Welcome everyone to our final and in some ways, climactic event of this three day conference emptiness ways of seeing this final event is,
in some ways a hybrid event for a hybrid conference.
We are having a roundtable where we're going to be discussing certain themes that we've discussed throughout the last few days, and it's also,
in some ways, a kind of pre-launch for a forthcoming book On the Edge Life at the Along the Russia China border by Colleen Humphrey and Frank Miller.
I just wanted to recount quickly what we've been discussing the last three days as a way
of an introduction on the segue we into what Colleen and Frank are going to talk about.
We've heard about depopulated model tones in Latvia,
abandoned industrial settlements and Karelia roads bypassed in Kazakhstan by
the dry dying villages in Eastern Europe and ghost towns in Inner Mongolia,
military townships in Taipei to Albanian bunkers,
tax schemes in post-industrial frontiers to post-Soviet rust belts and how they've been in global value chains.
F emptiness as a consequence of the intersection of state and capital with population and territory than its genesis.
Its presence, in essence, should be most visible at margins and edges, on borders and on the edge.
Humphrey and Frank Buckley assert that despite sharing what Gilbert Roseman calls polite identities,
these two countries are unleashed all the way down onto their very peripheries.
There's no functioning road, a real bridge connecting the two countries across this border,
one in the largest in the world, not withstanding decades of estrangement and hermetic closure forever.
The initiation of tentative contact in the beginning of significant cross-fertilisation provides the context the authors take as their field.
They draw upon a large and current and recent anthropological, sociological, geographical and political perspectives.
Although by and large, the issue theorising and yet on the edge pervades many groundbreaking insights into this truly important global relationship.
And it really makes perfect contributions to themes that we've discussed throughout this conference around about the areas of state capital,
population migration and what we discussed in the first round table with Saskia Sass and Johanna Bookman, Don Kalb and many others.
So let me introduce our distinguished speakers. We have Professor Carlene Humphrey, who's an Emeritus Professor and fellow King's College Cambridge,
the director and the former director and founder of Miyoshi, the Mongolian Innovation Studies Institute.
And over five decades has produced a huge corpus of scholarship about post-Soviet and Soviet Eurasia and from Karl Marx Collective to On the Edge.
She's written many co-authored books, and we have her co-author and a very innovative and theoretically important scholar,
Frank Buckley, who has written his monograph Scene of Obama and published What Women as sovereignties William in his state story.
A very significant work that we've already kind of taken into our and thought within our emptiness project, and he has many other books on the way.
Very productive scholar, and we have three very expert panellists.
We have Madeleine Reeves, who's professor of anthropology at the University of Manchester,
who is a leading scholar of Central Central Asia, borders migration sovereignty.
And that's evidenced in border work, her first monograph and in a recent edited volume, The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty.
We have Alexandru Repac, who is a Afraid Geist fellow at Alemu and associate professor at Tallinn,
who's published Borderland Infrastructure just last year, and many interesting articles from Reconceptualize Izumi to Rewilding.
And finally, we have Natalia Juva, who's a pre-eminent scholar of the Russian Far East,
an economist and an economic anthropologist who's written extensively about Russia,
China border, especially about trade migration, informal economies.
And I can't think of a more qualified audience panel to comment on this new work.
So if Katty and Frank could tell us a little bit about that, then we could hear from our panellists on incidents of discussion.
So over to you. We're very, very grateful to have the opportunity to come and talk to you and thank you for
the three readers who've taken the time to read the book and made comments.
We're really looking forward to hearing what you thought about it and also about your question.
So before we start, I I thought we could.
I could just say a few words about the genesis of the book.
So the book was is based on the project that Caroline and myself and around 20 other people have worked on at Cambridge between 2012 and 2015,
and the project was looking at the interaction between Russia and China.
It was in the context of yes,
I'll see call for projects looking at different arising powers we saw in Russia and China were very interesting on their own terms,
but also because they share a border.
As anthropologists, we would be able to look at what's happening at the border, a daily interaction and better understand what's happening.
We found that rising powers tended to be described and studied at very high level, looking at what's happening at the centre of the capital.
And we wanted to see what was happening on the border, the the daily interaction between between people.
So this was the application for that project was really our first experience of writing together, and we spanned many,
many weeks labouring and Caroline's office at Cambridge, writing and thinking about every sentence.
So it was really a really interesting and really useful way of of preparing for that book,
really, that we didn't know the time that we would write together. So why were we interested in that border?
So as as I said just now it was, it's a unique vantage point to look at interaction between these two.
States, but it's also a very unique border in the sense that it's there is really a hard
fracture between the two because the border was set before the majority groups,
the Russians and Chinese and Han Chinese moved to the region. And because the border was closed for a long time,
we have two very dissimilar cultures or civilisations that even people would describe them on either side.
So it was very interesting for us to see that unique break between these two ways of doing things in other borders,
even difficult borders like the U.S. and Mexico.
There's a lot of intermarriages as along the border was created, was was sent after people were already living there.
So this was really going to be unique. So this book and Kerry will talk a little bit about that as well was a challenge in in two ways.
The first one was that we were writing a a book that would be across academic and trade.
That was a very unique and first experience for us.
The it required some pushback in terms of, you know, sometimes we wanted to go deep into theory and we had to be really mindful of that.
And I remember today that actually when we pitched the book to Harvard, we also had a discussion with Penguin.
I don't know whether you remember Kerry. And there were there were.
Do you really want to trade book? I didn't want anything academic, and we thought that was not a very good fit for us.
We wanted to to be truthful to, you know, our community, academic community.
And also that's the way we work while making it understandable and enjoyable for non academics.
But we didn't want to write something that would be only trade.
So Harvard was really kind of a good, good fit for us.
But it was, of course, a challenge for me because it was the first time I was writing with somebody, even though we had to collaborate on that.
On that application, writing a book was a little bit daunting. Plus, the fact that we were far away, I moved to the United States.
But we I think that's we're very happy with how things went and we managed to I feel kind of unite our voices in a way that was not disjointed.
Yeah. And I let Carey talk a little bit about the book. Uh, and then I'll come back.
Thank you, Frank. Well, I thought perhaps I should start by just running through the chapter headings,
if you like, because most of the audience here won't have read the book.
Only the panellists have. And so it's got an introduction, which is more or less kind about on the political economy of the border.
Its first chapter is about space and the very, very different ways that Russia and China organise space.
It then homes in on an island in the middle of the Amazon River, which is half of it belongs to China and the other half belongs to Russia.
So in one very small space,
you can see some tremendously interesting contrasting ways that space has been handled and how it enters the politics of the places around it.
Then we have a chapter called Making a Living in the Cross-border Economy.
We have a chapter on indigenous peoples of the borderlands.
We have another chapter on relationships across the border, which is called friends, foes and kin across the border.
And we have another chapter on resources and environment, and we have a final chapter on the border cities,
which is about imagination really, or the role of actuality and the imagination of how people see cities on either side.
And then there's a kind of a coda. I thought I'd like to also say that during this project, a lot of things have appeared, I mean,
I think when we started, we somewhere wrote in there that this is a relatively unstudied border.
Well, that's not really true. No, there are really a lot of things.
Frank has published a sign, a phobia book. We had a couple of books came out during the project, ones to the both of some sort of collections,
one called Frontier Encounters and one called trust and mistrust in cross-border economies.
And then several members of the project who published books and important articles are certain Urbanski book Beyond the Frontier,
which is a really wonderful, detailed history.
There's a conference book Merrylands, which has got it full of ethnographic insights and ethnic history.
There's the tone. It's a formula, and it translates this wonderful book culture contact in a monkey land, which is very interesting.
And the original book on Ivanka and Bourret relations.
Then there's Natalia. Rizzo was immense contribution on economy and politics, and we really authoritative and insightful many articles.
The Science and I'm Sarajevo's work, which she's done terrific work on the sort of trade and ethnic relations,
and on the history of laborious exodus to Mongolia and China and Iran,
Pascal's work on political history and Russian attitudes to to being on the border.
So we actually refer to these books and articles, and we quote some of them,
but we feel that it's all actually all out there in published and we really didn't want to replicate it.
So as far as possible in the book, we focus on other aspects and in the main we use different ethnography.
And quite a lot of it comes from internet sources because in the last year or two,
we couldn't go there, obviously, and we needed, on the other hand, we felt we needed to be up to date.
So we did get a lot from the internet, and I should mention that our fieldwork was done at different places and time.
So Frank draws on his extended fieldwork in blog versions and figure two cities across the river.
And I used rather brief for fieldwork that I've done in the Kolkata region and around there on the Zoback Ask area and in Mongolia,
in China, and Shanahan, which is nearby.
And then I pass through Genji, and when Chen was at Fulford, and then I went on to do some research in Vladivostok,
where I focussed on real estate speculation and I've published separately on that.
It's not in this book. So I think as a result of all that sort of you consider a complicated set up behind this book.
It may seem to be patchy, and I think Frank got a little bit more to say about patchiness.
Yeah. So I think this what could come across as banshees because we looked at we decided
on what aspects of the interface between Russia and China wanted to look at.
And of course, different authors might have selected other things.
We decided on the basis, first of all, of our strengths and knowledge,
but also on on themes that we thought were really crucial to understand the interaction between the two things
that themes that came up regularly when we talked to people important things like the environment or space or,
you know, danger from, especially from the Russian perspective. So we tried to hone in on those things.
But of course, there's other things we could have written.
I mean, anything comprehensive or close to comprehensiveness would have been like a huge, you know, huge volume.
So we wanted to provide kind of a good understanding of this interaction interface between the two in ways that would be,
you know, that would speak to to the reality and also to to this to the readers.
And also, as Carrie said, we didn't want to replicate the wonderful work that's been done by our colleagues.
So we kind of acknowledge it, but try to talk, you know, in between those things.
But generally, I think any kind of any work of that nature,
looking at the border between two huge countries like Russia and China would have to be patchy because there is not a single.
It's not a unique vocal situation.
You have really different set of actors and people would have different ideas about both themselves and the other and their relationship,
depending on their and their background. Social, background, economic.
Around gender, the only experience with the other side.
So we really wanted to actually have that multifocal aspect.
We wanted to go against this kind of top down accounts of what Moscow,
Moscow and Beijing are saying, and I wanted to really look at what's happening on the ground.
So that's so maybe that that's what could come across as bad.
She's actually part of the design, I would say. OK, well, thank you, Frank.
I'm just going to say a few words about the book in relation to emptiness.
No, because I'm taking part in this roundtable made me think about it.
We weren't, of course, thinking about emptiness specifically when we wrote the book,
but I think that it does speak to the idea in three ways, and this probably will not come as a surprise to you.
All could have been talking about it for three days, but maybe we can think of emptiness as first as a substance and secondly as a kind of withdrawal.
And thirdly, as a kind of unintended product.
And I think our book illustrates these three ideas in many ways.
So in terms of absence of some definite thing that's been set up somewhere else.
I think that the chapter chapter one, in fact, that discusses the structural gaps that appear in the Ruderman model,
this idea of the sort of hyper typical high percent centralised system of administration and infrastructure in Russia.
Creates in its industries a sense of absence and emptiness.
And then we do also discuss withdrawal in well exemplified by the demise really
overall the closing down of industries and facilities and occupations and services.
And so that kind of emptiness is perhaps that of having nothing but a memory left of all these things.
And then thirdly, I think we can think of emptiness as a kind of chasm that's produced and has
unintended effects despite what looks like activity to create something positive.
That's a bit like what an economist might call an externality.
So here I'm thinking of something like the Eastern Economic Union Forum that happens regularly between China and Russia,
the deciding on economic collaboration. And we mention how you know there will be speeches and declarations and ceremony.
But the actual effect is to create a kind of haziness and unclarity that makes it difficult to actually implement anything.
And I think another example might be if we turn again to the island in the middle of the Amil River,
the kind of extravagant promises made on both sides and particularly the Russian side.
But if nobody believes them that there are kind of hot-air and then what that produces is an immediate future,
that's a kind of empty gap for the people who live around the.
And then finally, I think I'd like to go back to the thing that Dom mentioned at the beginning that the question of these.
Absent or no, the presence of bridges that don't actually serve or join Russia and China.
I think it's a fantastic topic to think about in relation to emptiness.
I think you're one of the things that comes out is the time specific nature of different kinds of emptiness.
So for 20 or 30 years, these bridges were planned and all sorts of meetings about them, but they were constantly delayed.
And I think you can think about that in terms of Rodman's model,
this kind of structural absence that documents on borders at the edges of administrative areas.
And in this case, of course, the border is a closed zone.
Or was it closed or still is it closed zone and it's across a highly militarised international border?
Now, what happened while we were writing the book is that they actually built two of these bridges,
one of them Railway Bridge, and the other one is both a railway and the road bridge, but they still don't.
There's still not quite open. And here I think we can again think about emptiness.
And I think Alessandra Ripa's probably written about this kind of thing, too if we learn from other border crossings around China.
It seems that these bridges are likely to be open for some people or for some companies and not for others,
and that they may well open and then they may close again because they're on the border
and the FSB may decide they're going to close it and then they may open it again.
And so. You get to a kind of construct that in rhetoric is the great link between these two peoples,
and if you look on the internet, that's the way it is described Russia and China coming together.
But in fact, you're going to kind of profiting off by the fact of the lack of accessibility and this temporal uncertainty.
And I think even if the bridge is open fully, I think the book as a whole kind of would support, especially its later chapters works.
Morton Pedersen has done in Mongolia or roads with Michael Bloomberg, who's arguing that basically roads can paradoxically separate people.
And in his us, it's a graphic case. These are mines built by the Chinese in Mongolia, roads linking the mines and oil fields to the border.
Then take this stuff out.
And the Mongolian herders either avoid using these roads or if they do, they say they haven't or they're kind of blank it out.
And the argument basically is that because of the relationship they actually have with the Chinese, it's not a non-related.
There is a relationship, but it's the relation of keeping distance, a relationship kind of disjuncture rather than adherence.
And so these roads, what they do is they prioritise a sort of single minded capitalist economic relationship.
But what they do is to kind of prevent really sort of untidy, indeterminate sort of multifaceted, possibly on the sort of non to legal side.
So the assemblage of relations between the Chinese and the Mongolians.
And it seems that the government is on both sides,
the Chinese and Mongolian government very happy with it being like that because
they both think that separation is the best way to avoid inter-ethnic conflict.
I think our book provides many different instances of that kind of thing, which I really,
really don't have time to go into, but I think there is a lot of evidence of that kind of thing.
It's a relationship, but one of disjuncture, which I think you could see as a kind of emptiness.
Yeah, and I think this this point of avoidant behaviour is something we see in infrastructure,
for instance, in the organisation of space there, you mentioned the bridge.
So one of them, the one that is being talked about for 30 years now between black or Asian, is going to take her going to exist.
But it doesn't link the two towns directly have to go around.
And then it would not be open to the public. True, true civilians.
I mean, to to anybody wanting to travel across, it's really kind of for goods.
And it's really kind of highly regulated.
So there's always this element, even in the connexion between the two, there's this element of avoidance that is always there.
And thinking also about import export things coming from China to true blood relations just across the river tends to travel around,
you know, yes, quotas imposed on them has tariffs, and he travels all the way west before coming back.
So they're becoming quite expensive. So there's always there are these connexions, but they are not direct connexions.
And I think that kind of leads to this feeling of emptiness that we all can also think about
close to zones like gulags and nuclear facilities as things we would have loved to work on.
But of course, it's it's very difficult for us to have any access to that, even for all four Russians.
But he really kind of contributes to this element of non homogenous space, which I think is an interesting point to make.
When you when you think of borders, kind of the general idea of the two states controlling the two,
the two territories in a homogeneous way, all the way to the border.
At the same time, you have these holes, these gaps in in.
Maybe not in sovereignty, but in access. I think that's that's an important point to make.
And this so that that kind of brings us to this idea of emptiness, connecting to remoteness.
And as something that we mentioned in the book The Way My People especially, I mean, actually on both sides, on both sides.
Speaking of their location on the border and kind of being on the edge for Russians,
it feels like they often talk about their town being kind of at the end of the world,
like on the edge of everything, even though they are just across the border from a very dynamic country like China.
For Chinese, it's also an edge in the sense of a window to look beyond the states, which is not always easy for Chinese to have access to.
So you have tourists coming to America and looking at the other side, so you really have this sense of disjuncture and and remoteness embedded in it.
And in a way, that's why we wanted to do the book with a book title. And that's that's something we worked on a lot.
We spent so much time trying to find the right title,
and I think we have because I think on the edge really kind of plays with this idea of the edge of the state,
but also it kind of includes this, this sense of being on edge.
So kind of this anxiety element to it, but also on edge on the edge.
There's also kind of the link of being on the cusp,
this kind of a more dynamic also sense of being on the cusp of something happening so that it's not just, you know, kind of very static.
So I think this that the title plays with this kind of three different ideas of the edge.
And and I think that will conclude our little introduction of the book and we look
forward to hearing the the and the thoughts of the three readers and their questions.
Well, thank you for that thought provoking introduction and first comments,
and I think we should move straight into our responses and I thought we would go by alphabetical order.
So Madeline, would you like to see your your piece and your thoughts?
Sure. Can you hear me OK? Yeah. Great. Thank you.
Thank you so much for the invitation to read and engage with Frank and Caroline's fascinating and I think, really expansive new book.
And I think my comments actually follow up a lot from some of the themes that have
already discussed this idea of non homogenous space and and the idea of gaps.
So given the constraints of time and the focus of our workshop on emptiness and our modes of apprehending,
it's I'm going to direct my comments to three themes that are raised for me by the book that I hope are pertinent to this wider workshop discussion.
So the first concern is exactly the question of the institutional and infrastructural production of variegated space.
The second concerns the relationship between emptiness and the movements of capital.
And the third concern is what we might call sensing or seeing emptiness of the relationship between emptiness, ethnography and the visual.
So first on the production of emptiness, and these will necessarily be pretty telegraphic points given the constraints of time,
but a recurrent theme in the book and it's one that Frank and Carey have alluded to already in their comments,
concerns what we might call the variegated, or, as Frank puts it,
the non homogenous institutional presence thing of capitalism after socialism, Russia and China.
We learnt on the first page, unlike all the way down and to their very peripheries,
and we see this in the various chapters in the countries respective cultures of capitalism in chapter three,
in contrasting memories of forced dislocation in Chapter four and divergent systems of tributes
and trade in Chapter six and in contrasting hierarchies of spatial organisation in chapter one.
And in developing this argument, the authors challenge both conventional assumptions that all illiberal states are illiberal in the same way and
Eurocentric readings of state formation grounded in localised histories of territory and its political legal production.
And as the authors have said and an astonishing alluded to in his comments, this is sort of explicitly not a theoretical book,
but I think there were really significant theoretical implications for argument say about the
history of territory which have tended to be written from a very Eurocentric perspective.
So the authors show, for instance, that even as China has invested heavily in roads connecting small border towns
and villages and has actively sought to populate its northern peripheries,
Russia's radio model in which distance from Moscow and from provincial centres is what matters in the nesting hierarchy of connectivity,
has allowed large swathes of land and significant rural populations to be
literally and metaphorically bypassed from wider economic and political currents.
Indeed, we learn that most border villages are disconnected from the recently constructed Amwell Highway,
creating communities the targets, the authors put it, marooned at the end of their own transport spurs.
This maroon, moreover, is at least in part intentional, if not habitual.
The Russian authorities we see are profoundly sceptical about too much connectivity with their much more densely populated neighbour.
The annual river has historically been conceived as a sacrosanct closure for Russia in the author's
work words a marker of a civilizational boundary rather than a source of contact and exchange.
And today, this results in a variety of phantom projects that haunt the present, not just these sort of partially constructed or constructed,
but unopened bridges that Caroline mentioned,
but also docking ports that have no boats to dock at them or so-called territories of advance development that can't attract employees.
So there's this kind of constant deferral of connectivity. China, meanwhile,
is busily stressing that the Great Wall constitutes less a boundary between different civilisations than the cradle of communication and fusion,
as well as actively investing in a miniaturised and sanitised version of Russian culture for sale to inland tourists in Kihei.
As the authors show, moreover,
this isn't just a story of connectivity on one side of a vast international border and an absence of such connexion on the other.
We might in Caroline's kind of tripartite sort of passing of ideas, emptiness.
We might think of different forms of emptiness that are produced on either side of the border because we see, for instance,
how China's very ambition to create connexion to distant land and seaports through the Belt and Road Initiative creates new kinds of disconnection,
new forms of economic stratification and perhaps new experiences of estrangement places rendered
newly remote or unreachable by the channelling of transport past rather than through them.
Emptiness, just like disconnection, it seems, is the product of action and inaction rather than a pre-existing state.
And just like disconnection,
it can be amplified by the very discourses and practises that promote connectivity and consumption as markers of modernity.
This gets me to my first cluster of questions for the authors,
which concerns how he makes sense of the political logic of Russia's policy of Maru Ning and how we square this with,
say, active programmes of resettlement for so-called compatriots Satechi's Sinicki to the Russian Far East.
I'm also curious to know about how the evident ambivalence about the connexion plays out within different parts of the Russian state.
The book stresses the centralised and hierarchies nature of the Russian polity in this kind of radial formation other than but in domains such as,
say, migration policy.
That's quite a lot of divergence at a provincial level and often discrepancy between the political agendas of different government ministries,
as well as between federal and provincial authorities. So I'm curious to know how this is manifest, for instance,
in the question of whether or not to open the long heralded bridge across the M4 or what to do with those Napier's given these Chawla,
those futureless villages that haven't been earmarked for special economic development.
I'm curious to know where and in what forms do those acts of abandonment contested?
My second set of comments, in part prompted by these questions, relate to the relationship between emptiness and the economy at different scales.
The authors describe the book as patchy, and I wouldn't have described it that way,
but it seems to me too that it occupies two registers simultaneously or perhaps to adopt the visual metaphor of our conference.
It seems to me that it shifts in its mode of seeing between a wide angled and a much more focussed lens.
On the one hand, there's an intervention into an Anglophone public debate that tends to exaggerate similarities
between Russia and China and disregard altogether the places where these two First Nations meet.
And here, as Dominic has already alluded to, the authors pull no punches.
The long border between the two gigantic, nationalistic oriented countries, the authors argue,
is, I quote not merely a line between two countries, but between two entirely different worlds.
And yet, the book also inhabits a different kind of register, one more traditionally associated with ethnography,
in which the specificity of particular lives with all the contingencies of biography, history, love, friendship, curiosity and so on.
Lead to quite different kinds of insight about intensive, unregulated practises of trade, about borrowing and mimi friendship and adventure.
About long, expensive and uncomfortable journeys to sacred sites but cannot be reduced to any simple economic rationality speaks a much
more encompassing sense of historical mythical connexion and incorporation of time measured in generations rather than years.
Moreover, while it's clear that Russian leaders and policymakers view too much connexion with China with some trepidation,
we also see how the very fact of spatial and social variation creates new opportunities for connexion.
A new exigencies to mobilise different regimes of value as a matter perhaps of economic survival.
Exigencies that operate amidst vestiges from the past where the physical ruins human habits or memories of forced displacement.
We see this, for instance,
in new forms of sociality produced around the illegal trades in jade ore body or the body parts of bears or the fang fen root.
I found these glimpses of contingent and unexpected collaboration, some of the most interesting parts of the book,
and I'd like to ask the authors about the theoretical implications of these,
both for our understanding of the differences that go all the way down and the possible ways in which such expectations of civilizational
difference are refused by those whose family history or personal biography do not fall easily into binary national narratives.
We get hints of this, for instance, in the varying attitudes towards the Chinese and black efficiency inflected by family
histories of trade or the desire for cultural connexion demonstrated by Buddhists and.
