Winner of the 2021 Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award from the American Association of Geographers​
2021 Foreword Indies Finalist - Politics and Social Sciences
Intimate Geopolitics begins with a love story set in the Himalayan region of Ladakh, in India’s Jammu and Kashmir State, but this is also a story about territory, and the ways that love, marriage, and young people are caught up in contemporary global processes. In Ladakh, children grow up to adopt a religious identity in part to be counted in the census, and to vote in elections. Religion, population, and voting blocs are implicitly tied to territorial sovereignty and marriage across religious boundaries becomes a geopolitical problem in an area that seeks to define insiders and outsiders in relation to borders and national identity. This book populates territory, a conventionally abstract rendering of space, with the stories of those who live through territorial struggle at marriage and birth ceremonies, in the kitchen and in the bazaar, in heartbreak and in joy. Intimate Geopolitics argues for the incorporation of the role of time–temporality–into our understanding of territory.
Series Foreword by Péter Berta
List of Figures
1 Introduction
2 Birth and the territorial body
3 The queen and the fistfight: territory comes to life
4 Intimacy on the threshold
5 Raising children on the threshold of the future
6 Generation vertigo and the future of territory
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
SARA SMITH is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Please complete your information below to login.
Sign In
Create New Account