As Chinese investments materialize across the Asian region, the meanings of territory, infrastructure and modernity are in a process of re-negotiation. While this is the case for many parts of Asia, research on China’s western and northern border areas with the former Soviet states — from Xinjiang to Manchuria — remains scant and often enmeshed in a discourse on the peculiarities of “the frontier”. This seminar seeks to explore ways beyond spatial and temporal fixes in the study of Central Asia and China’s north by discussing material and social change in the region from contemporary and historical perspectives. The seminar thereby brings together three scholars from anthropology and history.

In the first part of the seminar Dr. Till Mostowlansky will introduce and read from his new book Azan on the Moon: Entangling Modernity along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). The book presents an in-depth anthropological study of people’s lives along a road in the borderlands of Tajikistan, China, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan. In it Mostowlansky maintains that after almost a century of different projects of modernization, including contemporary Chinese endeavours, people along the road still navigate between the rubrics of modernity and marginality, and between a sense of centrality and political neglect.

In the second part of the seminar, Dr. Loretta Kim and Dr. Niccolò Pianciola will first discuss Azan on the Moon and the themes of modernity, materiality and sociality, drawing on their own historical research in Central Asia and China’s north. The floor will then be opened for discussion with the audience.