But I'm interested in the implications of these forms of connexion.
Sorry about the implications of these forms of connexion for the overarching argument that civilizational differences wrung both thick and deep.
I'm curious to know, for instance, about the new forms of cross-border communication that are enabled by mobile technologies or by the
consumption of forms of media uniting populations across the border originating from other elsewhere,
such as K-pop, which seems to be popular, you know, throughout large parts of East and Central Asia.
Do these forms of connexion have the potential to be truly disruptive or are they merely the exceptions that in a sense, prove the rule?
This gets me to my final point, which relates to ways of seeing and other ways of knowing.
And again, prompted by the sort of the theme of the conference and more generally on the relationship between emptiness, ethnography and aspect.
In our ocular centric public culture, as several of the workshop presentations have shown,
emptiness is paradigmatic fully conveyed through the visual field. We might think of the iconic scenes of abandoned Pripyat in the aftermath of
the Chernobyl nuclear disaster or the urban vistas of Chinese ghost towns,
figuring Sunday supplements, inviting the viewer to wonder if the hubris of a pristine, planned future.
There's a lot of this visual field in the book, too. So for instance, we as the reader are invited like the readers of Russian.
I must step out after to see and thus to wonder at the striking contrast between the waterfront scenes separating the two towns in the late 1980s.
And today to look at the sort of Google Earth view of the different sides of the border.
Likewise, we search participants in black. Officials can hear he were invited to draw, as well as to describe their impressions of the other side.
And it was striking that many of the descriptions focussed on the contrasting
visual aspects of the two cities or the visual impacts of the two cities.
So the lights that came on at nine p.m. and seek to create a festive atmosphere.
The grids over here and the sparkles over there and so forth.
And this has got me to thinking about the particular relationship between different consumption and the visual field.
I'm struck how much of the encounter that occurs at the border is one mediated through site,
not just in the infrastructure of watchtowers and border barracks, but were intended both to see and to be seen,
but also in the ways that border residents and visitors are invited to encounter and often sanitised version
of difference by viewing it at a distance from a viewing platform or a raised walkway or a hotel window,
or in a miniaturised kind of form for consumption. I'm curious to hear more about what the authors think is going on here,
both in terms of the dynamics that are driving it and its implications for the way that difference across the border is experienced,
felt and consumed, given in other words, to our informants as much as ourselves are inhabited by hyper mediated worlds.
How is their own way of seeing shaped by heightened awareness of how others might see them?
And given the ethnography too, is increasingly conducted in all sorts of mediated ways,
and the authors alluded to this in their in their comments where we say,
like our informants can wonder, the difference is exposed by Google Earth perspective on the border.
Well, the vista from a multi-story hotel. What implications does this have for ethnography as embodied practise?
In other words, can we how can we bring the tools of ethnography as a remote,
as a mode of attentiveness that entails spatial proximity to forms of encountering that are themselves premised upon a suspension of such proximity?
So I'm kind of curious about the implications of this argument,
both for the thinking about the sort of the role of the visual in this mode of cross-border encounter,
but also for how we kind of can conduct an ethnography of of these practises of obscene.
So I leave it there. Thank you very much. Thank you, Madeleine, that wonderful comments, I'm sure we could spend the next hour just discussing that,
but we have two other presentations that were sure adds even more food for thought.
So, um, Alessandra, would you like to be next?
Sure. Thank you. Hi, everyone, and thank you so much for inviting me to join this.
This, this roundtable and this event. More broadly, I find the Old Emptiness Project really fascinating and relevant and timely,
and I very much looking forward to following it over the next year and thank you for the opportunity to read on the edge and to sync with it.
It really is an honour for me to be here,
particularly as the work of both Colleen Humphrey and Frank P has been a source of constant inspiration for me
over the years and still very much something that I look up to as an example of just brilliant anthropology.
What to say of the book itself? I find it, and I see my comments are coming a little bit more from a China perspective.
And I find it not just a great contribution to two border studies,
but also two to two Chinese studies and a very timely contribution for three reasons.
The first is academic. The China studies field is very much, I find in the process of reorienting itself,
trying to move away from some of the methodological nationalism from some of
the exceptionalism that that characterised much of its research in the past.
And in this regard to the studies of global China, sudden studies of the impact of sort of Chinese investments,
development growth across its borders and across the globe really are multiplying and I would very much least on the edge amongst those.
Secondly, this book is particularly important in the current moment where very little ethnographic
research in China is possible and probably won't be possible for for the time being.
Which brings me to the third reason I see the book as a key contribution to China studies as because of the political situation.
Today, I find a need for nuance takes based on careful, ethnographic work that can add some flesh to a growing,
polarising discussion in opposition between China and the West again.
This is very much needed. Anything on the edge accomplishes there accomplishes that.
No, I'm not going to even try to summarise this work,
but I want to go through three key points that the book raised and that caught my attention in particular.
And I will try to phrase each point around the question so that we can have more of a discussion at the end.
Let me start with an anecdote from a few years back when I was at another border
of the of the PRC of the People's Republic of China near the town of Tanjung,
Southwest China and Yunnan province, driving along a newly built road that followed more or less a section of the Myanmar border.
We were just about some 20 kilometres away from the actual boundary line,
and I was together with the local party official and we were visiting some of the entry points to which were Burmese.
Timber was brought into China was sort of showing me around, and I remember asking him when that particular road we were travelling on was built
as it was then feature on a map that I had bought just just shortly before that.
And he told me that it was only recently built and that it was built as part of a project
to build one single road that will run alongside the entire border of the country,
from Yunnan to Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and and the Northeast.
Mm-Hmm. And so back in my room in the evening, I'm looking it up online and on the Chinese internet, and I couldn't really find any official.
He entered that project, and I didn't really follow up much on that on that conversation, especially because I haven't heard about it since.
Maybe my local friend came up with it. Maybe I just didn't look in the right place.
Nevertheless, this particular road did this idea of this road that follows the border within China.
So this truck struck a chord for how it explicitly sort of connected to kinds of infrastructure the border,
an infrastructure of monitoring and containment, and the road and infrastructure of connectivity.
Yet in this case, not of transnational connectivity. What is interesting about this road is that it doesn't cross the border.
It connects places within China.
It somewhat reinforces perhaps the state's territorial grip on its outermost regions, but doesn't ultimately contribute to cross-border mobility.
And so this experience came back to me once again while reading your book and made me think how?
In many border regions of China, the border, the proximity to the border doesn't really seem to matter too much.
There are exceptions, of course, such as I heard that you describe in the book perhaps really the China Myanmar borderlands,
not far from where I was sitting that to some extent.
And you should add their own existence to the past 1980s, 1990s opening of these borders and and of the Chinese economy more broadly.
But as soon as you move a little bit away from cities and in most parts along the Chinese side of the border,
it seems to me that this proximity doesn't play much of a role.
You write that in the case, in the case of Russia, that China is Russia's main trading partner,
whereas Russia is only the 12th in China's list of partners and received less than two percent of its exports,
well beyond world behind countries such as India, Singapore and the Netherlands.
And this is true of all of China's land neighbours.
Perhaps the only exception is India, but again, it's not much strange going on that the actual land border with India.
And so I find it sort of unsurprising that when you discuss transnational economic activities like you do in Chapter three,
you focus much more on activities within Russia, which seem to matter a lot more to local border population than than within China,
which kind of makes me think that proximity to the border in China matters significantly less then than in those countries.
That's what my question would be, whether you you agree with that,
but also if this is just about a particular economic imbalance or does it also have to do
with a particular cultural I would call it reluctant c on the Chinese side to openly,
perhaps on equal terms, engage with the other side.
It's something that you that you write about in the book that I'd like to sort of hear a little bit more.
The second point, and I'm going to try to be to be brief, I would have many more points.
Maybe I can add some questions during the Q&A later.
But my second point is more of a question about sort of the book's contribution to the field of anthropology more than just Chinese studies.
Is that something that that that Frank mentioned at the beginning that the book explicitly
tries to avoid trying to capture this particular borderlands through a particular theme,
such as you mentioned, neighbour, as you mentioned, madeleines border work and doesn't aim to theorise your findings,
but also to foreground tomography and construct contextual analysis of these technocracy, of course.
And I find it extremely refreshing.
And one of the main reasons I really enjoyed reading the book so much, and you also avoid using theories from the outside.
For instance, you don't speak like you mentioned, for example,
Solomon's accumulation with reference to some of China's business interest in Russia's Far East.
But you don't you don't go into that you resort instead to the analysis of a local political theorist, Leonid Blackhat.
I'm sorry for mispronouncing. No, is it just me?
Or this also hints at an invitation, perhaps toward some current anthropological literature in which theorising very often is given primacy
over some graphic material and at times ends up obfuscating the quality of lived experience systems.
How do you see this approach?
Again, not so much as a criticism, but more of an invitation to step back a little bit from the need to theorise, generalise or to abstract.
And the last point I want to make is about representation.
And Carolyn was talking about imagination just at the beginning of the roundtable,
and I'm thinking of representation or imaginations of the other in particular once again from the Chinese side,
because on the one hand, you have the representation of the Russian observer.
I'm thinking of your examples from Chapter seven, which have already been mentioned by Madeleine of the of the model Russian village,
for instance, which you say is a largely positive image.
But what an image that is not based on any real dialogue.
And you show how the imaginary of Russia that the model Russian village projects has been filtered
through the state narratives rather than representing the outcome of a lived experience.
And this, to me, strikes a parallel with how indigenous groups are represented in China.
You describe again model villages, which are built largely for tourism consumption on the Chinese side,
in which particular indigenous tradition or ethnic minority tradition are invented.
And to some extent, imposed upon such communities.
And as someone who has been working in minority areas in Xinjiang and Yunnan, I can completely relate to this.
Now, what was particularly interesting to me is the intersection of ecological,
ethnographic and cultural heritage politics in China and the underlying connexion that you point out
between minority communities and a certain idea of a natural environment that you can find within China.
And yet, at the same time, again, these contradictions that it think again,
Karen was sort of hinting at the same time, not only on the Chinese side of the border has been heavily developed,
but also you have Chinese firms engaging in environmentally damaging businesses and the Russian side timber and so on.
And so what is nature? What is this nature that is represented here in those model villages in this sort of
composition of particular forms of indigenous is is this in itself another either?
I was wondering if we could say of how this natural environment is represented in China, the same that you say of the Russian model villages,
something that is largely positive, but that is not based on any real experience, something that is filtered by and through state narratives.
Is this a parallel? Doesn't make sense. And maybe this is why there is no contradiction between simultaneous efforts to
preserve both minority livelihoods and natural environments and to conserve
nature in particular species and efforts to develop to extract and destroy the
landscape and its non-human inhabitants for the processes of accumulation.
And so I'll stop here and thank you again very much for this opportunity and congrats on the book.
Thank you, Alexandra, fascinating insights and points there and really appreciate your perspective,
and I'm sure Katy and Frank will come back to that. But finally, we have Natalia juva to share her point of view.
So Natalia, can you come over to you?
Thank you for inviting me to this talk to discuss Carolyn Frank's book and also thank you,
Dominique, for encouraging me to share some of my ethnography.
I mean, the only me, I'm going to present something I I, when I read this book,
identify two issues which are really important for understanding the current situation on the Russian forests.
It turns out that I don't entirely agree with the conclusions the authors came to on this on the first issue about emptiness,
and I will explain why and how, and I would like to somewhat of the issue on the issue of cultural capitalism.
So I built my presentation on these two issue. What I disagree is connected to the theme of the conference.
The authors claim that Russia almost intentionally cultivate intentionally sorry cultivates alternatives in peripheral regions.
The authors insist that Russia was to have liminal space to ensure security,
while liminal space is produced through different access restrictions open and some closed this again and really, to some extent with this assertion.
Nevertheless, I think Russia appears in such claim as a coherent will.
However, let's suppose that different regional and federal governments and the very different population have the same,
and we should agree that the somewhat irrational understanding of security
and coldness and have the same desire to create empty space along the border.
But in this case, one needs to explain how such coherence is achieved.
I am afraid I disagree with the coherence of the same perception of security or closeness may arise, probably,
but it would result from a complex interweaving of rational incentives and maybe not entirely rational attitudes.
I do illustrate my comments with a small, ethnographic case the Book of Mormon, chants of the City of Subordinate and the thoughts of Ski.
It said that Zettl was created based on MacGregor's,
but it doesn't say that the was created based on the secret global settlement, which rules for bodily iTeam surroundings.
For Woodley, where Zuma has a secret settlement subordinate to you long or you see them on the map.
And actually, my ethnography based mainly on subordinate 21 in Soviet times nuclear warheads was taught in probably to world,
while in sublimely 18 meaningful missiles.
Although military surrounding space will still preserve the infrastructure, barracks, officers, buildings, even clinics,
schools and kindergartens, and the government decided to use the former sabudana 18 for Bazardo and Cosmodrome.
Actually, the book mentioned this story.
The residence of Subordinate 20, while remained remain utterly, may also hold that something valuable would be placed in their old tome.
One of the auction was that Gazprom would accommodate builders and then employees of Advanced Development Zone.
The regional administration are strongly supportive of this idea.
Most importantly, the people who State Duma February 21 dreamed of such an opportunity,
including the skilled migrants from Turkey, would come to life in this race.
As a result, the town would find that we totally keys to be called dreams about Darleen.
We would not come to Gazprom House or is it in place in a completely new space?
However, it spoils for me or how people on this are two very similar Janelle.
Logically related towns felt about emptiness and the occupancy of the people in Neveldine.
They were eager to have the tunnel filled because. Otherwise they were in danger of becoming imagine the West Village and the
people in Sokolski were happy to remain closed and therefore relatively empty.
Hala, was there any irrationality in this case?
I mean, this story left I I think so. Returning to coherency,
people in Sokolski were angry with the central government while locals are leaving the local hero with the regional government.
Moreover, was. Sokolski, even ordinary situations has a unique you most cases, Russian swimming, military balance, all frontier garrisons.
Our secret towns are not even tonight to share the faith of family, but the fate of of empty dying regional spaces.
At the same time, most not all, but most new development zone, like a war zone through territorial development are built on entirely empty new places.
And I agree with Caroline, who proposed a long time ago in our conversation that could use an empty space for development
of the Russian governmental perception of people and managing and controlling the Russian front.
This perception and actions actually irritate the population very much,
and people simultaneously see empty and crumbling tunnels and new facilities not connected with them.
So that again, is a point about incoherence.
I assume you so if you put on and you see the people in government have a coherent policy or coherent understanding of Clinton,
both create an empty space on the periphery. What is the apparatus for achieving such a coherence?
That's my first question. Yeah, I was told that he ended.
The second one is about the culture of capitalism.
The book argues that such cultures in Russia and China are totally different.
Seventy years of anti-capitalism of the USSR resulted in building modern Russian capitalism on the remnants of collectivism.
And incidentally, unlike China, which was lucky enough to build its version of capitalism and simple everyday commerce,
the also the authors also argued that Russia has chosen a nearly liberal version of capitalism,
and the discussions of the culture of capitalism in the book include rural ethnography and Chinese farmers and the Russian words.
I have some with my graphic observation, which I want to introduce before asking my question.
So with my colleague, who finished the paper and revealed how the big Russian migrant holding came to
the city crime three years ago by a cloud farm by China is a great audience.
For over a decade, Chinese and Russian who are the holders of, I would say, antagonistic structures and culture.
The rest of the world has a vertical organisation. However, it is controlled by a single centre, while China's one has a horizontal structure,
which looks like there is no structure to just small Chinese farmers who work separately.
In the paper,
we argue that the Russian hold them would not have entered the region if previously China's target of holding would not rent land shares from small,
rational local horse holders. In other words,
I assume that the Chinese culture of capitalism was much more suited to coping with the ruins of the West Coast than the Russian culture.
In my other article also write about holding relatives a small one which came into the
real estate in almost girlboss and quickly collected land from small shareholders.
Apart from the land, the villagers were almost immediately deprived of all the resources of the youth of the 1990s in their petty capitalism.
They produced meat, milk store games. They made moonshine and even gushes all that.
The economist from below will evaporate in just a few years after Holden came out on your bet.
What are you seeing happened because of the Soviet remnants?
Not in the sense that there was too much optimism, but because the villagers were not ready to collaborate.
More precisely, the lack of collaboration resulted in the failure to scale up their petty capitalism,
inability to build supply chains and finally inability to defend themselves against dispossession.
The sad conclusion I came to is the disposition apparently awaits all small landholders
in agricultural regions like Moscow West or even less familiar with the payments to cry.
So it's my understanding, and they want to ask to what extent you agree with these three Russians.
So neoliberal capitalism continues to.
See, form all resources, including those suitable for economies from below, what will happen to people who cannot get into mainstream economy?
Will the poor become truly beggars? Finally, what is the role of China and China's farmers or Chinese traders through intermediaries before they work,
the kind of source for survival of rational oracles, but luckily now the real economy and the mechanism of fall for disposition?
Thank you. That's all my questions.
Thanks, Natalia, for these two very challenging and interesting questions,
especially since you've been backed up with rich ethnography that's based on on on a great deal of research and expertise.
I think the best thing would be for Katie and Frank.
In whichever order you want to react spontaneously to these questions, I know they're there.
They are quite deep questions and you probably can't comprehensively address them all at this point.
But if you'd be able to at least comment on on the questions, and I know each each participant's different perspectives.
So who would like to to start us off? Practicality, it's fun to go or you go like, Oh, I'm trying to digest this so much, yeah, yeah, does.
There's a lot of things I think we will.
We won't be able to really, I mean, if we try to answer every question, we would give such and such limited responses.
Let me maybe try with OK.
Just looking at all the really interesting questions I'm I'm I.
I'm going to try and see if I can answer maybe some of the points Madeleine and Allison
were raised in a kind of maybe combine some of the questions I'm thinking about the.
The point that you made about the way we kind of try to avoid the high theory.
I I mean, yeah, I know what would I think about this?
Me trying to remember what my ideals were about this.
I think that's as you said this. That can be a kind of a disjuncture between the theory, high theory and ethnography.
And I think Madeleine kind of raised also this idea of disjuncture between the different kind of views
that we had like going from the more generally to the more the more ethnographic in particular.
And I think maybe these two views, I mean, these two kind of angles are.
May be unavoidable in the work we do as anthropologists, because if we were just describing,
you know, very my new ethnographic specificities without contextualising it,
either in the larger view, all through theory, I think that would be that that would not bring very much for the reader, right?
I would not bring a very important contribution. It would be more like a travel book, just very descriptive.
I think we we I guess. Bye bye.
Not going into theory,
maybe we fell into a different kind of modes of putting things in parallel in terms of looking at trying to contextualise within a larger,
larger context and looking at a low point, I don't know.
I don't know whether you think of that. Could I broken, though, Frank?
I think one thing is that we were actually instructed that this book is a trade book.
It's not even an academic trade book. It's a trade trade book.
And we were told not to to go into anthropological theory because the readership is not supposed to be anthropologists.
It's supposed to be kind of an informative book for the general public.
And so that is certainly for me. That's one reason why I thought we should not not engage with anthropological theory at all, really.
But I was actually really happy to hear Alessandro say he finds that refreshing, but we're glad if that's true.
But in relation to Madeline's point about, on the one hand,
a sort of broad view of political structures as it were and detailed ethnography, I think we did.
At least some of the book tried to bridge that. For example,
in the case of the island where where you do have very detailed accounts of people living there and things that have happened and all contingencies,
I mean, things like the floods the Murray River keeps flooding, sweeps everything away, all the Chinese stuff they're building, it got swept away.
But at the same time, tried to touch into.
As far as we could understand, the political structures on either side, which were were rather different.
I mean, the government, as a local mayor,
a sort of urban structure and for you and on one hand and Barofsky on the other tried to link him to that and
to sort of hint at the point of how those cities on on the edge sort of linking to the bigger structures.
So we tried to make a stab at it may not be very successful, but we had to go.
I think we tried to bring a kind of a general context of the border,
but then then provide details on and showing that the the multi vocal aspect of that.
I mean, the difference between regions is something that is really important in terms of how people perceive the other side.
There's really, I mean, even on the local level, I think that the ethnography about like Irish,
as you can see, some people might feel very positively about China or some might not.
But even even at the individual level, which is kind of interesting, even people that were very eager to go to China,
they would still retain some of the some of the stereotypical kind of imagination of the other.
And I think this is the link between the imagination, something that both you and my men and you, Alessandra, I raised.
I mean, this weather influences like K-pop can be disruptive.
I'm not sure. I think they can easily be accommodated into a more general view of the other.
And the way things representation of the other tend to be filtered through that.
So the representations of in China, the representation of the Russians and to be filtered through a model of understand the
other that we see reflected in the way indigenous populations are represented as well,
in a way that is sanitised, that is accommodated within a general framework,
whether that be the pre-eminent role or position of the Han Chinese remains unaffected.
So in a way, there is maybe a lack of real engagement also on the on the Chinese side.
I feel as this kind of filtered through. So I think this these are some of the.
The examples I really show how you can I mean, we try to to accommodate a larger view on a smaller view and that there does really that does not,
I think at this juncture is really they they feed off each other. I think the local views,
even if they seem to be completely different from from a general idea of the other they self-tanner filtered through and accommodated within that.
I think this. Well,
I'd like to have a make a brief answer to one of Madeleine's questions where you asked about the new sociality and these kind of
links across the border and the sort of theoretical implications of this when at the same time in the book we say these very,
very deep civilizational differences exist between Russia and China.
And you ask if these new ethnic sort of links could be disruptive if I get to write Madeleine or whether they're just exceptions,
that proves the rule. I think.
I think it's a very interesting question, because I think maybe when we we did say that the Russia and China are different all the way down.
That applies to the majority populations,
but I'm not sure that it does about the larger ethnic minorities who I think really do maintain their own history and traditions very,
very actively, and especially so in the last sort of 10 15 years.
I mean, this is in both China and Russia sort of outburst of books sort of genealogies,
revisions of republication of earlier books by by great authors from that ethnicity and so on and immense detailed attention to this.
You know, when I was doing fieldwork in the Kurdistan region, there were every village.
Maybe you're familiar with this, too, Madeleine, from your field.
Every village had somebody who was trying to compile things and getting places and dates and ancestors and all written down,
and they were publishing little local books about it.
And from one sort of area near the sort of edge of the by coast, a barrier to area, the I have a collection of seven mega tomes,
each of them 500 pages of local reminiscences and eminent people from here and the genealogy going to this plan, all that kind of stuff.
And so that's obviously not all patriots and bodegas going for that kind of thing,
but that really does seem to have a significant number of people who do.
And I think it may particularly be people who live in these kind of new perspective, new kind of places.
They're kind of there. They somehow make a living. And, you know, I'm quite a little, you know,
they have a small plot and so a few sheep and whatever it is and what they are interested in is a lot of this stuff.
You know, their own kind of stuff, cultural stuff.
And I thought, in a way, may I'm not sure so sure on the Chinese side, but it may.
I think from what I've seen, where I've worked in China, more in detail is not near the border, but I think it probably does apply.
As Alessandra was pointing out that in China, you could be quite close to the border and it doesn't mean very much,
necessarily, you know, your focus is on your own communities.
And I think that the only people who are exceptions to this are people like the bullets and burgers who actually live on both sides.
I'd like to try and answer Natalia's question.
I'm trying to the seem to be lots of them. I'm trying to get my head around, really.
I mean, what you said? The rocks for board May 21 and 20 and 18, that's really, really interesting.
And I just didn't know all of that.
And so it's new to me, and I had to put together words I could were writing about snowboarding without as much information as you obviously got.
But I think you're quite right that this is not coherent and that if we implied in the book that
the Moscow kind of structural picture works all the way down to the everybody on the edges,
that's wrong. And you're quite you're quite right. And we shouldn't have implied that if we did, I hope.
