Frontier Assemblages

The Emergent Politics of Resource Frontiers in Asia

Jason Cons, Michael Eilenberg, Jason Cons, Michael Eilenberg

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781119412052, 9781119412069
• eBook ISBN: 9781119412106
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Frontier Assemblages offers a new framework for thinking about resource frontiers in Asia

• Presents an empirical understanding of resource frontiers and provides tools for broader engagements and linkages
• Filled with rich ethnographic and historical case studies and contains contributions from noted scholars in the field
• Explores the political ecology of extraction, expansion and production in marginal spaces in Asia
• Maps the flows, frictions, interests and imaginations that accumulate in Asia to transformative effect
• Brings together noted anthropologists, geographers and sociologists

Part I
Frontier Experimentations

Framing Essay: Assemblages and Assumptions

Christian Lund

Is there more God in an elephant than in an oyster?

– Samuel Beckett, Echo’s Bones, 1933

The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the World than it finds.

– Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620

Assemblages have gained currency as an object of study as well as a method of inquiry. The Introduction to this book by Cons and Eilenberg shows how objects are conceptualized as complex assemblages by a variety of disciplines and how it can be used to analyse specific historical constellations of dynamics. There is something intuitively appealing about looking at the world as assemblages. The empirical world is messy, and one is well‐advised to be open to the multitude of actors, resources, objects, ideologies and discourses without assigning over‐determining qualities to any of them prior to analysis. The world can, indeed, be seen as an infinite number of oysters and elephants making up a transitory mosaic of facts. Openness is a sound scholarly reflex, but we should not claim to be more open‐minded than we can be. It can be tempting to simply ‘let the naked facts speak for themselves’, yet, no naked facts ever spoke to anyone except through concepts and assumptions, however vaguely defined or unacknowledged. In the social sciences, the potential variables are simply too many for us to not select and specify a few. We select all the time, and we do it through concepts and assumptions; through epistemology. The transition from observation to analysis, is not like passing through the green gate in an airport with ‘Nothing to Declare’. We always travel with our epistemology, our concepts, and our assumptions. To not declare them does not mean that you do not have any. But by not questioning the concepts and categories with which we read the ‘naked facts’, and by not making our assumptions clear and laying them out, it is easy to make a set of observations look speciously unequivocal and pervasive (Lund, 2014: 226). We always have intellectual preferences about what pickings of the magpie’s nest of reality we find important and can foreground, and what knick‐knack we should disregard for the moment. It is imperative to acknowledge that the inspection of an assemblage is inevitably guided by assumptions. And they should be made explicit. Declare the goods.

This line of thinking has roots in Immanuel Kant’s work (Kant, 1953; Wolf, 1999). He argues that rather than insisting that our cognition reflects ‘real’ objects, we may try to see ‘real’ objects as conforming to our cognition. That is, we ‘see’ things through a lens of a priori concepts formed through experience; these newly observed things then become part of our new experience, and we can have another, new, look. This suggests a never‐ending, iterative approximation between a priori concepts, cognition of ‘the world’, and the formation of renewed a prioris. Hence, the transition from what we see to what we understand requires open conceptual determination; maybe especially with assemblages. In the Introduction to this book, for example, Cons and Eilenberg focus on materiality, not for materiality itself but for its connection to, say, institutions. They focus on institutions not for institutions themselves but for their connection to, say, ideas. They focus on ideas, not for the ideas themselves …, and so on.

In her work on anticipatory ruination in Bangladesh, Kasia Paprocki identifies a series of dynamics with clear assumptions about how materiality and its institutions link with ideology, even when, in the case of the World Bank, it is packaged as ‘robust options’ with a sheen of scientific objectivity. Paprocki shows how governments and other influential policy makers perform so‐called epistemic interventions. By framing large climate‐based threats as inevitable, active, ‘pre‐emptive’, destruction of people’s living conditions is simply to give history a helpful push. Hannah Arendt shows in her writings that reading ideology as ‘natural law’, or ‘natural history’, of a teleological movement opens for terror, where the ‘political’ yields to ‘emergency’ and ‘the inevitable’ (Arendt, 1979). By using her concepts, Paprocki abstracts and edits her data, and she makes particular inherent qualities of it prominent. Paprocki’s identification of pre‐emptive ruination suggests that climate change has the potential to sire nasty ideologies. Not only climate‐change deniers will use their denial as convenient excuse; those who acknowledge climate change can equally use this to justify and expedite atrocities when opening new frontiers.

