Content area
Full text
Inter-Asia
While globalization has played a salutary role in stimulating scholarship beyond local and national units of space, kicking anthropologists out of villages and historians out of nation-states, its ability to do so has reached certain limits.1
To go beyond those limits, I propose that the study of Asia, thought of as an Inter-Asian space, and smaller than the whole globe, can provide tractable concepts for a new round of research to shed light on the social shapes of societies that are mobile, spatially expansive, and interactive with one other. In this sense, the notion that area studies receive theories and concepts but cannot generate them need not be true.
To promote an adjective to a noun, Inter-Asia, thought of not as a unitary continent but an old world crisscrossed by interactions between parts that have known and recognized one another for centuries, provides an unmatched depth and breadth of mobile experience and material.2Such material can be recognized and used as data if seen through concepts designed to bring out the shapes of mobile societies, and to analyze the dynamics that form and transform them.
Such concepts can be crystalized and shed light on Inter-Asian material through a renewed collaboration between history and anthropology, each bringing to the joint effort their many ways of handling time and space. More diverse notions of time are needed to break the lockstep assumption, common under the sway of globalization, that spatial connectivity increases as time passes. Crudely put, the primitive is local, the modern global. Such an assumption restricts our understanding of mobile societies to those close to the highly marketized societies, techno-logistics, and cultural forms led by the modern West. While many Asian societies today have indeed been shaped by the modern West and reflect it, especially urban ones, there were and are many mobile societies that sustain relations across Asia beyond and before globalization's reach. Neither in art nor in literature, in religion nor in techniques, can Asia be said to be primitive. In this sense, Asia is a good place for starting to break the "local = past/global = present" lockstep of space and time assumed by globalization. This Asia, where the past is neither primitive nor local, is the world of...