In the presentation of their new book On the Edge: Life Along the Russia-China Border, which has been shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2022, Dr Franck Billé and Professor Caroline Humphrey will take us on a journey through these little-explored borderlands. They will reveal extraordinary contrasts between Russia’s slumbering forest villages and China’s dynamic urban sprawl; the frequent tension and occasional war between two of the world’s political giants; the revival of indigenous cultures in some places and the adoption of foreign symbols in others; and the cross-border connections that persist despite the ruling regimes’ discouragement.
The border between Russia and China traces a mysterious line along thousands of miles of taiga, forest and river. Two distinct worlds have emerged on either side of this 2,600 km-long border, but interaction between them remains at a minimum. In some places, Chinese and Russian cities face each other across the Amur River; in others, the gulf between two countries lies imperceptible in thick forest. What does it mean for two major authoritarian powers to share such an extensive border?
Join Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey for a wide-ranging conversation about the fractious Russia-China relationship and the people whose lives are governed by it, underpinned by their pioneering and rigorously researched book On the Edge. The discussion will be moderated by Professor Bruce Grant.
Please note that this is an online-only event. The ticket will allow you to join live as well as to watch the recording of the conversation later.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Caroline Humphrey (University of Cambridge) is an anthropologist who has worked in Russia, Mongolia, China, India, Nepal, and Ukraine. She has written on inequality and exclusion; theories of ritualisation; the politics of memory; naming practices; ethics and conceptions of freedom. Recently she has completed an international research project on socio-economic interactions on the Russia–Mongolia–China border. Caroline’s recent publications include: A Monastery in Time: The Making of Mongolian Buddhism (Chicago 2013); Trust and Mistrust in the Economies of the China-Russia Borderlands (Amsterdam University Press 2018); and On the Edge: Life Along the Russia-China Border (Harvard 2021), co-authored with Franck Billé.
Franck Billé (University of California, Berkeley) is an anthropologist and geographer, working at the intersection of cartography, sovereignty, and territoriality. His research interest has led to a number of book projects, both single-authored and collective, organised around the theoretical foci of the volumetric, the corporeal, and the topological. He is the author of Sinophobia: Anxiety, Violence, and the Making of Mongolian Identity (Hawaii 2015), editor of Voluminous States: Sovereignty, Materiality, and the Territorial Imagination (Duke 2020), co-editor of Yellow Perils: China Narratives in the Contemporary World (Hawaii 2019), and co-author, with Caroline Humphrey, of On the Edge: Life Along the Russia-China Border (Harvard 2021). He completed his PhD in Social Anthropology at Cambridge.
Bruce Grant is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at New York University. A specialist on cultural politics in the former Soviet Union, he has done fieldwork in both Siberia and the Caucasus. He is author of In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas (Princeton 1995), a study of the Sovietisation of an indigenous people on the Russian Pacific coast, and winner of the Prize for Best First Book from the American Ethnological Society; as well as The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus (Cornell 2009), on the making of the Caucasus in the Russian popular imagination. He was co-editor of Caucasus Paradigms: Anthropologies, Histories, and the Making of a World Area (LIT 2007) and The Russia Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke 2010). His current research explores the early twentieth-century, pan-Caucasus journal Molla Nasreddin (1905-1931) as an idiom for rethinking contemporary Eurasian space and authoritarian rule within it.