In her work on sub‐surface frontiers, Gökçe Günel explores the efforts to exploit the underground; not to extract resources but to put waste back in, more specifically carbon dioxide. This is a complex technical operation with equally complex questions of law, ownership, risk, and interests. The analysis focuses on the discursive and accountancy work that goes into reconstituting the underground to become a space for burying the excrements of the carbon‐based economies. Günel makes the assumption that not only are frontiers assembled, but are multi‐local. The site of accountancy work is not in situ of the depositories, but more importantly, the storage will increase the relative value of other resources very far away (where it would otherwise have been dispersed, dumped, or deposited). This opens for an important complementary perspective to existing works on the carbon frontier (Mitchell, 2011; Watts, 2014), and the striking feature is the confluence of interests. This new frontier of carbon dioxide storage, has many resemblances with the extraction of the carbon in the first place. One reason is the technical and legal nature of the operations, another that storage of carbon dioxide makes the emission problems ‘go away’, and can therefore be used to justify continued carbon dependency.

In his work on governance and the Chinese dust‐bowl, Jerry Zee deals with an extraordinary frontier. Contrary to conventional frontiers that mark the expansion of capitalism and the destruction of rights and institutions pushing ever further out, this frontier rolls the other way. Zee makes the assumption that even when certain frontier dynamics are halted, it makes sense to see this slow‐down as the result of the acceleration of other, competing frontier dynamics valorizing new resources, new activities, and in the end, new actors. Dust storms and desertification in Inner Mongolia appear to move closer to Beijing and threaten the Chinese heartland. So, to combat this threat, the government authorities engaged in complex measures to control the environment as part of their larger project to create a ‘socialist ecological civilization’. This policy reworks the frontier regions of China. The ‘environment’ is, in Zee’s text, a feat of symbiotic engineering where government works through logics and incentives to have herders and others replant, stabilize and re‐establish the landscape. The different subject positions that government policy animates are far from stable, however. The efforts to roll back the physical frontier of sandstorms and stabilize the environment may, thus, also open a new frontier of destabilization of the social environment, labour, and belonging. A destabilization that could surpass the damage of storms.

The three contributions work on new frontiers and show how to stretch the concept. ‘Social scientists do not discover new events that nobody knew about before. What is discovered is connections and relations, not directly observable, by which we can understand and explain already known occurrences in a novel way’ (Danermark et al., 2002: 91). Paprocki, Günel, and Zee encourage us to see how new valuable resources emerge in changing contexts. Climate calamities, such as flooding, sand storms, and global warming, produce new emergencies that can override the political. And they open for the use of resources as varied as the land of the evicted/evacuated, the underground for geological carbon sequestration, and the labour of herders‐turned‐into‐foresters and a desert which may, one day, be fertile. These situations do not conjure up the usual images of frontiers as the wild west and un‐conquered expanses. Instead, they demonstrate how frontiers represent, most basically, the discovery or invention of new resources; not new places. They may be in our back‐yard, hell, they may be our back‐yard. As when the municipality of Copenhagen ‘discovered’ an ‘unused’ marshland behind a now redundant industrial area and decided that hover‐flies, green toads, and Copenhageners’ Sunday outings, were standing in the way of profitable condominiums filled to the brim with new tax‐payers who could fund a metro line. Consequently, a ‘frontier is not space itself. It is something that happens in and to space. Frontiers take place’ (Rasmussen and Lund, 2018: 388). This ‘something that happens’ which turns the potential into an actual resource, is complex. It is a complex of material resources that are restructured by actors who wield power and knowledge. They hold the capacity to frame the potential in narratives of prosperity, and security, and then undergird their interests with ideology and force, law, and exception (Mattei and Nader, 2008). Such complexes have structure, contours, and topography: The world is not flat. Messy, yes; flat, no. The social and political landscapes that emerge from these works are far from the hodgepodge of ‘everything is connected and matters equally’. Instead, the three authors’ concepts illuminate the contours of the frontiers and show the unfolding of events as contingent necessities (Jessop, 1990) rather than pure accident or structural predestination. Through their epistemological experimentation, the contributors open up new vistas for the understanding of the rocky resource frontiers.

1
All that Is Solid Melts into the Bay: Anticipatory Ruination on Bangladesh’s Climate Frontier

Kasia Paprocki

What are the ruins of the bourgeoisie?

– Walter Benjamin (1999)

Bangladesh's southern coastal region is home to the world’s largest delta, that of the Ganga, Meghna, and Brahmaputra rivers, that drains into the Bay of Bengal. This region, and particularly the southwestern district of Khulna, is often referred to as the most vulnerable to climate change in the world.¹ Key actors in policy, academic, and practitioner c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Frontier Experimentations
• Framing Essay
• Part II: Frontier Cultivations and Materialities
• Framing Essay
• Part III: Frontier Expansions
• Framing Essay
• Part IV: Frontier Re(Assemblies)
• Framing Essay
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement