Roads and Non-places at China's Northwestern Border: Marc Augé Revisited

• In Event: Frontier Spaces: The Production of Place and Meaning in China's Borderlands

Abstract

Marc Augé (1995: 63) argues that “if a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.” The spaces of communication and circulation—highways and railways among others—are for Augé such “empirical non-places” (1995: xxii). The present paper critically engages with this claim by exploring both the historicity and the “now” of roads in southern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest China. In the paper I suggest that roads are embroiled in complex webs of meaning and produce historically distinct spatialities. In my analysis, roads appear as multiple places. They are inscribed with different meanings by individuals engaged in planning, constructing, maintaining, and using them. Migrants who settle along roads, and even those individuals who only gaze at roads unable to profit from the connectivity, also establish specific relationships with roads and project on them their longings and desires. In Xinjiang, a multi-ethnic border region, road networks are additionally a part of borderland management with its specific security concerns and technologies of territory. The present paper discusses the multiplicity of meaning ascribed to roads and complex spatial relationships they establish based on the research material collected in southern Xinjiang during a 13-month anthropological fieldwork.

Author

• Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich