11th Annual International ADI Conference
Asian Dynamics Initiative, University of Copenhagen

Roundtable on “Asian Mobilities”

18 June 2019, 17:30-18:30 in Asia House, Indiakaj 16, 2100 Cph

Moderated by Oscar Salemink, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen

Participants: 
Dagmar Schäfer, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
Edyta Roszko, Chr. Michelsen Institute
Eric Tagliacozzo, Dept. of History, Cornell University
Magnus Marsden, Dept. of Anthropology, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex

The 11th ADI conference at the University of Copenhagen on Asian Mobilities continues the tradition of investigating Asian intra-regional and transregional connectivities. The point of departure for the roundtable is the truism that the multi-directional movement of people, ideas, things and technologies across space and time produces ever-changing configurations of human relationships, knowledge systems, and power relations. While it is becoming ever clearer that such movements have characterized human history since its inception, much contemporary scholarship about globalization adopts a present-centric approach that emphasizes present-day movements, mobilities and circulations but willy-nilly de-emphasizes such processes in the past. Thus the historical results of such processes in the form of present-day political and cultural configurations – in particular nation-states – are mistaken as point of departure for our understanding of regions and states, as brought out in an oft taken-for-granted-ness of present-day nation-states as containers for area studies.

Without denying the importance of in-depth local linguistic, cultural and historical knowledge situated in area studies, this roundtable will ask how our understanding of the Asian regions and nations will change if we allow for a view of the present as a historically contingent outcome of historical process in terms of a broader context of multiple mobilities and connectivities. And following from that, we would like to broach the speculative question how past and present processes might yield historical outcomes in the future that change the shape of Asia – both its nation-states and its supra- and sub-regions.