I hope we didn't, really. So I think the fact that there are different views on this and there are different standpoints
from from different positions like the governor who region or who may be a temporary person,
but sort of municipal heads who made them much more permanent. These are all that kind of thing would make a huge difference in people's
attitudes and what they want to get out of things like the resources from Utah,
if they can tune into it at all or their attitudes to the Chinese kind of agri business is sitting there amongst them.
So I really do agree with you, it's not coherent. But if you're asking me to predict what's going to happen there, you know much more than I do.
Natalia, you better tell us. Frank, did you have any further thoughts on what was said before?
Uh, yes, I, I,
I I've been very interested in what Madeline said about the individual fields because that's
something I've been kind of working on and looking at a multi-sensory all kind of views of borders.
I've been interested in haptic and touch in the auditory.
And I think you're right.
My let I maybe I don't know whether we've made enough of a point to them that I think the fact that it's really about reality, I mean,
optic is really I mean, the vision vision in terms of senses is the one that really stays the most remote is the least proximate, all the senses.
And I think that's that says a lot about the relationship between the two because everything is mediated at a distance.
I was really kind of surprised when I was in regulations in particular that you would not hear Chinese music.
There's actually there's I remember looking at the movies that were at the movie theatre and they were,
you know, either Russian or Western, and there was very little engagement with Chinese culture.
The only the only exception to that would be food.
Food is actually was a big thing, and that's very proximal. So again, it kind of complicates the issue.
But it's true that the first the first interaction that you see between the two is
really kind of a lack of interaction because it's really mediated through the eyes.
But that doesn't mean that is the only thing happening.
I mean, I I think it was maybe I mean,
I remember the being surprised by the number of Chinese restaurant eating Black Irish and or really kind of there was a lot is very popular food.
People enjoy going to China for the food. So there's really engagement at that level in a way that is very kind of a non
mediated in a way like having a kind of direct engagement for the Chinese side.
I think there is I mean, in particular, you can you do hear Russian music and you have some accommodation made for Russian food,
but I don't know to what extent is I think it's really kind of it's really fodder for the Russian audience.
It's not something that it's not for Chinese consumption.
So I think again, the experience of the Chinese with with Russia is also mediated through vision, especially because,
you know, you have these bulbs going on the river, just looking at China and Russia and then coming back.
So but yeah, and I guess in terms of food stuffs, you do have things sold in L.A. for for domestic tourists,
but is not really kind of a big engagement with that. So I think I think that was a really interesting point that you raised on something.
I I I don't I can't recall how much we make of it in the book.
It's definitely an interesting point.
There's so many other things that we should be responding to, but I I think it's kind of difficult to do that in the allocated time.
So I don't know whether maybe we can just email you directly once we've had time to reflect a bit more to respond to your questions.
Yes, what I was, I was thinking that we could you I could help curate these responses and send them around to you.
And that this could be turned into some sort of more extended written forum or something that that could generate interest in the book because,
well, it's a U.S. carrier. It's a trade book, mostly, but it's I think it has a lot of repercussions.
And for anthropologists interested in this area, I was wondering, Carrie, what you thought about Natalia's second point,
which was that this dispossession, I think, she said, awaits everyone in the Far East,
that this this story that you've told of, of people, you know, following Black that the first 30 years they've been able to to kind of leave,
OK, and these somewhat empty lands or even, you know, small scale agriculture.
But but there's a certain model of capitalism that's know in Russia now that's going to so we kind of growth that not left you.
I know you're not predicting the future, but there's certain predictive qualities in your work.
Do you see the the trajectory or the way things are going with the, you know, the informal economy there?
Well, as I remember it, the abductor account was actually itself quite chronologically.
And he expressed a changes in the way those kind of that hunting ground idea worked.
And I think he does end up by arguing that the big companies kind of tend to kind of blot out what else is going on,
but they only do it by actually squeezing out the sort of middle rank companies,
which then turn into more egregious and potentially illegal kind of activities.
And I how can I predict?
I've no idea, really, but I think there could be a process on the one hand of growing poverty,
which I think is what Natalia's suggesting a real poverty there,
but also a continuation of the of that process, of the more kind of you've got some mega structures that are sort of hanging over you.
There will be things squeezed out at the edges. There will be things that won't fit into it.
There'll be people who refuse to work in it.
And I think the example of the fishing show that to some extent that that there are just going to be people who
have kind of gotten used to doing it outside the bounds of what should be the kind of regular way of doing things.
And they're pretty adept at doing it. And I I don't think that that is going to end as far as I can make out.
I don't know what do you think, Natalia, actually?
I think that we can tell about the Russian forest, but the wall, I mean, the territory is huge.
There are different processes.
If we focus on a village, I mentioned it is very specific because it's very comfortable, it's very productive for growing soybeans.
And you know, that's working as a global commodity. But if we focus on some small villages somewhere in the middle of nowhere, yeah,
actually, people still have a lot of basis for their economies from below as you well.
So I assume that the territory will proceed to be more and more like different territory,
which adjusted to cities or territories which have some roads a little bit, then an a lot of roads.
However, there are some connectivity, so if the settlement homes have.
Settlements have roads and access to site of them.
We will see real beggars there or just a migration, people just leave the spaces.
The problem with there would not be villages. I mean, look, villagers as we used to be used to meet, but other religions probably would be different.
So your prediction is not a good for the scholars.
However, the the reality which we are now observing is changing so fast because of these advanced
development areas and also because of the new to thinking that forest the hectare we you also.
Oh yes, for sure. You wrote the well, the mentioned about this, but I mean, the audience also know about the new there.
So that's also changed the situation.
There are a lot of people who would like to go would like to leave somewhere in the middle of nowhere and that that's actually not the process.
So. Yes, I think I agree, I think that's very interesting.
I mean, in a burrito, which was, I know better than any other place there are,
there are small Buddhist monasteries which largely have got around them,
whole little camps and settlements in little villages of people from Moscow and over in the
West who want to go and live in a Buddhist environment in nature and all that is happening.
But I also think that it's ethnically very diverse.
You mentioned kind of class differences, but I think if we look at people like idiots,
I think that their village life may continue quite in a sort of not a beggarly way that
they will manage to keep things going because they are so much better at collaboration.
You mentioned lack of collaboration, but some of these ethnic groups are really good at it,
and they just have that way of operating with their kin networks and the cousin who comes in and does that and all this kind of thing.
And it it really works. OK, so you can have I've seen it an old couple who are really physically unable to do a lot of the jobs that
are required for them to keep the plot going and the cow and the firewood for winter and all of that.
But they managed to do it because they were in a kind of entire collaborative environment.
And this includes somebody who will drop down from the city at the weekend and bring something to them or,
you know, exchange relations with a lot of people in the village, that sort of thing.
So I think I don't see that dying out exactly, but I think it just be specific.
I agree with the idea.
Could I just say, Madeleine, Madeleine needs to leave just now, so we thank her then and we'll continue the conversation with Madeleine.
Another point, but thank you. Yes, I apologise. I want to do with childcare.
Thank you for the opportunity. Thank you. You know, right?
But I think we can talk for another 15 minutes or so. So, Natalie, you were just responding to Katie.
I just wanted to agree that the ethnic diversity doesn't matter for entirely into the Russian forests or Siberian islands.
Mm-Hmm. Yes, they are different in human relations.
And will they give people? Yeah, I mean,
one other question that I thought we may discuss was Alessandra talked about the Chinese view of nature and there's a chapter on resources.
And in the book, frankly, I think you were the author of an.
I mean, one of the things that I was wondering is, you know, there's this talk of is there are Res Publica,
a sure thing between can there be a sure thing between Russia and China?
And obviously as we we sit on this precipice of the 21st century and people are wondering what the the ecological commons and famously wrote,
the man said that he imagined that that Russia could be in the 21st century.
This superpower of equality with its this wonderful, well, goodness and there was no need to to exploit boys.
So can you see any crossover between Chinese models of nature and and Russian ones?
Or is it anything you see a big ecology thing?
