I am honored to comment on Engseng Ho's provocative essay through the lens of my own research on inter-Asian connections and mobilities in and beyond Asia. The abstract for the panel, entitled “The Flow of Migration beyond the State,” stated that “much scholarship on Asia is framed by organizational schemes that engage in spatial relationships and contrasts” (e.g., cores and peripheries, uplands and lowlands, mainland and islands) and that the idea of the “nation as a bordered entity” cross-cuts and transforms such common binaries. The panel's abstract also stated that the panel's goal was to “interrogate these borders” and to “rethink these schemes” and forge new understandings about nations, regions, and Asia by addressing questions such as: What happens when we decenter the state? What concepts of society capture external relations and engagements? What concepts apart from class, status, race, and gender will help us get a better understanding of transregional phenomena?
Ho's essay is rich in its historical border-crossing examples and broad in its scope both disciplinarily and geographically. He introduces important critiques of globalization and advocates for the importance of inter-Asian and other “transregional” approaches that avoid reifying older concepts of state and society and a global-local divide. He proposes a number of concepts. They are not entirely new, but they are valuable for pulling together many of the words and ideas that have been used—perhaps inconsistently and perhaps without enough explicit critical analysis—for quite some time. These concepts include: (1) mobility as a method for moving outside of the “internalist box” of the demarcated social spaces of conventional social theory; (2) disaggregation-reaggregation where mobility of people, objects, capital, etc. can move together or separately; (3) connections that are made and unmade and do not form an unbroken line; (4) circulation, which can include repetitions and hierarchies of movement through time; (5) partial societies and fragmentary societies that are not holistic or static; (6) transregional and intermediate scale that shifts away from a global-local close up or distance view; and (7) outside-in analysis, as opposed to analyses that shift from the inside out, that then allows a return to conventional units that are examined in new ways.
As I read his essay, I vividly recalled several museums I visited in Melaka and Singapore that materially illustrated complex contacts between diverse groups of mobile people past and present. Such contacts are literally engraved into wooden armoires with motifs from multiple regions; built into the designs of ships, sails, and masts; infused in the cuisine through various spices and ingredients; and in the elusive and rich Peranakan identities formed initially by marriages of migrant men and local women. Ho's discussions of Asian circulations and connections, goods and people, and capital and relationships also reminded me of ideas that are fictionally brought to life in Amitav Ghosh's Ibis trilogy, set in the nineteenth-century inter-Asian region of China, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and beyond. Those stories illustrate a variety of material and social connections between regions. Flows of goods, capital, and people—including those who range from elites to forced laborers of different ethnic, class, and religious backgrounds—are all part of the trilogy. Ho's terms provide conceptual language for such transregional Asian stories and histories.
Ho criticizes the by now well-worn and overly essentialized binaries of local and global, primitive and modern, and village and state. As he notes, these binaries do not fit easily within the context of Asia. He also questions all-encompassing assumptions about “globalization” that can eclipse specific areas, spaces, and timeframes of Asia through time. Simultaneously, he evokes a rich history of what I would normally fit within a conception of global or transnational studies, a body of literature that is well aware of many of these critiques. Significant attention has been paid to the many forms of cross-border connections and discontinuities in Asia, in the many panels of Inter-Asian Connections conferences sponsored by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) over the past decade.
My own research interests have long related to mobilities, connections, and circulations in transnational Asia—transcending, traversing, transforming and crossing, going beyond, or through the nation-state. As such, my use of transnationalism is not so different from Ho's notion of transregionalism. Yet transregionalism has the advantage of avoiding the nation or nation-states as the key referents and encompassing them in a wider Asian sphere. My work has mainly examined gender in relation to mobilities and immobilities of various sorts. Of particular interest is the “power geometry” of who moves and who does not; as Doreen Massey (Reference Massey1994, 149) notes, some people are “in charge of” their mobility and others are largely “on the receiving end.” This includes inter-Asian cross-border marriages or marriage-like relations, temporary migrant labor, overstayers, and asylum seekers. I have been particularly interested in mobilities that do not fit the expected or normative patterns, those that explode easy social and spatial categorization and labeling—for example, queer or non-normative migratory family formations; displaced people and migrants whose status shifts between documented, undocumented, or stateless; children who are “born out of place” (where their mother or parent has no right of abode); and what I have called “migratory cycles of atonement” in which single mothers reenter migration to escape the stigma of single motherhood and to redeem themselves by sending remittances “home” (Constable Reference Constable2011, Reference Constable2014). “Home” itself is a fascinating concept, as it is not geographically or conceptually fixed, but socially, culturally, and historically shifts through time, especially for migrants and other mobile people (Constable Reference Constable1999).
Although the panel abstract calls for attention to concepts apart from class, status, race, and gender, I find such a move difficult and inadvisable—especially in my own work. All of the patterns of inter-Asian mobility I study are deeply inflected by gender, sexuality, and class, often race or ethno-national identities, and citizenship or lack thereof. It is precisely because, I would argue, the lenses (not filters) of gender, class, and race or ethnicity reveal subtle, or not so subtle, shifts in older patterns of mobility that they are important. In earlier centuries, mostly men from China migrated to Southeast Asia and they often married or established families with local women. Today it is often women from certain regions of South and Southeast Asia who move as brides or as temporary migrants to other parts of Asia, the Middle East, or the Gulf States. The ways in which such patterns are differently gendered point to—using Ho's terms—new sorts of mobilities, disaggregations and reaggregations, connections, and circulations. They are also the concepts that are useful to follow inside and out.
As Ho advises, forging new understandings about nation-states, regions, and Asia does require and benefit from a careful and critical interrogation of the concepts we use. But I would argue that avoiding class, status, race, and gender is counter-productive. Instead we should consider how such patterns shift in relation to mobilities of various sorts. I am not advocating blindly for reiterating the same old tired concepts. Rather I ask how the content of these concepts—and others such as home, family, and community—can shift and transform as people, goods, ideas, and capital traverse and enter or return from new geographical regions. Historically, Ann Stoler's (Reference Stoler1989, Reference Stoler1992) work illustrates the importance of the politics of gender, sexuality, reproduction, and race in relation to social class and power in the Dutch East Indies. The specific patterns of gendered mobility differ today from one Asian region to another: Singapore and Hong Kong hire hundreds of thousands of female domestic workers from Indonesia and the Philippines, but Singapore also recruits male migrant workers from various regions of Asia in significant numbers, while Hong Kong generally does not, at least not on the same scale. This radically changes the sexual politics of both locations and the regulations and disciplinary regimes (Constable, Reference Constableforthcoming b).
Gendered mobilities result in particular reproductive politics of race and class. Some Indonesians and Filipinas return home from working abroad with mixed-race babies, sometimes valued for their beauty and lighter skin, sometimes stigmatized for their apparent differences and illegitimacy. Shaping what Ho calls “partial societies,” or “partial notions of society, rather than the synthetic and holistic ones of classic theory, or the fragmentary ones of postmodern cultural studies,” Indonesian and Filipino women have married Pakistanis, Indians, and many other South Asians. This echoes older patterns of South Asian men who took Chinese wives in Hong Kong's early colonial times but it is also a significantly different phenomena. Some of these women go with their husbands to Pakistan or India, but many are left behind as single mothers, sometimes adding to Hong Kong's asylum seekers. Some women who get pregnant in Hong Kong remain as overstayers until they are caught. Some become asylum seekers or live with asylum seeker husbands (from many parts of Asia and Africa) and join their partners’ refugee claims in the hope of being resettled as a family in a third country (since Hong Kong does not permanently accept refugees). Some migrant workers’ children born abroad are adopted by expatriate or mixed-race families and thus cross multiple lines of class, location, and nationality. Some women use labor migration as a way to escape bad marriages or to escape marriage altogether in their countries of origin. Some return home with a same-sex partner, and sometimes a child as well. Some cut their ties to family entirely. Many of Ho's concepts apply to these examples but methodologically and analytically from an inside-out analysis.
I share Ho's interest in moving beyond conventional and overly fixed concepts of society, globalization, and the state, but my anthropological methodologies for doing so are significantly different. While I am interested in history, and it is useful in my work, my research is primarily ethnographic. It is based on close encounters and participant observation with people. I mostly look and listen (Constable Reference Constable2005, Reference Constable2007). Conversations with and stories told by people who have come to know me and trust me over months, years, or sometimes decades form the basis of my writings. I read social theory, but the words, lives, stories, and experiences of my interlocutors are often more important to me in revealing patterns that do not lend themselves, or that refuse to submit easily to, or that rub up uncomfortably against, conventional large-scale or universalizing concepts of globalization, or state and societal borders and boundaries that are assumed to be fixed and unambiguous.
Of course I cannot claim that such deeply embedded social science concepts do not shape my framework; no one is free of intellectual biases. I am aware that problematic societal and cultural concepts creep in. But by listening to migrant women and accompanying them in their daily routines in what I consider the margins, interstices, or counterhegemonic spaces of society (what Ho calls partial or fragmentary societies), I have become especially attuned to fleeting or exceptional and temporary social formations and social spaces rather than in hegemonic and more common and enduring ones. While there are some continuities between the Chinese amahs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the “foreign domestic helpers” of today, the discontinuities of past and present are as relevant as the continuities. Moreover, what Ho calls “disaggregation-reaggregation,” where people, land, labor, and capital can be separated by the different pathways, directions, trajectories, and patterns in relation to border-crossings are also important, as capital and labor flow in multiple directions often differently from family formations, and yet both are shaped by gender and class. The stories of Filipina and Indonesian migrant workers, Chinese or Filipina so-called “mail-order brides,” or migrant workers who get pregnant abroad by men who are often asylum seekers or undocumented workers from other parts of Asia or Africa do not easily lend themselves to conventional notions of society and state, nor to conventional divides of class, status, and organic solidarity, although gender, class, and citizenship (or lack thereof) remain of critical importance. Their stories relate to mobilities, connections, and circulations, what Ho calls partial societies, among which I would include temporary, queer, or failed family formations, and transient transnational communities that are not diasporic (Constable, Reference Constableforthcoming a).
Ho's essay includes criticism of classic social theory for the blinders that it—especially the work of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim—has seemingly imposed on us. And though I have not found Weber or Durkheim explicitly useful of late, Marx's work on class—updated and challenged or complemented with ideas about precarious labor, post-Fordist production, flexibility, and affective labor in relation to specific forms of neoliberalism and late capitalism in different regions of Asia—is still useful. Even more applicable and useful is Deleuze's work that shifts the focus from Foucault's “disciplinary societies,” which are exemplified by bounded and enclosed social and institutional spaces such as schools, prisons, and hospitals, to ideas about “societies of control” (Deleuze Reference Deleuze1992; Foucault Reference Foucault1979). Deleuze suggests that societies of control are replacing disciplinary societies. This involves a shift from the localized discipline of institutions and enclosed social spaces (and here we can include older enclosed concepts of “society” and “the state”) to contexts in which control is far less spatially bounded and is instead characterized by flows and movements of information and surveillance, more akin to what Deleuze calls “gaseous substances” that transcend conventional borders. These updated methods of control include e-passports, computer records, biometric records, the Internet and other networks of communication, surveillance mechanisms, and information technologies that differ from older paper records, identity cards, and forms of discipline. Deleuze's insights have fostered work on newer sorts of border-crossing logics in the shape of networks, flows, or assemblages (Ong and Collier Reference Ong and Collier2005). Such concepts are useful for understanding connections between new sorts of movements of people, ideas, and things, including new types of migratory family formations in and beyond Asia (Constable, forthcoming a).
The borders of families and communities have become more fluid, existing or ceasing to exist across unbounded space. They cannot be assumed to correspond (if they ever did) with localized households or “family” as a clearly demarcated social unit. These concepts also apply to my recent ethnographic project that examines the introduction of e-passports to Indonesians in Hong Kong and that illustrates not only the use of new technologies in creating “legibility” of citizens (Scott Reference Scott1998), but also the shortcomings of citizenship technologies as common, so-called natural identifiers such as names, dates of birth, and places of birth are rendered suspect or meaningless in the process of migration.
