Frontier Assemblages offers a new framework for thinking about resource frontiers in the contempo... more Frontier Assemblages offers a new framework for thinking about resource frontiers in the contemporary moment. Over the past several decades, there have been radical transformations in marginal spaces throughout Asia. Millions of acres of land have been rapidly converted to sites of large-scale monoculture production, mining, and other forms of resource extraction. At the same time, alternative marginal spaces are also being reframed as new kinds of productive sites—zones slated for massive infrastructural projects, spaces of capital extraction through privatized health care, habitats of ecological reclamation and sustainability, speculative locations for carbon storage, and areas where environmental degradation is itself a source of productive power. See Chapter Abstracts here.
Cons and Eilenberg’s Frontier Assemblages is a collection of richly textured essays tracing the incorporation of remote areas into new territorial formations in the context of Asia. Framed through the notion of assemblage, the collection speaks to the complexity, lability, and nonlinearity of these transformative processes. It will be essential reading for border scholars and specialists of Asia alike. — Franck Billé, University of California, Berkeley.
This fascinating collection sheds new light on the varied dynamics of frontier-making across a diverse and sometimes surprising set of spaces in Asia. It is especially strong on frontier temporalities of anticipation and ruin, and on the productive (not just extractive) work of resource frontiers. Frontier Assemblages is highly stimulating, analytically rich, and not to be missed. — Derek Hall, Wilfrid Laurier University.
This is the introduction and first chapter of my book, out from University of Washington Press in... more This is the introduction and first chapter of my book, out from University of Washington Press in early April.
Ecologies of Capture in Bangladesh's Sundarbans, 2021
What is the relationship between climate change and criminal predation? Bangladesh's Sundarbans, ... more What is the relationship between climate change and criminal predation? Bangladesh's Sundarbans, the world's largest mangrove forest, has, over the past decade, emerged as a climate frontier. It is a space viewed not only as a climate hot spot but also as a zone where control and opportunity emerge out of friction between long-standing political economies, new conservation interventions, and the materialities of the mangrove forest. Concomitantly, those who work in the Sundarbans have reported a dramatic increase in banditry and kidnapping. This article proposes the concept of an "ecology of capture" to chart the articulations between such kidnappings and other attempts to control rents, resources, and territory. Seen through the lens of capture, the Sundarbans highlights how the global rush to secure climate hot spots against degradation and displacement produces new configurations of expropriation and exploitation. [climate change, piracy, capture, conservation, Sundarbans, Bangladesh]
This paper offers an ethnographic engagement with the present and futures of Bangladesh’s southwes... more This paper offers an ethnographic engagement with the present and futures of Bangladesh’s southwest delta. The southwest – which houses the Sundarbans, the world’s largest remaining mangrove forest – is at once profoundly vulnerable to climate change and a site critical to Bangladesh’s economic development. It figures thus both as a space of optimistic industrial growth and planetary threat. I explore what I call delta temporalities – the dissonant and possibly incommensurate imaginations of the future, and more importantly the projects seeking to bring them about, that proliferate in and shape the delta’s fragile ecology in the present. Tracing tensions between conservation initiatives, dredging projects that attempt to keep rivers flowing for shipping and transportation, and new industrial and energy infrastructure projects, this paper reveals how and why the southwest – and deltas more broadly – have become key chokepoints of the Anthropocene, zones where the future itself becomes blocked and the present imperilled.
