Territorial Governance and Intangible Spaces: Anthropological and Historical Approaches toward Nation-States in Asia

Panel Convenor(s)

• HS

  Hisashi Shimojo

  ICAS Book Prize 2023 - Winner Japanese Language Edition
  Kobe University, Japan

Panel Chair(s)

• HS

  Hisashi Shimojo

  ICAS Book Prize 2023 - Winner Japanese Language Edition
  Kobe University, Japan

Presenter(s)

• HS

  Hisashi Shimojo

  ICAS Book Prize 2023 - Winner Japanese Language Edition
  Kobe University, Japan
• AK

  Aya Kawai

  Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan
• YO

  Yuka Oishi

  Kobe University, Japan
• HO

  Hideyuki Okano

  Kindai University, Japan
• NO

  Nara Oda

  Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan

States have sought to sedentarize people, to expand grain cultivation requiring irrigation, to manage the environment, resources, and population, or to secure food and collect taxes. Given such a territorial governance, power over the periphery diminished with distance from the political center in pre-modern states. However, since the emergence of modern national borders, nation-states, assuming a territorial space with a uniform distribution of power, have attempted to infiltrate formal order everywhere within the state territory by imagining that there are settled national citizens in a state. 

　　If so, when territorial state governance is weakened by war or the dismantling of the administrative system, in what places and through what social relations do people recreate vernacular orders in everyday life? This panel introduces the concept of “intangible spaces,” in which the state has been reluctant to intervene, and shows that in these spaces there are still  rooms for people to recreate their own vernacular orders. 

 　 Intangible spaces may partially overlap with, but be subtly different from, the margins of states or “Zomias” discussed by anthropologists. Intangible spaces may appear in borderlands and ecological settings such as watery areas, or in homes, religious institutions, and places of informal economic transaction where moralities are formed. This panel considers how people collude with each other, without depending on the state, and weave collaborative relations, even in temporary and fluctuating forms. There are 5 presenters on this panel: 

   Hideyuki Okano examines the “crack of sovereignty” constructed in one of the border towns with Myanmar. He argues that illegal economic immigrants and unenrolled political refugees coming from Myanmar are governed through informal governance which is kept “intentionally informal.” 

  Aya Kawai discusses how the Batek, a hunter-gatherer group of the Orang Asli of Malaysia, has responded to environmental and social changes such as sedentarization policies and plantation development, and how they continue to live in their own ways.

   Yuka Oishi will discuss how highly mobile reindeer herders living in the western Siberian Forest interact with  state governance, examining their practices of production and subsistence in collectivization and de-collectivization.

　Nara Oda explores how Vietnamese traditional medicine was persistently practiced despite the state’s intervention that controls and limits practitioners’ space for traditional medicine in the Republic of Vietnam.  

  Hisashi Shimojo demonstrates how intangible spaces have emerged between Vietnam and Cambodia by focusing on black market, temples to avoid conscription, undocumented migration routes, and the “Water Frontier.”  

Presentations:

• 14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)

  “Intangible Spaces” between Vietnam and Cambodia: Focusing on Multi-Ethnic Hybrid Societies in the River Basins
  

  Presenter: Hisashi Shimojo – Kobe University
• 14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)

  Foraging People in a Nation-State and Global Economy: The Orang Asli Batek in Malaysia
  

  Presenter: Aya Kawai – Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
• 14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)

  Reindeer Herding in Siberia and the State
  

  Presenter: Yuka Oishi – Kobe University
• 14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)

  Utilizing Intentional 'Crack of Sovereignty': Economic Migrants and Political Refugees from Myanmar in a Border Town
  

  Presenter: Hideyuki Okano – Kindai University
• 14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)

  Ungovernable Practices: State-Control and Persistence of Traditional Medicine in the Republic Vietnam
  

  Presenter: Nara Oda – Tokyo University of Foreign Studies