Ho opens his essay with a (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) statement: that globalization served to kick anthropologists out of villages and historians out of nation-states—expanding their focus beyond the local and the national. Not to draw too fine a point, but many anthropologists left villages long ago and others are still studying villages today, not in isolation but in relation to their connections to other parts of Asia and the world through migration, remittances, politics, marriages, and so on (e.g., Chan Reference Chan2017; McKay Reference McKay2016). This raises a temporal question: When did globalization begin and how is it related to an older world systems approach? If the world system was a form of globalization (Abu-Lughod Reference Abu-Lughod1993), we might argue that globalization began long before anthropology was established as a discipline.Footnote
1
I agree with Ho that globalization—on its own—is not such a useful concept. But it depends how we define it. Many studies that might be thought of as dealing with “globalization” today however, my own included, are in fact are focused on particular transregional mobilities and relationships between peoples and spaces.Footnote
2
These mobilities, for example, Asian cross-border marriages and gendered labor migrations, are clearly shaped by gender, class, race, status, and history, but they are also configured by and configuring new patterns. The new patterns may hint at older ones, but they are also different from them. And while the “state” has never been the central focus of my work, the state has nonetheless never disappeared. States are especially relevant in their attempts to regulate access to borders, and to define or constrain the rights of citizens both within and beyond their own borders.
The panel I organized for the first SSRC Inter-Asian Connections conference in 2008 and the resulting edited volume were called Migrant Workers in Asia: Distant Divides and Intimate Connections (Constable Reference Constable2011). The panel used gendered labor migration of Southeast Asian women (mostly but not only Filipinas and Indonesian women) as a starting point from which to rethink our assumptions of what constitutes “Asia” beyond conventional social and geographic mappings, and to query the roles of sending and receiving states in regulating and/or protecting migrant workers in settings ranging from Hong Kong and Singapore to Israel, Jordan, and Yemen. Neither concepts of “society” nor “the state” provided the primary framework or the entry point for these studies. Specific patterns of mobilities, regulations, and fluid forms of sociality that cross-cut, traversed, transcended, and also transformed states were at the center. Tracing these patterns provided studies that, like Ho's work, promote critiques of simplistic notions of globalization, question simplistic binaries of global and local, move beyond the boundaries of states or villages, and offer new openings and angles from which to examine continuities, changes, various mobilities, and social formations through time in Asia and beyond.
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I am honored to comment on Engseng Ho's provocative essay through the lens of my own research on inter-Asian connections and mobilities in and beyond Asia. The abstract for the panel, entitled “The Flow of Migration beyond the State,” stated that “much scholarship on Asia is framed by organizational schemes that engage in spatial relationships and contrasts” (e.g., cores and peripheries, uplands and lowlands, mainland and islands) and that the idea of the “nation as a bordered entity” cross-cuts and transforms such common binaries. The panel's abstract also stated that the panel's goal was to “interrogate these borders” and to “rethink these schemes” and forge new understandings about nations, regions, and Asia by addressing questions such as: What happens when we decenter the state? What concepts of society capture external relations and engagements? What concepts apart from class, status, race, and gender will help us get a better understanding of transregional phenomena?
Ho's essay is rich in its historical border-crossing examples and broad in its scope both disciplinarily and geographically. He introduces important critiques of globalization and advocates for the importance of inter-Asian and other “transregional” approaches that avoid reifying older concepts of state and society and a global-local divide. He proposes a number of concepts. They are not entirely new, but they are valuable for pulling together many of the words and ideas that have been used—perhaps inconsistently and perhaps without enough explicit critical analysis—for quite some time. These concepts include: (1) mobility as a method for moving outside of the “internalist box” of the demarcated social spaces of conventional social theory; (2) disaggregation-reaggregation where mobility of people, objects, capital, etc. can move together or separately; (3) connections that are made and unmade and do not form an unbroken line; (4) circulation, which can include repetitions and hierarchies of movement through time; (5) partial societies and fragmentary societies that are not holistic or static; (6) transregional and intermediate scale that shifts away from a global-local close up or distance view; and (7) outside-in analysis, as opposed to analyses that shift from the inside out, that then allows a return to conventional units that are examined in new ways.
