research understanding, a problem-oriented approach. He studied geography and history with the aim of combining the academic understanding of space and time. Along that line, his PhD on “Ethnicity and Ethnic Conflicts in Afghanistan” aimed to show the significance of spatiality in ethnic constructions. In his further research, Schetter concentrated on the role of the “local” in political processes in Central Asia and South Asia. Particularly by studying the global–local nexus, Schetter became aware of the limitations of classical Area Studies. Together with Katja Mielke, Schetter was the initiator of the research network Crossroads Asia. Due to his longstanding research on countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan, Schetter has been involved in providing policy advice to German minis- tries, international organizations and NGOs. Andreas Wilde graduated in 2005 with a Master’s degree in Iranian Studies, Arab Literature and Islamic Studies from the University of Bamberg. Covering a wide range of different, partly interrelated fields such as history, geography, lan- guage and literature, both classical and modern, of the so-called Persianate world, his academic training makes him a classical “areanist.” His PhD on Transoxanian history and concepts of power, authority and social order supple- ments his profile as a social historian. In addition, he has worked on the history Notes on Contributors xxi of northern Afghanistan and particularly the networks of local landed elites. Wilde is currently an Assistant Professor at the Chair of Iranian Studies in Bamberg and lectures widely on various topics related to Bukhara, Afghanistan and Iran. Regarding the rethinking of Area Studies, he is of the opinion that the debate should also focus on curricula, teaching activities and the training of young academics. List of Figures

Fig. 1 Southeast Asia as an Area Formed by Family Resemblances 75 Fig. 2 Department Structure of Think Tanks in Peace, Conflict and Security (PCS) Research 86 Fig. 3 Map of Pakistan and Gilgit-Baltistan 106 Fig. 4 Location of the Study Area 126 Fig. 5 Status of the Barakholka Bazaar Agglomeration in May/ June 2014 127 Fig. 6 The Konkani Sufi Muslim’s “Crossroads” Relationship with Arabastan 143 Fig. 7 Hermeneutic Circle of New Area Studies 201 Fig. 8 A Sequence of Still Images Is the Culmination of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His past Lives 259 Fig. 9 The Descendants of Disappeared Communists Improvise on the History of Nabua 260 Fig. 10 Disappearance Emerges as the Primary Political Metaphor of Uncle Boonmee 261 Fig. 11 The Trope of Haunting and the Figure of the Monkey-Ghost Add a Primordial Dimension to the History of State Violence from the 1960s to the 1980s 262

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