Introduction: Place, society and politics across urban and rural Asia

Abstract

The chapters in this volume concern the politics of place in four Asian nations: India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. They are about the ever-evolving relationship between and across rural and urban places. The categories of rural and urban are deeply embedded and naturalised in our imagination and in the cultural schemes of places across all the nations discussed in these chapters. One irony of what Gavin Jones (1997) calls the thorough-going urbanisation of Asia is that even as any sharp distinction between urban and rural ways of life has become increasingly blurred, the social and political implications of our imagination of rural and urban difference have, if anything, intensified. We present the chapters here as case studies of the many modes in which ideas and practices of the urban and rural play out across varied Asian contexts.