As I read his essay, I vividly recalled several museums I visited in Melaka and Singapore that materially illustrated complex contacts between diverse groups of mobile people past and present. Such contacts are literally engraved into wooden armoires with motifs from multiple regions; built into the designs of ships, sails, and masts; infused in the cuisine through various spices and ingredients; and in the elusive and rich Peranakan identities formed initially by marriages of migrant men and local women. Ho's discussions of Asian circulations and connections, goods and people, and capital and relationships also reminded me of ideas that are fictionally brought to life in Amitav Ghosh's Ibis trilogy, set in the nineteenth-century inter-Asian region of China, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and beyond. Those stories illustrate a variety of material and social connections between regions. Flows of goods, capital, and people—including those who range from elites to forced laborers of different ethnic, class, and religious backgrounds—are all part of the trilogy. Ho's terms provide conceptual language for such transregional Asian stories and histories.
Ho criticizes the by now well-worn and overly essentialized binaries of local and global, primitive and modern, and village and state. As he notes, these binaries do not fit easily within the context of Asia. He also questions all-encompassing assumptions about “globalization” that can eclipse specific areas, spaces, and timeframes of Asia through time. Simultaneously, he evokes a rich history of what I would normally fit within a conception of global or transnational studies, a body of literature that is well aware of many of these critiques. Significant attention has been paid to the many forms of cross-border connections and discontinuities in Asia, in the many panels of Inter-Asian Connections conferences sponsored by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) over the past decade.
My own research interests have long related to mobilities, connections, and circulations in transnational Asia—transcending, traversing, transforming and crossing, going beyond, or through the nation-state. As such, my use of transnationalism is not so different from Ho's notion of transregionalism. Yet transregionalism has the advantage of avoiding the nation or nation-states as the key referents and encompassing them in a wider Asian sphere. My work has mainly examined gender in relation to mobilities and immobilities of various sorts. Of particular interest is the “power geometry” of who moves and who does not; as Doreen Massey (Reference Massey1994, 149) notes, some people are “in charge of” their mobility and others are largely “on the receiving end.” This includes inter-Asian cross-border marriages or marriage-like relations, temporary migrant labor, overstayers, and asylum seekers. I have been particularly interested in mobilities that do not fit the expected or normative patterns, those that explode easy social and spatial categorization and labeling—for example, queer or non-normative migratory family formations; displaced people and migrants whose status shifts between documented, undocumented, or stateless; children who are “born out of place” (where their mother or parent has no right of abode); and what I have called “migratory cycles of atonement” in which single mothers reenter migration to escape the stigma of single motherhood and to redeem themselves by sending remittances “home” (Constable Reference Constable2011, Reference Constable2014). “Home” itself is a fascinating concept, as it is not geographically or conceptually fixed, but socially, culturally, and historically shifts through time, especially for migrants and other mobile people (Constable Reference Constable1999).
Although the panel abstract calls for attention to concepts apart from class, status, race, and gender, I find such a move difficult and inadvisable—especially in my own work. All of the patterns of inter-Asian mobility I study are deeply inflected by gender, sexuality, and class, often race or ethno-national identities, and citizenship or lack thereof. It is precisely because, I would argue, the lenses (not filters) of gender, class, and race or ethnicity reveal subtle, or not so subtle, shifts in older patterns of mobility that they are important. In earlier centuries, mostly men from China migrated to Southeast Asia and they often married or established families with local women. Today it is often women from certain regions of South and Southeast Asia who move as brides or as temporary migrants to other parts of Asia, the Middle East, or the Gulf States. The ways in which such patterns are differently gendered point to—using Ho's terms—new sorts of mobilities, disaggregations and reaggregations, connections, and circulations. They are also the concepts that are useful to follow inside and out.
As Ho advises, forging new understandings about nation-states, regions, and Asia does require and benefit from a careful and critical interrogation of the concepts we use. But I would argue that avoiding class, status, race, and gender is counter-productive. Instead we should consider how such patterns shift in relation to mobilities of various sorts. I am not advocating blindly for reiterating the same old tired concepts. Rather I ask how the content of these concepts—and others such as home, family, and community—can shift and transform as people, goods, ideas, and capital traverse and enter or return from new geographical regions. Historically, Ann Stoler's (Reference Stoler1989, Reference Stoler1992) work illustrates the importance of the politics of gender, sexuality, reproduction, and race in relation to social class and power in the Dutch East Indies. The specific patterns of gendered mobility differ today from one Asian region to another: Singapore and Hong Kong hire hundreds of thousands of female domestic workers from Indonesia and the Philippines, but Singapore also recruits male migrant workers from various regions of Asia in significant numbers, while Hong Kong generally does not, at least not on the same scale. This radically changes the sexual politics of both locations and the regulations and disciplinary regimes (Constable, Reference Constableforthcoming b).
