3. Governing Landscapes across Asia

Convenor: Rune Bennike, Dept. of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen

Across most of human history, the textures of Asian landscapes have played a crucial role in the government of people and places. In Asia, as elsewhere, the adverse geography of mountains and jungles has provided zones of refuge for people fleeing expanding empires and state structures. In turn, ecological distinctions have been employed as central markers in governmental differentiation separating civilization from its wild outside (Guha 1999, Scott 2009). Bordering both the physical extension and political imagination of centralized government, landscapes have thus been intensely political. Nonetheless, in the ‘national order of things’ where most of modern politics is imagined, studied and conducted the physical landscape is concealed by the fantasy of a flat, bordered and uniform national territory (Ferguson & Gupta 2002, Malkki 1992). Ironed out – supposedly – by the distance-demolishing technologies of modernity, the physical landscape has largely been purged from the vocabulary of political and governmental theory. In real life, though, a broad range of contemporary, global dynamics (struggles for the recognition of indigenous belonging, political battles over local autonomy, environmental protection schemes, geographical indications branding) push the materialities and representations of landscapes back into politics.

As a response, this panel invites participants to re-think notions of government from a starting-point in landscape rather than national territory. The notion of landscape highlights multiple tensions between proximity and distance, inhabitation and observation, land and gaze, nature and culture (Wylie 2007). It thus invites analysis of the contingent, political connections made between land and vision across government interventions, NGO programmes, commercial branding, international development assistance etc. Seeking contributions across archeology, geography, anthropology, political science and beyond the panel encourages explorations of landscape both in a historical sense, and as analytical tool to approach government and politics at a time when national territories are increasingly challenged by the multiple forces of globalization.