Migrants gather in “jungles” at the mouth of the Chunnel, awaiting an opportunity to cross from m... more Migrants gather in “jungles” at the mouth of the Chunnel, awaiting an opportunity to cross from mainland Europe into the UK undetected. Somali pirates attack ships queuing up at the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, a critical passage between the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. A flash crash in the stock market triggers a digital “circuit breaker” that instantly shuts off digital trade until cooler heads prevail. Transcontinental internet connectivity is funneled through bundles of undersea cables, making global information flow susceptible to disruption by something as minor as a misplaced ship anchor. These tunnels, corridors, and cables illustrate how some conduits can become chokepoints, sites where malfunction, blockage, or strategic pressure constricts—or “chokes”—the flows and connections upon which contemporary life depends. Limn 10 brings together anthropologists, geographers, photographers, media scholars, sociologists, ecologists, and historians to explore chokepoints. We ask: When and why do these sites of constriction and connection emerge? How and for whom do they work? And what do chokepoints reveal about the the past, present, and future?
This essay interrogates an emergent genre of development projects that seek to instill resilience... more This essay interrogates an emergent genre of development projects that seek to instill resilience in populations likely to be severely impacted by climate change. These new projects venture a dark vision of life in a warming world—one where portable technologies become necessary for managing a future of climate chaos. I propose, following Michel Foucault, understanding these projects as heterodystopias: spaces managed as and in anticipation of a world of dystopian climate crisis that are at once stages for future interventions and present-day spectacles of climate security. My exploration of these projects is situated in the borderlands of Bangladesh, a space increasingly imagined as a ground zero of climate change. The projects discussed frame the borderlands as a site that reflects forward onto a multiplicity of (other) dystopian spaces to come. Their often puzzling architecture reveals a grim imagining of the future: one in which atomized resilient families remain rooted in place, facing climate chaos alone, assisted by development technology. In this way, these projects seek to mitigate against global anxiety about climate displacement by emplacing people—preventing them from migrating across borders increasingly imagined as the front lines of climate security. Yet at the same time, these projects speak a visual language that suggests they are as much about representing success at managing climate crisis to an audience elsewhere as they are to successfully stemming climate migration in a particular place. Heterodystopia provides an analytic for diagnosing the specific visions of time and space embedded in securitized framings of the future. In doing so, however, it also points toward counterimaginations and possibilities for life in the midst of ecological change. I thus conclude by contrasting climate heterodystopias with other projects that Bangladeshi peasants living in the borderlands are carrying out: projects that offer different ways of imagining the environment and life in the borderlands of Bangladesh.
Limn 10 explores chokepoints, sites that constrict—or choke—the flows upon which contemporary lif... more Limn 10 explores chokepoints, sites that constrict—or choke—the flows upon which contemporary life depends. Malfunction brings widespread effects. At once vital yet vulnerable, why do chokepoints work? What happens when they do not?
Cultural Anthropology (Theorizing The Contemporary), 2017
Part of the Speaking Volumes discussion in Cultural Anthropology's Theorizing the Contemporary se... more Part of the Speaking Volumes discussion in Cultural Anthropology's Theorizing the Contemporary series
The conclusion to a special issue of the Journal of Environmental Studies and Society edited by B... more The conclusion to a special issue of the Journal of Environmental Studies and Society edited by Brandn Green, Kristal Jones, and myself on "Understanding Place."
Addressing life in borders and refugee camps requires understanding the way these spaces are rule... more Addressing life in borders and refugee camps requires understanding the way these spaces are ruled, the kinds of problems rule poses for the people who live there, and the abilities of inhabitants to remake their own lives. Recent literature on such spaces has been influenced by Agamben's notion of sovereignty, which reduces these spaces and their residents to abstractions. We propose an alternate framework focused on what we call aleatory sovereignty, or rule by chance. This allows us to see camps and borders not only as the outcomes of humanitarian projects but also of anxieties about governance and rule; to see their inhabitants not only as abject recipients of aid, but also as individuals who make decisions and choices in complex conditions; and to show that while the outcome of projects within such spaces is often unpredictable, the assumptions that undergird such projects create regular cycles of implementation and failure.
