Dan Smyer Yü and Jean Michaud (eds.): Trans-Himalayan Borderlands. Livelihoods, Territorialities, ModernitiesUte Wallenböck

ASIEN – Nr. 148 (2018) pp. 102–104

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. 310 S., 89 EUR

This edited volume on Trans-Himalayan Borderlands emerged from selected papers of two conferences on an interdisciplinary approach to Himalayan studies with focus on questioning the conception of border — simultaneously as limitations and opportunities — and what the authors call “affective boundaries” (p.73), “livelihood reconstruction” (p.31) and “trans-Himalayan modernities” (p. 148). This volume further explores and presents the diversity of a highland realm exemplified by historical and ethnographic case studies, drawing from anthropology, environmental studies, ethnology, geography, history, human ecology, religious studies, and Tibetology, as well as wider academic interests. This book is a “type of transboundary area study or transregional study aimed at an ethnoculturally and ecologically coherent but geopolitically demarcated world area” (p. 17). In fact, the valuable conceptual and empirical contributions provide an important contribution to borderland studies in general…