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Crossroads Studies and the State: Anthropological Perspectives

Acknowledgments This paper grew out of reflections after six years of collaboration within the research network "Crossroads Asia". I am heavily indebted to the German Ministry of Education and Research for very generously funding the network, but also to all the members of the network for continuous debate. Further, I thank Claus Bech Hansen, Anna Grieser, Dietrich Reetz and Conrad Schetter for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Introduction What is an area? What is in an area? In recent discussions on area studies the limits and limitations of " areas " have been hotly debated. The " geographies of knowing " produced by the conventional layout of studied areas go hand in hand with specific " geographies of ignorance " , writes Willem van Schendel (2002). As a result, he proposes a new area, " Zomia " , extending over the mountainous terrain from South East Asia via the margins of South Asia into Central Asia. Van Schendel proposed Zomia not so much to establish a new area but rather to point to the epistemological problems of any kind of fixed area in order to trigger the imagination of readers to think of other types of spatial formations that enable new kinds of insights. Knowledge simply " contained " in and by areas is always limited knowledge. The research network Crossroads Asia, funded by the initiative of the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) to strengthen area studies in Germany, departed from this discussion and suggested not a new area (" Crossroads Asia ") but a new approach to area studies: a " Crossroads perspective " that focuses not on social and cultural processes contained within certain spatial boundaries but rather on processes that cut across borders (Mielke and Hornidge 2014). In consequence, the members of the network were very critical of using any kind of " territorial container " as analytical device or unit of study. Yet last summer term I taught a course at my department that might be considered a cardinal sin in the context of Crossroads Asia. The title of the course was Society and Culture of Pakistan. Thus, the title referred to a " territorial container " that limited the contents of the course to a country, to a (nation-)state and its territory. Why did I teach such a course? It is not because in a perspective of unacknowledged …