SAMAJ: South Asia Multi-Disciplinary Academic Journal, 2015
This essay makes a case for reconceptualizing South Asia by refiguring postcolonial territory. It... more This essay makes a case for reconceptualizing South Asia by refiguring postcolonial territory. It does this by bringing together the broad political history of a series of enclaves along the India-Bangladesh border with an ethnographic discussion of the contemporary political economy of Dahagram, the largest of these enclaves. The essay argues for a need to bring nationalist framings of space and more textured explorations of everyday forms of territory- making into a single analytic frame. Doing so provides a way to understand and think beyond the territorial impasses posed by nationalist framings of space—the inability to disentangle lived realities from affectively charged conceptualizations of the nation and its borders. The essay, instead, reframes territory as the relationality between broad spatial imaginaries and lived realities at the margins. Such a view allows for a conceptualization of the region that builds upwards from quotidian negotiations to challenge nationalist and communal geographies.
This essay questions the possibilities of food sovereignty for producing a radical egalitarian po... more This essay questions the possibilities of food sovereignty for producing a radical egalitarian politics. Specifically, it explores the class-differentiated implications of food sovereignty in a zone of ecological crisis – Bangladesh’s coastal Khulna district. Much land in this deltaic zone that had previously been employed for various forms of peasant production has been transformed by the introduction of brackish-water shrimp aquaculture. This has, in turn, caused massive depeasantization and ecological crisis throughout the region. Through an examination of two markedly different polders (embanked islands) – one which has been overrun by shrimp production and one that has resisted it – we ask how coastal communities and their members have variously negotiated their rapidly changing ecologies and food systems based on their relative class position and access to land. We highlight the multiple meanings that peasants from different classes ascribe not just to shrimp, but also to broader questions of adaptation, community and life in uncertain terrains. We show that while food sovereignty in non-shrimp areas has averted the depeasantization affecting shrimp areas, it has not necessarily led to greater equality in agrarian class relations. To achieve such ends, we suggest that a broader conception of agrarian sovereignty provides a critical and necessary corollary to self-determination in agricultural production.
This paper explores the politics of dependency in researcher–assistant relationships. By doing so... more This paper explores the politics of dependency in researcher–assistant relationships. By doing so, it reflects on how these dynamics are always already predicated on broad personal histories and a range of emergent dependencies. Taking the politics of depend- ency in fieldwork seriously charts a path towards more fully understanding the quixotic production of ethnographic knowledge. Specifically, this paper reflects on the author’s relationship with Saiful (a pseudonym), who worked with the author during research at the India-Bangladesh border. Saiful was addicted to heroin. This addiction both com- promised and enabled a productive research engagement in an unstable place. But Saiful’s heroin use was only one of a series of dependencies that structured our rela- tionship and this research project. Using the lens of dependency to unpack the con- struction of the field and of ethnographic knowledge more broadly, this paper reflects on a range of questions, including access, anxiety, insider-outsider politics, and entanglement.
Research assistants have long been central to ethnographic practice, yet the conven- tions of aca... more Research assistants have long been central to ethnographic practice, yet the conven- tions of academic labor have left their roles under-stated and obscure. The implications, we opine, are both theoretical and practical. Writing research assistants back in to our collective considerations of the method does more than simply fill a lacuna in the ‘reflexive turn’. It opens windows onto a radically transformed field of ethnographic practice. Today, the ‘field’ appears neither where nor what it used to be. Ethnographers are exploring ever-new terrains—many of them emergent, unstable, and dangerous. These endeavors, in turn, are prompting new kinds of research relationships. Against this backdrop, the time is now for a critical reappraisal of the players of contemporary ethnography. Venturing a new calculus of reflexive thinking, this Introduction engages the research assistant to revisit core ethnographic concerns—among them: research in dangerous places; the ethics of ethnographic labor; the shifting differentials of ‘academic vs. native’ expertise; and the socially produced nature of the ‘field’ itself. As the articles and Introduction of this special issue show, research assistants unsettle conventional understandings of what ethnography is and can be. Readmitted to the conversation, they provide a unique look into ethnography’s current state of play—and glimpses of the method’s future possibilities.
