Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

‘Area studies' use a geographical metaphor to visualise and naturalise particular social spaces as well as a particular scale of analysis. They produce specific geographies of knowing but also create geographies of ignorance. Taking Southeast Asia as an example, in this paper I explore how areas are imagined and how area knowledge is structured to construct area ‘heartlands' as well as area ‘borderlands‘. This is illustrated by considering a large region of Asia (here named Zomia) that did not make it as a world area in the area dispensation after World War 2 because it lacked strong centres of state formation, was politically ambiguous, and did not command sufficient scholarly clout. As Zomia was quartered and rendered peripheral by the emergence of strong communities of area specialists of East, Southeast, South, and Central Asia, the production of knowledge about it slowed down. I suggest that we need to examine more closely the academic politics of scale that create and sustain area studies, at a time when the spatialisation of social theory enters a new, uncharted terrain. The heuristic impulse behind imagining areas, and the high-quality, contextualised knowledge that area studies produce, may be harnessed to imagine other spatial configurations, such as ‘crosscutting’ areas, the worldwide honeycomb of borderlands, or the process geographies of transnational flows. Scholars of all conventional areas can be involved in this project to ‘jump scale’ and to develop new concepts of regional space.

In casting Asia as Europe's ‘Other’, it is often assumed that European spatial imaginaries are unproblematically assimilated by the peoples of Asia themselves. In this paper I challenge this assumption by charting the changing characterization of India, from being virtually synonymous with Asia for centuries to being virtually excluded from the reigning conceptions of Asia. I provide a thumbnail sketch of the spatial imaginaries of some of the peoples inhabiting the cartographic quadrant labeled ‘Asia‘. Against this background, I examine how these imaginaries were subverted by the incorporation of Asia within the capitalist world system. I then chart the impact of modernization theories on the newly independent states of the region. I argue that as several major centers of capital accumulation emerged in Asia, and capitalism ceased to be a Euro-American narrative, a new conception of Asia emerged in the 1980s. If India's lack of industrial development marginalized it from these imaginaries, it is suggested that the meltdown of the Asian ‘miracles' has once again destabilized hitherto-dominant conceptions of Asia.

In this paper I deal with a recent effort, conducted jointly by corporate and voluntary bodies, to create a themed cultural environment in Chennai (formerly Madras), the capital city of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. This project, not yet completed, fuses craft center with architectural reconstruction, and is the work of upper-caste, globally connected elites. The site, Dakshina Chitra, envisions southern Indian culture and history in ways that are tied to consumerism and to elite perceptions of regional and national heritage. This effort departs from and poses a critique of the versions of culture, history, and identity that have been inscribed by the state in urban public space during the second half of the 20th century—the statues, monuments, and memorials that celebrate Tamil ethnicity as promulgated in the Dravidianist sociopolitical movement. This movement, which originated in the late 19th century, provided a platform for anticolonial and subaltern social movements. It continues in the hands of the political parties who have controlled, at different times, the government of Tamil Nadu since 1967. The competing discourses on heritage posed by these different projects are indicative of political, economic, and cultural transformations associated with liberalization that are now reconfiguring the relations between state and society in southern India. The constructions of locality and history that became visible during the anticolonial struggle of the first half of the 20th century are being challenged by alternative formulations as heritage becomes a marketable good and consumption becomes a vehicle of political participation. With this case I consider the ways that themed urban environments serve not only as indices of the changing political economy, but also as markers of changes in the cultural mediation of political subjectivity.

Representations of motherhood are central to the process of constituting a market for milk powder in Sri Lanka. Mothers are the primary providers of food and nutrition for their families and communities and have a profound influence on food production and consumption. Consequently, a focus on mothers shapes the efforts of both the New Zealand Dairy Board, the main supplier of milk powder to Sri Lanka, and the Movement of Mothers to Combat Malnutrition, a nongovernmental organisation that promotes home gardening to combat high levels of malnutrition, and whose educational programmes discourage purchasing of milk powder in order to resist multinational food production. In drawing on specific representations of motherhood, each organisation articulates the needs of mothers in a specific form. In this paper we show how the market for milk powder in Sri Lanka emerges through and against these processes.

In this paper I draw upon a realist conceptualization of power to inform the analysis of ethnographic data on access to irrigation water and vulnerability to flood hazard in Pakistan. I undertake an integrated analysis of the role of different types of power in influencing differential vulnerability to flood hazard and access to irrigation water in four local-level villages in central Pakistan. Three modes of power are identified: the feudal mode, the bourgeoisie mode, and the communal mode. Each of the modes relies on force, socialization, and control over resources, respectively, to ensure compliance. The villages which are dominated by large landowners tend to have the feudal mode of power as the predominant power structure, whereas the villages with relatively equal property ownership tend to have the communal mode as the dominant power structure. The analyses of power suggest that the participatory reforms in the water sector of Pakistan proposed by the World Bank are unlikely to lead to gains in either equity or efficiency as long as issues of differential power remain unaddressed.

In this paper we aspire to develop a situated method in order to interrogate the spaces and subjects of the globalising economy. In our brief review of the social science literatures on economic globalisation, we identify a promising intellectual convergence around the theme of imaginaries. We develop an argument that global imaginaries involve both discourses and practices that are, in turn, constitutive of new spaces and subjects. We identify the particular significance of calculative practices such as benchmarking and allied techniques in constituting global imaginaries in the New Zealand context. We then demonstrate how our method might inform a case study of the globalising retail-banking sector by revealing multiple spaces and subjects. In analysing the emergence of new economic spaces and subjectivities in this way, our aim is to give situated content to the concept of global imaginaries and to make visible the constitutive power of governing practices.