Boundless Worlds
Description
Where lived experience of surroundings is shifting, visceral, and immersive, interpretation of social spaces tends to be static and remote. "Space" and "place" are also often analyzed without grappling much (if at all) with the social, political, and historical roots of spatial practice. This volume embarks upon the novel strategy of focusing on movement as a way of understanding social spaces, which offers a means to get beyond biases inherent in the social science of space. Ethnographic studies of social life in settings as varied as nomadic Mongolia and island Melanesia, as distinct as contemporary Tokyo and war-torn Palestine, challenge Western assumptions about the universality of "space" and allow concrete understanding of how life plays out over different socio-cultural topographies. In a world that is becoming increasingly "bounded" in many ways - despite enormous changes wrought by technological, ideological, and other social developments - Boundless Worlds urges a scholarly turn, away from the purely global, toward the human dimension of social lives lived in conditions of conflict, upheaval, remapping, and improvisation through movement.
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Peter Wynn Kirby is Senior Lecturer in the Anthropology of Japan at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK, and a research fellow at the EHESS, Paris. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. Author of the forthcoming book Troubled Natures: Waste, Environment, Japan, he scrutinizes environments, including cities, with specific reference to Japan and France.
Content
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. Lost in 'Space': An Anthropological Approach to Movement
Peter Wynn Kirby
Chapter 2. Against Space: Place, Movement, Knowledge
Tim Ingold
Chapter 3. Spatiality, Power, and State-Making in the Organization of Territory in Colonial South Asia: The Case of the Anglo-Gorkha Frontier, 1740-1816
Bernardo A. Michael
Chapter 4. Embodying Spaces of Violence: Narratives of Israeli Soldiers in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
Richard Clarke
Chapter 5. This Circle of Kings: Modern Tibetan Visions of World Peace
Martin Mills
Chapter 6. A Weft of Nexus: Changing Notions of Space and Geographical Identity in Vanuatu, Oceania
Carlos Mondragón
Chapter 7. At Home Away from Homes: Navigating the Taiga in Northern Mongolia
Morten Axel Pedersen
Chapter 8. Toxins Without Borders: Interpreting Spaces of Contamination and Suffering
Peter Wynn Kirby
Chapter 9. Movements in Corporate Space: Organizing a Japanese Multinational in France
Mitchell W. Sedgwick
Chapter 10. Making Space in Finland's New Economy
Eeva Berglund
Conclusion: Onward Bound: Ethnographic Perspectives on Space, Movement, and Context
Peter Wynn Kirby
Visual Appendix: Movement Studies
Christian Grou and Tapio Snellman
Notes on Contributors
Index