This introduction to a special issue exploring "Geographies at the Margins" of South Asia offers ... more This introduction to a special issue exploring "Geographies at the Margins" of South Asia offers a dis- cussion that links the literature on borders and margins to the regional complexities and geographies of South Asia. Specifically, we argue for linking of these literatures to develop an optic for thinking about external and internal borders that is at once relational and comparative. South Asia, as has often been observed, is a region marked with multiple borders and margins. It is also a space where the articulation between such spaces is at once suggestive and crucial for understanding the political geography of South Asia and the ways that borders and margins are similarly implicated in working out the postcolonial politics of nation, state, and space.
This paper explores the politics of community making at the IndiaeBangladesh border by examining ... more This paper explores the politics of community making at the IndiaeBangladesh border by examining the public and private narratives of history and belonging in a Bangladeshi enclaveda sovereign piece of Bangladesh completely territorially surrounded by India. Drawing on framings of political society, this paper argues that understanding populations at the margins of South Asia and beyond requires attention to two processes: first, to the ways that para-legal activities are part and parcel of daily life; and second, to the strategies through which these groups construct themselves as moral communities deserving of inclusion within the state. Border communities often articulate narratives of dispossession, exception- ality, and marginalization to researchers and other visitorsdnarratives that are often unproblematically reproduced in academic treatments of the border. However, such articulations mask both the compli- cated histories and quotidian realities of border life. This paper views these articulations as political projects in and of themselves. By reading the more hidden histories of life in this border enclave, this article reconstructs the notion of borders as experienced by enclave residents themselves. It shows the ways that the politics of the IndiaeBangladesh border are constitutive of (and constituted by) a range of fractures and internal boundaries within the enclave. These boundaries are as central to forging communitydto articulating who belongs and whydas are more public narratives that frame enclave residents as victims of confused territorial configurations.
Frontier Assemblages offers a new framework for thinking about resource frontiers in the contempo... more Frontier Assemblages offers a new framework for thinking about resource frontiers in the contemporary moment. Over the past several decades, there have been radical transformations in marginal spaces throughout Asia. Millions of acres of land have been rapidly converted to sites of large-scale monoculture production, mining, and other forms of resource extraction. At the same time, alternative marginal spaces are also being reframed as new kinds of productive sites—zones slated for massive infrastructural projects, spaces of capital extraction through privatized health care, habitats of ecological reclamation and sustainability, speculative locations for carbon storage, and areas where environmental degradation is itself a source of productive power. See Chapter Abstracts here.
Cons and Eilenberg’s Frontier Assemblages is a collection of richly textured essays tracing the incorporation of remote areas into new territorial formations in the context of Asia. Framed through the notion of assemblage, the collection speaks to the complexity, lability, and nonlinearity of these transformative processes. It will be essential reading for border scholars and specialists of Asia alike. — Franck Billé, University of California, Berkeley.
This fascinating collection sheds new light on the varied dynamics of frontier-making across a diverse and sometimes surprising set of spaces in Asia. It is especially strong on frontier temporalities of anticipation and ruin, and on the productive (not just extractive) work of resource frontiers. Frontier Assemblages is highly stimulating, analytically rich, and not to be missed. — Derek Hall, Wilfrid Laurier University.
This is the introduction and first chapter of my book, out from University of Washington Press in... more This is the introduction and first chapter of my book, out from University of Washington Press in early April.
