List of Figures vii

Series Editors’Preface ix

Notes on Contributors xi

Acknowledgements xvii

Introduction: On the New Politics of Margins in Asia: Mapping Frontier Assemblages 1
Jason Cons and Michael Eilenberg

Part I Frontier Experimentations 19

Framing Essay: Assemblages and Assumptions 21
Christian Lund

1 All that Is Solid Melts into the Bay: Anticipatory Ruination on Bangladesh’s Climate Frontier 25
Kasia Paprocki

2 Subsurface Workings: How the Underground Becomes a Frontier 41
Gokce Gunel

3 Groundwork in the Margins: Symbiotic Governance in a Chinese Dust‐Shed 59
Jerry Zee

Part II Frontier Cultivations and Materialities 75

Framing Essay: Frontier Cultivations and Materialities 77
Nancy Lee Peluso

4 Mainstreaming Green: Translating the Green Economy in an Indonesian Frontier 83
Zachary R. Anderson

5 Growing at the Margins: Enlivening a Neglected Post‐Soviet Frontier 99
Igor Rubinov

6 Patterns of Naturecultures: Political Economy and the Spatial Distribution of Salmon Populations in Hokkaido, Japan 117
Heather Anne Swanson

Part III Frontier Expansions 131

Framing Essay: Assembling Frontier Urbanizations 133
K. Sivaramakrishnan

7 China’s Coasts, a Contested Sustainability Frontier 139
Young Rae Choi

8 Spaces of the Gigantic: Extraction and Urbanization on China’s Energy Frontier 155
Max D. Woodworth

9 Private Healthcare in Imphal, Manipur: Liberalizing the Unruly Frontier 171
Duncan McDuie‐Ra

Part IV Frontier Re(Assemblies) 187

Framing Essay: Framing Frontier Assemblages 189
Prasenjit Duara

10 Frontier 2.0: The Recursive Lives and Death of Cinchona in Darjeeling 195
Townsend Middleton

11 Frontier Making and Erasing: Histories of Infrastructure Development in Vietnam 213
Christian C. Lentz

Conclusion: Assembling the Frontier 229
Michael Eilenberg and Jason Cons

Bibliography 235

Index 259

Frontier Assemblages offers a new framework for thinking about resource frontiers in Asia. Frontier assemblages are the intertwined cultural, spatial, material, ecological, and political economic processes that produce particular places as resource frontiers at particular moments in time. Contributors offer rich ethnographic and historical studies of both spaces of extraction and production, mapping a set of radical transformations unfolding across Asia. In doing so, they collectively formulate new ways to think about how resource frontiers are made, their implications for those who live and work within them, and their rippling consequences across space and time.

Frontier Assemblages brings together noted anthropologists, geographers and sociologists to rethink a set of processes that are reconfiguring millions of people’s relationship to land. In doing so, it opens a set of new conversations about resource frontiers and their relationship to pasts, presents, and futures of economy, ecology, and life in the margins of Asia.

Written for scholars of human geography, political ecology, political and environmental anthropology and more, Frontier Assemblages maps the flows, frictions, interests, materialities and imaginations that accumulate in frontier spaces to transformative effect.

'Cons and Eilenberg’s Frontier Assemblages is a collection of richly textured essays tracing the incorporation of remote areas into new territorial formations in the context of Asia. Framed through the notion of assemblage, the collection speaks to the complexity, lability, and nonlinearity of these transformative processes. It will be essential reading for border scholars and specialists of Asia alike.'
Franck Billé, University of California, Berkeley 


'This fascinating collection sheds new light on the varied dynamics of frontier-making across a diverse and sometimes surprising set of spaces in Asia. It is especially strong on frontier temporalities of anticipation and ruin, and on the productive (not just extractive) work of resource frontiers. Frontier Assemblages is highly stimulating, analytically rich, and not to be missed.' 
Derek Hall, Wilfrid Laurier University