Gendered mobilities result in particular reproductive politics of race and class. Some Indonesians and Filipinas return home from working abroad with mixed-race babies, sometimes valued for their beauty and lighter skin, sometimes stigmatized for their apparent differences and illegitimacy. Shaping what Ho calls “partial societies,” or “partial notions of society, rather than the synthetic and holistic ones of classic theory, or the fragmentary ones of postmodern cultural studies,” Indonesian and Filipino women have married Pakistanis, Indians, and many other South Asians. This echoes older patterns of South Asian men who took Chinese wives in Hong Kong's early colonial times but it is also a significantly different phenomena. Some of these women go with their husbands to Pakistan or India, but many are left behind as single mothers, sometimes adding to Hong Kong's asylum seekers. Some women who get pregnant in Hong Kong remain as overstayers until they are caught. Some become asylum seekers or live with asylum seeker husbands (from many parts of Asia and Africa) and join their partners’ refugee claims in the hope of being resettled as a family in a third country (since Hong Kong does not permanently accept refugees). Some migrant workers’ children born abroad are adopted by expatriate or mixed-race families and thus cross multiple lines of class, location, and nationality. Some women use labor migration as a way to escape bad marriages or to escape marriage altogether in their countries of origin. Some return home with a same-sex partner, and sometimes a child as well. Some cut their ties to family entirely. Many of Ho's concepts apply to these examples but methodologically and analytically from an inside-out analysis.
I share Ho's interest in moving beyond conventional and overly fixed concepts of society, globalization, and the state, but my anthropological methodologies for doing so are significantly different. While I am interested in history, and it is useful in my work, my research is primarily ethnographic. It is based on close encounters and participant observation with people. I mostly look and listen (Constable Reference Constable2005, Reference Constable2007). Conversations with and stories told by people who have come to know me and trust me over months, years, or sometimes decades form the basis of my writings. I read social theory, but the words, lives, stories, and experiences of my interlocutors are often more important to me in revealing patterns that do not lend themselves, or that refuse to submit easily to, or that rub up uncomfortably against, conventional large-scale or universalizing concepts of globalization, or state and societal borders and boundaries that are assumed to be fixed and unambiguous.
Of course I cannot claim that such deeply embedded social science concepts do not shape my framework; no one is free of intellectual biases. I am aware that problematic societal and cultural concepts creep in. But by listening to migrant women and accompanying them in their daily routines in what I consider the margins, interstices, or counterhegemonic spaces of society (what Ho calls partial or fragmentary societies), I have become especially attuned to fleeting or exceptional and temporary social formations and social spaces rather than in hegemonic and more common and enduring ones. While there are some continuities between the Chinese amahs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the “foreign domestic helpers” of today, the discontinuities of past and present are as relevant as the continuities. Moreover, what Ho calls “disaggregation-reaggregation,” where people, land, labor, and capital can be separated by the different pathways, directions, trajectories, and patterns in relation to border-crossings are also important, as capital and labor flow in multiple directions often differently from family formations, and yet both are shaped by gender and class. The stories of Filipina and Indonesian migrant workers, Chinese or Filipina so-called “mail-order brides,” or migrant workers who get pregnant abroad by men who are often asylum seekers or undocumented workers from other parts of Asia or Africa do not easily lend themselves to conventional notions of society and state, nor to conventional divides of class, status, and organic solidarity, although gender, class, and citizenship (or lack thereof) remain of critical importance. Their stories relate to mobilities, connections, and circulations, what Ho calls partial societies, among which I would include temporary, queer, or failed family formations, and transient transnational communities that are not diasporic (Constable, Reference Constableforthcoming a).
Ho's essay includes criticism of classic social theory for the blinders that it—especially the work of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim—has seemingly imposed on us. And though I have not found Weber or Durkheim explicitly useful of late, Marx's work on class—updated and challenged or complemented with ideas about precarious labor, post-Fordist production, flexibility, and affective labor in relation to specific forms of neoliberalism and late capitalism in different regions of Asia—is still useful. Even more applicable and useful is Deleuze's work that shifts the focus from Foucault's “disciplinary societies,” which are exemplified by bounded and enclosed social and institutional spaces such as schools, prisons, and hospitals, to ideas about “societies of control” (Deleuze Reference Deleuze1992; Foucault Reference Foucault1979). Deleuze suggests that societies of control are replacing disciplinary societies. This involves a shift from the localized discipline of institutions and enclosed social spaces (and here we can include older enclosed concepts of “society” and “the state”) to contexts in which control is far less spatially bounded and is instead characterized by flows and movements of information and surveillance, more akin to what Deleuze calls “gaseous substances” that transcend conventional borders. These updated methods of control include e-passports, computer records, biometric records, the Internet and other networks of communication, surveillance mechanisms, and information technologies that differ from older paper records, identity cards, and forms of discipline. Deleuze's insights have fostered work on newer sorts of border-crossing logics in the shape of networks, flows, or assemblages (Ong and Collier Reference Ong and Collier2005). Such concepts are useful for understanding connections between new sorts of movements of people, ideas, and things, including new types of migratory family formations in and beyond Asia (Constable, forthcoming a).
The borders of families and communities have become more fluid, existing or ceasing to exist across unbounded space. They cannot be assumed to correspond (if they ever did) with localized households or “family” as a clearly demarcated social unit. These concepts also apply to my recent ethnographic project that examines the introduction of e-passports to Indonesians in Hong Kong and that illustrates not only the use of new technologies in creating “legibility” of citizens (Scott Reference Scott1998), but also the shortcomings of citizenship technologies as common, so-called natural identifiers such as names, dates of birth, and places of birth are rendered suspect or meaningless in the process of migration.
Ho opens his essay with a (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) statement: that globalization served to kick anthropologists out of villages and historians out of nation-states—expanding their focus beyond the local and the national. Not to draw too fine a point, but many anthropologists left villages long ago and others are still studying villages today, not in isolation but in relation to their connections to other parts of Asia and the world through migration, remittances, politics, marriages, and so on (e.g., Chan Reference Chan2017; McKay Reference McKay2016). This raises a temporal question: When did globalization begin and how is it related to an older world systems approach? If the world system was a form of globalization (Abu-Lughod Reference Abu-Lughod1993), we might argue that globalization began long before anthropology was established as a discipline.Footnote 1 I agree with Ho that globalization—on its own—is not such a useful concept. But it depends how we define it. Many studies that might be thought of as dealing with “globalization” today however, my own included, are in fact are focused on particular transregional mobilities and relationships between peoples and spaces.Footnote 2 These mobilities, for example, Asian cross-border marriages and gendered labor migrations, are clearly shaped by gender, class, race, status, and history, but they are also configured by and configuring new patterns. The new patterns may hint at older ones, but they are also different from them. And while the “state” has never been the central focus of my work, the state has nonetheless never disappeared. States are especially relevant in their attempts to regulate access to borders, and to define or constrain the rights of citizens both within and beyond their own borders.
The panel I organized for the first SSRC Inter-Asian Connections conference in 2008 and the resulting edited volume were called Migrant Workers in Asia: Distant Divides and Intimate Connections (Constable Reference Constable2011). The panel used gendered labor migration of Southeast Asian women (mostly but not only Filipinas and Indonesian women) as a starting point from which to rethink our assumptions of what constitutes “Asia” beyond conventional social and geographic mappings, and to query the roles of sending and receiving states in regulating and/or protecting migrant workers in settings ranging from Hong Kong and Singapore to Israel, Jordan, and Yemen. Neither concepts of “society” nor “the state” provided the primary framework or the entry point for these studies. Specific patterns of mobilities, regulations, and fluid forms of sociality that cross-cut, traversed, transcended, and also transformed states were at the center. Tracing these patterns provided studies that, like Ho's work, promote critiques of simplistic notions of globalization, question simplistic binaries of global and local, move beyond the boundaries of states or villages, and offer new openings and angles from which to examine continuities, changes, various mobilities, and social formations through time in Asia and beyond.