Boundless Worlds: An Anthropological Approach to Movement

Where lived experience of surroundings is shifting, visceral, and immersive, interpretation of social spaces tends to be static and remote. "Space" and "place" are also often analyzed without grappling much (if at all) with the social, political, and historical roots of spatial practice. This volume embarks upon the novel strategy of focusing on movement as a way of understanding social spaces, which offers a means to get beyond biases inherent in the social science of space. Ethnographic studies of social life in settings as varied as nomadic Mongolia and island Melanesia, as distinct as contemporary Tokyo and war-torn Palestine, challenge Western assumptions about the universality of "space" and allow concrete understanding of how life plays out over different socio-cultural topographies. In a world that is becoming increasingly "bounded" in many ways - despite enormous changes wrought by technological, ideological, and other social developments - Boundless Worlds urges a scholarly turn, away from the purely global, toward the human dimension of social lives lived in conditions of conflict, upheaval, remapping, and improvisation through movement.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Chapter 1. Lost in ‘Space’: An Anthropological Approach to Movement Peter Wynn Kirby Chapter 2. Against Space: Place, Movement, Knowledge Tim Ingold Chapter 3. Spatiality, Power, and State-Making in the Organization of Territory in Colonial South Asia: The Case of the Anglo–Gorkha Frontier, 1740–1816 Bernardo A. Michael Chapter 4. Embodying Spaces of Violence: Narratives of Israeli Soldiers in the Occupied Palestinian Territories Richard Clarke Chapter 5. This Circle of Kings: Modern Tibetan Visions of World Peace Martin Mills Chapter 6. A Weft of Nexus: Changing Notions of Space and Geographical Identity in Vanuatu, Oceania Carlos Mondragón Chapter 7. At Home Away from Homes: Navigating the Taiga in Northern Mongolia Morten Axel Pedersen Chapter 8. Toxins Without Borders: Interpreting Spaces of Contamination and Suffering Peter Wynn Kirby Chapter 9. Movements in Corporate Space: Organizing a Japanese Multinational in France Mitchell W. Sedgwick Chapter 10. Making Space in Finland’s New Economy Eeva Berglund Conclusion: Onward Bound: Ethnographic Perspectives on Space, Movement, and Context Peter Wynn Kirby Visual Appendix: Movement Studies Christian Grou and Tapio Snellman Notes on Contributors Index

About the Author :
Peter Wynn Kirby is Senior Lecturer in the Anthropology of Japan at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK, and a research fellow at the EHESS, Paris. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. Author of the forthcoming book Troubled Natures: Waste, Environment, Japan, he scrutinizes environments, including cities, with specific reference to Japan and France.

Review :
“…the collection continues in the anthropological tradition by maintaining a healthy scepticism of the many potentially universalizing concepts at the centre of the ‘spatial turn’, by insisting on addressing complex processes via an attention to indigenous expe­rience and perspectives; an aim it achieves with aplomb.”  ·  Sociology