Um. Well, there seems to be, I think, maybe a lack of infrastructure or context in order for them to really collaborate.
I think the collaboration between them has been successful for things like the protection of the Tigers, for instance,
for the creation of creation of large parks that are done that need to be then that need to be kind of across
the two states and advantage they have in terms of collaboration is that because things are so centralised.
If you have really kind of the two heads of states kind of pushing for something that is
easier for things to happen across across the border rather than in in in other places,
there would be a multiplicity of actors, there would be different stakeholders with different opinions.
So I think this has been kind of this way of maybe kind of a more authoritarian model can be useful in a way.
But yes, it is. Still, there are different pressures on both sides, I think.
I mean, there's more pressure on the Chinese side to to use the land in a more in a more productive way and not aggressively necessarily,
but in a more more intensively. Whereas in Russia, they can be less less of a demographic pressure, I guess, two two years down the line.
So I don't know whether that answers your question, and it's not that you got something more specific in mind.
No, so that's that's great, thanks for. Well, we have a let's let's have a question from the charts.
Would you like to ask this, or shall I read the notes? What would you prefer?
Bill, can you hear me? Yeah. I don't know. Oh, OK.
I don't mind either way, to be honest. Baby, please, please, please, please don't.
Right? OK. So I just have a. So give you some background because I did.
And I'm from the northeast of China, myself at Jilin province.
And then I did a little bit of kind of a pilot research at the border Wenchuan city,
which lies between the three countries border China and Russia, and also North Korea,
and the my research was mainly to detect a North Korean kind of interactions with the on the borderline
with China and how the North Koreans sent labours and especially the female labourers to China,
worked for the Chinese factories, etc. and then a one phenomenon.
When I was there, I noticed this. So most of the trade, cross-border trade,
the loss of actually trade between the North Korea and the side and also the Chinese side and
the most of them done activities are actually done by the Chinese ethnic minority people,
the Chinese Koreans. So my question is, in what way if I can think about the Chinese histories and how how these Korean,
especially these regional histories, how this region was formed and then the cuts between the different countries?
And it seems the Chinese government control all these type of regions very much in response to the ethnic minority people who occupies this region.
And then another way to say is, um, either way,
the Chinese government across the history or Chinese recalls across history seems to leave this frontier red
zone as kind of a buffer zone against the potential non-Chinese going to be invasions or Chinese expansions.
So in what way related to the theme of this emptiness is intentionally done.
This reaches left empty in order to to maintain control of the central goals of the heartland of China.
And then ironically, this kind of emptiness leaves the free that of the local ethnic minority people
in China to actually do to trade or to to organise their own social life.
That's my main kind of ancestral graphic kind of question relating to this theme.
And then in my methodological one is mainly just because I did the research,
my research it my main doctoral research is on Chinese engagement in Africa.
And then one of the problems I always encounter when I was doing research is how to
relate to Chinese migrants social life everyday lives on the ground related to a higher,
very much macro scale of a China-Africa international relations.
So how can we do as democratic research on international relations?
Mm hmm. Well, can I respond to that? I think that's a really, really interesting.
I think, um yeah, I think you may be right about this buffer zone idea in relation to China and the border.
And it may be why, for example, in the case of the area around for yuan,
they've created a really very extensive what you call it, a kind of nature, nature reserve sort of thing.
It's it's for preserving marshes and that kind of thing, which is expanded and now includes the Chinese half of the island.
And in a way that leaves it empty. But I'm in my experience, I'm not sure that it needs that much opportunity for local people.
Well, you mentioned trade, of course, the North North Korean border.
I don't know how much is going on across the across the river.
I the may be I mean, I think this some illegal fishing in that kind of thing.
But it's very difficult to document and I don't get the impression that there's immense
sort of the fact of there being some clear land creates that much opportunity,
maybe illegal hunting, but I don't know. And I also think that the Chinese government policy with regard to indigenous peoples is changing.
And we see this in relation to Inner Mongolia, where they're insisting that even primary school children now should have all the lessons in Chinese.
And I think there are parallel things in other parts of Southwest China, Tibet and so on.
And I think the the very broadly speaking,
the earlier model in which you have a China as a sort of multi-national nation is gradually changing into a sort of homogenous Chinese nation,
much more homogenous with just less opportunity, less funding, less place for all the different cultures inside.
And quite a lot of pressure for the generations to be increasingly signified that that's what the impression I get.
I just to add to that, I think there is really kind of a hardening of borders in that sense in China.
The point you made about the kind of ethnic groups kind of similar to the ones on the other
side being used as kind of intermediaries in a way kind of a kind of a liminal space.
So that's something I you don't have with the the Russian border.
I mean, you have small groups, I mean, smaller groups like the various other moguls who have taken that kind of role.
But you don't have like a large Russian population on the Chinese side, the way you would have, you know,
kind of substantial Korean minority in China that would be able to take on that role and be fully bilingual.
But yes, I think there's there seems to be kind of a signing of the border in the sense of there.
There's a drive towards a more modern as a state.
I think so. I agree. I would agree with Carrie, though. Well, the thing we we have time for one more question, which comes from for lawyer Artur,
what would you like to ask your question or shall I read it out? OK, I'll read.
OK, so reload your rates, your book, your book does indeed go against the new Cold War mentality, where Russian and China,
Russia and China are portrayed as the ultimate villains plotting against the Western democracies behind their backs.
However, there is truth in increasing cooperation between China and Russia and beyond in post-Soviet countries.
In my view, would say in Belarus, which is an important trade hub on the way to Europe,
Chinese is a popular language to study in schools and some ATMs of Chinese language.
Chinese agricultural companies are present in Ukraine.
If, in addition to the border, you were to choose another or other field sites to study Russia China relations.
What would you choose? Well, one of the people in our project was a Chinese expert on on Russia who who hails from Shanghai,
and he was telling us that actually Chinese government and UN companies prefer not to engage, particularly in this border region, which they do.
They don't see us having much perspective, and it's full of too much bureaucracy and hindrances of every kind.
And they prefer, in fact, to go to parts of western Russia.
I mean, he didn't mention Belarus anyway.
I think the implication of what he's saying is that a large amount of Chinese investment in Russia is nowhere near this border.
It's somewhere else. It's in areas where it looks more kind of economically promising.
And because it's sort of bigger scale, it's less hampered by sort of local kind of bureaucratic complications that that's what he was saying.
And in terms of where we could do research on Russia and China,
what a personally Central Asia think would be kind of interesting because they're both invested in that kind of third space.
And I think it would be interesting to see what's happening there in terms of
how people feel about this kind of shift in kind of geopolitical orientation.
Now. But.
Yeah, in Eastern Europe can also be very interesting.
Eastern and Central Europe gesture to to see a kind of be our I was kind of a the old kind of connexions with the former Soviet Union.
That would be kind of interesting to. Well,
I think that's very fitting final comment to to end our discussion today on which is how this
this book on the Edge is going to initiate and inaugurate a whole research agenda about Russia,
China, relations and anthropology. Hopefully, at least this contributing to my current project in the Russian Far East,
and I thank you for engaging with our conference theme in such a generous way and sharing that book with us.
And I hope that it reaches an anthropological audience and a broader audience in the world than they are.
Because, of course, is one of the most important topics in the world today and with certain alliances
or certain hostilities that the Alexandru was intimating in his comments.
It's essential there are a more nuanced perspective is out there.
And I think that that's one thing that this book really is a wonderful example of public anthropology with so being willing that on its sleeve.
So with that, I encourage everyone to the by and read this book and share the world.
And we look forward to coming out in November, and I will connect frank and carry with these these wonderful responses from the tally,
Alessandra and Madeline, and look forward to more publicity being generated for the book, as well as more research ideas coming out of it.
So I would conclude our discussion with that.
There's another final discussion in another in this room.
OK, we'll stay on this link, but that's all for now.
A bit a bit this book. So thank you very much, Katie and Frank for your time and Alexandra Natalie for reading the book.
Thanks. Thank you for setting it up. We're really grateful.
It's kind of you. Yeah. McCrone. It's my pleasure.