HIGHLAND ASIA AS A WORLD REGION: An introduction

Abstract

This chapter makes a case for the recognition of Highland Asia as a distinct world region. While in recent centuries, Asia’s highland communities have fallen over the historical and political edge of state and national narratives and have been variously sidelined and suppressed by dominant lowland discourse, new and critical scholarship increasingly recognises them as key enactors, repositories, and mediators of world-historical processes. This is a dynamic that broadly extends from the Central Asian Mountains, through the greater Himalayan region, to the highlands of Southeast Asia. By exploring Asia’s highlands together, we see a new theoretical and ethnographic space emerge and begin to reimagine global history, economy, politics, and social theory writ large from primarily highland vantages. We foreground the narratives of old and new Silk Route traders and travellers, healers and prophets, bards and merchants, planners and investors, rebels and revolutionaries, and think through the analytics of ‘pathways’ and ‘highways’, thus focusing on flows of peoples, goods, ideas and ideologies, songs and epic poetry, languages, genes, and capital, flows of both human and nonhuman nature, of both biotic and abiotic matter. In so doing, we gain new understandings of highland landscapes, livelihoods, and life-worlds and their varied connections with wider planetary contexts and conditions. In this way, this introduction both integrates spaces and scholarship hitherto divided between massifs and mountains, and puts forward a new research agenda, reorienting institutional space, theory, methodology, and ethnography.