Rutgers University Press Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Territory, and the Future on India's Northern Threshold (Politics of Marriage and Gender: Global Issues in Local Contexts)

Intimate Geopolitics begins with a love story set in the Himalayan region of Ladakh, in India’s Jammu and Kashmir State, but this is also a story about territory, and the ways that love, marriage, and young people are caught up in contemporary global processes. In Ladakh, children grow up to adopt a religious identity in part to be counted in the census, and to vote in elections. Religion, population, and voting blocs are implicitly tied to territorial sovereignty and marriage across religious boundaries becomes a geopolitical problem in an area that seeks to define insiders and outsiders in relation to borders and national identity. This book populates territory, a conventionally abstract rendering of space, with the stories of those who live through territorial struggle at marriage and birth ceremonies, in the kitchen and in the bazaar, in heartbreak and in joy. Intimate Geopolitics argues for the incorporation of the role of time - temporality - into our understanding of territory. Review "Intimate Geopolitics is a timely and important intervention in Himalayan studies....[An] engaging and ethnographically rich narrative, which treats a geopolitically loaded question with a great deal of sensitivity and understanding."-- "Journal of Asian Studies""Intimate Geopolitics is a richly crafted book, which forcefully demonstrates that politics of the intimate are intricately tied to global political maneuverings. Its empirical detail, animated through stories of the people Smith interviewed in Ladakh, reveal that the deeply personal and painful struggles refuse to be contained to the intimate. They bristle with tension and vulnerability about territory, sovereignty, and belonging." --Rupal Oza "author of The Making of Neoliberal India""This deeply moving ethnography takes us through a complex interplay of intimacy, reproduction, bodies and nationhood in the North Indian region of Leh and Ladakh. Smith's work is courageous and critical, and once again confirms that reproduction can never be apolitical, and that longing and belonging cannot be delinked."--Amrita Pande "author of Wombs in Labor" About the Author Sara Smith is an associate professor in the department of geography at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.