Ecologies of Capture in Bangladesh's Sundarbans, 2021
What is the relationship between climate change and criminal predation? Bangladesh's Sundarbans, ... more What is the relationship between climate change and criminal predation? Bangladesh's Sundarbans, the world's largest mangrove forest, has, over the past decade, emerged as a climate frontier. It is a space viewed not only as a climate hot spot but also as a zone where control and opportunity emerge out of friction between long-standing political economies, new conservation interventions, and the materialities of the mangrove forest. Concomitantly, those who work in the Sundarbans have reported a dramatic increase in banditry and kidnapping. This article proposes the concept of an "ecology of capture" to chart the articulations between such kidnappings and other attempts to control rents, resources, and territory. Seen through the lens of capture, the Sundarbans highlights how the global rush to secure climate hot spots against degradation and displacement produces new configurations of expropriation and exploitation. [climate change, piracy, capture, conservation, Sundarbans, Bangladesh]
This paper offers an ethnographic engagement with the present and futures of Bangladesh’s southwes... more This paper offers an ethnographic engagement with the present and futures of Bangladesh’s southwest delta. The southwest – which houses the Sundarbans, the world’s largest remaining mangrove forest – is at once profoundly vulnerable to climate change and a site critical to Bangladesh’s economic development. It figures thus both as a space of optimistic industrial growth and planetary threat. I explore what I call delta temporalities – the dissonant and possibly incommensurate imaginations of the future, and more importantly the projects seeking to bring them about, that proliferate in and shape the delta’s fragile ecology in the present. Tracing tensions between conservation initiatives, dredging projects that attempt to keep rivers flowing for shipping and transportation, and new industrial and energy infrastructure projects, this paper reveals how and why the southwest – and deltas more broadly – have become key chokepoints of the Anthropocene, zones where the future itself becomes blocked and the present imperilled.
Migrants gather in “jungles” at the mouth of the Chunnel, awaiting an opportunity to cross from m... more Migrants gather in “jungles” at the mouth of the Chunnel, awaiting an opportunity to cross from mainland Europe into the UK undetected. Somali pirates attack ships queuing up at the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, a critical passage between the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. A flash crash in the stock market triggers a digital “circuit breaker” that instantly shuts off digital trade until cooler heads prevail. Transcontinental internet connectivity is funneled through bundles of undersea cables, making global information flow susceptible to disruption by something as minor as a misplaced ship anchor. These tunnels, corridors, and cables illustrate how some conduits can become chokepoints, sites where malfunction, blockage, or strategic pressure constricts—or “chokes”—the flows and connections upon which contemporary life depends. Limn 10 brings together anthropologists, geographers, photographers, media scholars, sociologists, ecologists, and historians to explore chokepoints. We ask: When and why do these sites of constriction and connection emerge? How and for whom do they work? And what do chokepoints reveal about the the past, present, and future?
This essay interrogates an emergent genre of development projects that seek to instill resilience... more This essay interrogates an emergent genre of development projects that seek to instill resilience in populations likely to be severely impacted by climate change. These new projects venture a dark vision of life in a warming world—one where portable technologies become necessary for managing a future of climate chaos. I propose, following Michel Foucault, understanding these projects as heterodystopias: spaces managed as and in anticipation of a world of dystopian climate crisis that are at once stages for future interventions and present-day spectacles of climate security. My exploration of these projects is situated in the borderlands of Bangladesh, a space increasingly imagined as a ground zero of climate change. The projects discussed frame the borderlands as a site that reflects forward onto a multiplicity of (other) dystopian spaces to come. Their often puzzling architecture reveals a grim imagining of the future: one in which atomized resilient families remain rooted in place, facing climate chaos alone, assisted by development technology. In this way, these projects seek to mitigate against global anxiety about climate displacement by emplacing people—preventing them from migrating across borders increasingly imagined as the front lines of climate security. Yet at the same time, these projects speak a visual language that suggests they are as much about representing success at managing climate crisis to an audience elsewhere as they are to successfully stemming climate migration in a particular place. Heterodystopia provides an analytic for diagnosing the specific visions of time and space embedded in securitized framings of the future. In doing so, however, it also points toward counterimaginations and possibilities for life in the midst of ecological change. I thus conclude by contrasting climate heterodystopias with other projects that Bangladeshi peasants living in the borderlands are carrying out: projects that offer different ways of imagining the environment and life in the borderlands of Bangladesh.
Limn 10 explores chokepoints, sites that constrict—or choke—the flows upon which contemporary lif... more Limn 10 explores chokepoints, sites that constrict—or choke—the flows upon which contemporary life depends. Malfunction brings widespread effects. At once vital yet vulnerable, why do chokepoints work? What happens when they do not?
Cultural Anthropology (Theorizing The Contemporary), 2017
Part of the Speaking Volumes discussion in Cultural Anthropology's Theorizing the Contemporary se... more Part of the Speaking Volumes discussion in Cultural Anthropology's Theorizing the Contemporary series
The conclusion to a special issue of the Journal of Environmental Studies and Society edited by B... more The conclusion to a special issue of the Journal of Environmental Studies and Society edited by Brandn Green, Kristal Jones, and myself on "Understanding Place."
Addressing life in borders and refugee camps requires understanding the way these spaces are rule... more Addressing life in borders and refugee camps requires understanding the way these spaces are ruled, the kinds of problems rule poses for the people who live there, and the abilities of inhabitants to remake their own lives. Recent literature on such spaces has been influenced by Agamben's notion of sovereignty, which reduces these spaces and their residents to abstractions. We propose an alternate framework focused on what we call aleatory sovereignty, or rule by chance. This allows us to see camps and borders not only as the outcomes of humanitarian projects but also of anxieties about governance and rule; to see their inhabitants not only as abject recipients of aid, but also as individuals who make decisions and choices in complex conditions; and to show that while the outcome of projects within such spaces is often unpredictable, the assumptions that undergird such projects create regular cycles of implementation and failure.
SAMAJ: South Asia Multi-Disciplinary Academic Journal, 2015
This essay makes a case for reconceptualizing South Asia by refiguring postcolonial territory. It... more This essay makes a case for reconceptualizing South Asia by refiguring postcolonial territory. It does this by bringing together the broad political history of a series of enclaves along the India-Bangladesh border with an ethnographic discussion of the contemporary political economy of Dahagram, the largest of these enclaves. The essay argues for a need to bring nationalist framings of space and more textured explorations of everyday forms of territory- making into a single analytic frame. Doing so provides a way to understand and think beyond the territorial impasses posed by nationalist framings of space—the inability to disentangle lived realities from affectively charged conceptualizations of the nation and its borders. The essay, instead, reframes territory as the relationality between broad spatial imaginaries and lived realities at the margins. Such a view allows for a conceptualization of the region that builds upwards from quotidian negotiations to challenge nationalist and communal geographies.
This essay questions the possibilities of food sovereignty for producing a radical egalitarian po... more This essay questions the possibilities of food sovereignty for producing a radical egalitarian politics. Specifically, it explores the class-differentiated implications of food sovereignty in a zone of ecological crisis – Bangladesh’s coastal Khulna district. Much land in this deltaic zone that had previously been employed for various forms of peasant production has been transformed by the introduction of brackish-water shrimp aquaculture. This has, in turn, caused massive depeasantization and ecological crisis throughout the region. Through an examination of two markedly different polders (embanked islands) – one which has been overrun by shrimp production and one that has resisted it – we ask how coastal communities and their members have variously negotiated their rapidly changing ecologies and food systems based on their relative class position and access to land. We highlight the multiple meanings that peasants from different classes ascribe not just to shrimp, but also to broader questions of adaptation, community and life in uncertain terrains. We show that while food sovereignty in non-shrimp areas has averted the depeasantization affecting shrimp areas, it has not necessarily led to greater equality in agrarian class relations. To achieve such ends, we suggest that a broader conception of agrarian sovereignty provides a critical and necessary corollary to self-determination in agricultural production.
This paper explores the politics of dependency in researcher–assistant relationships. By doing so... more This paper explores the politics of dependency in researcher–assistant relationships. By doing so, it reflects on how these dynamics are always already predicated on broad personal histories and a range of emergent dependencies. Taking the politics of depend- ency in fieldwork seriously charts a path towards more fully understanding the quixotic production of ethnographic knowledge. Specifically, this paper reflects on the author’s relationship with Saiful (a pseudonym), who worked with the author during research at the India-Bangladesh border. Saiful was addicted to heroin. This addiction both com- promised and enabled a productive research engagement in an unstable place. But Saiful’s heroin use was only one of a series of dependencies that structured our rela- tionship and this research project. Using the lens of dependency to unpack the con- struction of the field and of ethnographic knowledge more broadly, this paper reflects on a range of questions, including access, anxiety, insider-outsider politics, and entanglement.
Research assistants have long been central to ethnographic practice, yet the conven- tions of aca... more Research assistants have long been central to ethnographic practice, yet the conven- tions of academic labor have left their roles under-stated and obscure. The implications, we opine, are both theoretical and practical. Writing research assistants back in to our collective considerations of the method does more than simply fill a lacuna in the ‘reflexive turn’. It opens windows onto a radically transformed field of ethnographic practice. Today, the ‘field’ appears neither where nor what it used to be. Ethnographers are exploring ever-new terrains—many of them emergent, unstable, and dangerous. These endeavors, in turn, are prompting new kinds of research relationships. Against this backdrop, the time is now for a critical reappraisal of the players of contemporary ethnography. Venturing a new calculus of reflexive thinking, this Introduction engages the research assistant to revisit core ethnographic concerns—among them: research in dangerous places; the ethics of ethnographic labor; the shifting differentials of ‘academic vs. native’ expertise; and the socially produced nature of the ‘field’ itself. As the articles and Introduction of this special issue show, research assistants unsettle conventional understandings of what ethnography is and can be. Readmitted to the conversation, they provide a unique look into ethnography’s current state of play—and glimpses of the method’s future possibilities.
This introduction to a special issue exploring "Geographies at the Margins" of South Asia offers ... more This introduction to a special issue exploring "Geographies at the Margins" of South Asia offers a dis- cussion that links the literature on borders and margins to the regional complexities and geographies of South Asia. Specifically, we argue for linking of these literatures to develop an optic for thinking about external and internal borders that is at once relational and comparative. South Asia, as has often been observed, is a region marked with multiple borders and margins. It is also a space where the articulation between such spaces is at once suggestive and crucial for understanding the political geography of South Asia and the ways that borders and margins are similarly implicated in working out the postcolonial politics of nation, state, and space.
This paper explores the politics of community making at the IndiaeBangladesh border by examining ... more This paper explores the politics of community making at the IndiaeBangladesh border by examining the public and private narratives of history and belonging in a Bangladeshi enclaveda sovereign piece of Bangladesh completely territorially surrounded by India. Drawing on framings of political society, this paper argues that understanding populations at the margins of South Asia and beyond requires attention to two processes: first, to the ways that para-legal activities are part and parcel of daily life; and second, to the strategies through which these groups construct themselves as moral communities deserving of inclusion within the state. Border communities often articulate narratives of dispossession, exception- ality, and marginalization to researchers and other visitorsdnarratives that are often unproblematically reproduced in academic treatments of the border. However, such articulations mask both the compli- cated histories and quotidian realities of border life. This paper views these articulations as political projects in and of themselves. By reading the more hidden histories of life in this border enclave, this article reconstructs the notion of borders as experienced by enclave residents themselves. It shows the ways that the politics of the IndiaeBangladesh border are constitutive of (and constituted by) a range of fractures and internal boundaries within the enclave. These boundaries are as central to forging communitydto articulating who belongs and whydas are more public narratives that frame enclave residents as victims of confused territorial configurations.
This paper offers a history of belonging in Dahagram, a sovereign Bangladeshi enclave situated wi... more This paper offers a history of belonging in Dahagram, a sovereign Bangladeshi enclave situated within India but close to the India-Bangladesh border. I recount Dahagram’s post-Partition history, focusing particularly on the long and localized struggles between 1974 and 1992 to open the Tin Bigha Corridor, a land bridge through Indian territory that links Dahagram to the Bangladeshi mainland. Drawing on the memories and experiences of residents, I examine Dahagram’s past(s) as narratives of postcolonial belonging: to fragmented conceptions of state and nation, to surrounding areas, and to the enclave itself. I focus on the overlapping tensions between national and local struggles to ‘claim’ Dahagram as Bangladeshi or Indian territory, and uneven processes of political inclusion within and around the enclaves and within the Bangladeshi State. I use ‘belonging’ as a double-entendre, as these tensions are all intimately linked to possession of land/territory, goods, and access to markets. The notion of belonging(s) helps to illuminate Dahagram’s historical and contemporary cultural politics and political-economy, as well as its articulations with broader events in postcolonial South Asia. Yet, belonging is also an analytic for understanding how history is remembered and articulated as a claim to territory, rights, and membership in unstable places.
In Voluminous States: Sovereignty, Materiality, and the Territorial Imagination, edited by Billé ... more In Voluminous States: Sovereignty, Materiality, and the Territorial Imagination, edited by Billé Franck. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2020.
Sensitive Space by Jason Cons offers a distinctive and imaginative account of the peculiar and of... more Sensitive Space by Jason Cons offers a distinctive and imaginative account of the peculiar and often mystified enclaves or "fragmented territories" on the border between India and Bangladesh. Focusing solely on Dahagram, the largest Bangladeshi enclave in the archipelago surrounded by Indian territory, Cons offers the notion of "sensitive space" to
In recent years, South Asia has been a generative location for rethinking the anthropology of the... more In recent years, South Asia has been a generative location for rethinking the anthropology of the state. Whether in Akhil Gupta’s account of structural violence, Matthew Hull’s exploration of the social and political life of the file, or Laura Bear’s engagement with austerity—to provide but a few examples—the state and especially its bureaucracies have proved fruitful sites for unsettling easy understandings of the relationships between rules and practices. Nayanika Mathur’s magnificent Paper Tiger stands out in this emerging field. It takes the ethnography of the state in new and dynamic directions via a grounded and beautifully written study of the social life of law, bureaucracy, and development in a village far away from the center of the state.
Uploads
Books by Jason Cons
Cons and Eilenberg’s Frontier Assemblages is a collection of richly textured essays tracing the incorporation of remote areas into new territorial formations in the context of Asia. Framed through the notion of assemblage, the collection speaks to the complexity, lability, and nonlinearity of these transformative processes. It will be essential reading for border scholars and specialists of Asia alike. — Franck Billé, University of California, Berkeley.
This fascinating collection sheds new light on the varied dynamics of frontier-making across a diverse and sometimes surprising set of spaces in Asia. It is especially strong on frontier temporalities of anticipation and ruin, and on the productive (not just extractive) work of resource frontiers. Frontier Assemblages is highly stimulating, analytically rich, and not to be missed. — Derek Hall, Wilfrid Laurier University.
Papers by Jason Cons
Cons and Eilenberg’s Frontier Assemblages is a collection of richly textured essays tracing the incorporation of remote areas into new territorial formations in the context of Asia. Framed through the notion of assemblage, the collection speaks to the complexity, lability, and nonlinearity of these transformative processes. It will be essential reading for border scholars and specialists of Asia alike. — Franck Billé, University of California, Berkeley.
This fascinating collection sheds new light on the varied dynamics of frontier-making across a diverse and sometimes surprising set of spaces in Asia. It is especially strong on frontier temporalities of anticipation and ruin, and on the productive (not just extractive) work of resource frontiers. Frontier Assemblages is highly stimulating, analytically rich, and not to be missed. — Derek Hall, Wilfrid Laurier University.