AHA Session 150
Saturday, January 8, 2022: 8:30 AM-10:00 AM
Mardi Gras Ballroom FG (New Orleans Marriott, 3rd Floor)
Chair:
Joshua L. Reid, University of Washington, Seattle
Papers:
Comment:
The Audience
Session Abstract
This panel brings together new research on the Chinese borderlands, Kenya’s Turkana borderlands, Pakistan’s frontier with Afghanistan and the US-Mexico border through the twentieth century. These textured histories showcase everyday life, law and local systems of authority in border regions. They offer new perspectives on state, and histories of policy and administration, showing states to be strategically adaptive to the business of governance in these territories, sometimes successfully and other times with less desirable results.
The participants in this panel mine rich and unusual archives: biographical writings of warlords, travelers and religious leaders in Tibet, Xinjiang and Mongolia; the United States INS archives; the records of jirga councils in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas; and the archives of the colonial state in Kenya. Rather than focusing on patterns of exclusion and militarization, these papes bring attention to local actors who were authorized to enact strategies of state relating to immigration, justice and economy and others observed central government at work, and to local forms of authority and expectations of justice.
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