Description
Book SynopsisBegins 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.
Trade Review"Intimate Geopolitics is a richly crafted book, which forcefully demonstrates that politics of the intimate are intricately tied to global political maneuverings. Its empirical detail, animated through stories of the people Smith interviewed in Ladakh, reveal that the deeply personal and painful struggles refuse to be contained to the intimate. They bristle with tension and vulnerability about territory, sovereignty, and belonging."
-- Rupal Oza * author of The Making of Neoliberal India *
"This deeply moving ethnography takes us through a complex interplay of intimacy, reproduction, bodies and nationhood in the North Indian region of Leh and Ladakh. Smith's work is courageous and critical, and once again confirms that reproduction can never be apolitical, and that longing and belonging cannot be delinked." -- Amrita Pande * author of Wombs in Labor *
"
Intimate Geopolitics is a timely and important intervention in Himalayan studies....[An] engaging and ethnographically rich narrative, which treats a geopolitically loaded question with a great deal of sensitivity and understanding." * Journal of Asian Studies *
Table of ContentsSeries 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
