A Rippa
Biographic Data
| ID | 38257 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Rippa |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Rippa |
| SIGNATURE | RIPPA A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tallinn University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9533-3988 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 141 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
When is a Frontier? Nostalgia and Aspirations at China’s Borderlands with Burma and Laos
This article argues that nostalgia forms a crucial part of the imaginary that drives frontier economies—not in contradiction but alongside the future-oriented imaginaries of speculation, anticipation, and appearances. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted across three key locales—Pianma, Mong La, and the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone—this study introduces the concept of “frontier nostalgia” to analyze how these spaces function as sit…
Trading in troubled times
The COVID‐19 pandemic and the 2021 military coup have dramatically affected the lives and livelihoods of communities across Myanmar. Border areas in the north of the country also suffered from the prolonged closure of the Chinese border due to PRC COVID containment measures. The city of Ruili, the main trading hub between the two countries, witnessed one of China's strictest series of lockdowns, and its border with Myanmar remained largely closed…
The Travelling Carpet
This chapter builds on ethnographic research with and among carpet dealers in Islamabad and Kashgar and aims to recount the little-known story of Xinjiang carpets from Khotan, as these have travelled between China, northern Pakistan and Afghanistan since the opening of the Karakoram Highway in the 1980s. As cross-border relations grew with the opening of the road, Pakistani carpet collectors and traders began looking for old Khotanese carpets. Th…
Where tourism fails
This paper develops the notion of post-working landscape to describe how labour, largely no longer performed, continues to shape how local communities understand their landscape in two Alpine valleys in Italy's Trentino Province. Following the abandonment of mountain agriculture, the landscape here is undergoing a process of rewilding, as part of which human traces (terrace fields, mountain pastures, etc.) are being erased. Post-working landscape…
Infrastructure and the environment in anthropology
This article maps out a nascent field that is currently taking shape, one that bridges anthropological considerations of infrastructure, political ecology, and science and technology studies with transdisciplinary approaches to ethics of care beyond the human. This emerging field stimulates a re-thinking of the relationships between the built and the non-built environment and encourages exploring infrastructure as indexes by which to grasp, ethno…
Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia
Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong and the Center for Asian Studies at the
The Russia/China border
Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey. On the edge: Life along the Russia-China border. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2021
Turning Land into Capital
Hunting, Rewilding, and Multispecies Entanglements in the Alps
The rewilding of Alpine landscapes has often triggered the expansion of wildlife populations and the 'return' of previously near extinct species. Among those, the wolf has generated much debate and is a frequent object of contention between mountain communities and environmentalist groups. This paper aims to reorient such polarising debate by foregrounding multispecies entanglements through the experience of wildlife hunters in an Italian Alpine …
Imagined borderlands
Building on a ‘biographical’ approach to national boundaries, this paper traces the history of the China‐Myanmar border—its formations, disappearances and rematerializations. In doing so, it identifies three alternative imaginaries that have characterized and shaped these borderlands throughout the past one and a half century. These imaginaries—terrain, technology and trade—sketch out some of the ways in which borderlands are seen, perceived and …
From Guest Traders to Live Streamers
This article seeks to deepen our understanding of how markets are constituted and organized by foregrounding an anthropological focus on hospitality. Drawing on ethnographic insights from the gemstone market in China’s Yunnan province, I argue that the use of online retail platforms has radically transformed social relations among traders, retailers, and customers. Despite such changes, and the seeming demise of ‘hosting’ as a central aspect of t…
Infrastructures and b/ordering
Border regions worldwide have gained prominence for how nation-states order, divide and understand the world. This is increasingly made explicit in the selective management of global commercial and human flows, leading to a paradoxical development and a major dilemma for the contemporary bordering practices in border regions: that of concurrently facilitating differentiated mobility while ensuring territorial integrity, securing both territories …
Archive
In this introduction to the collection Alessandro Rippa reflects on the nexus of infrastructure and archive, and on the vast possibilities that a creative, multi-method and open-ended co-exploration of objects, practices and places can offer
Building Socialism
In this first Roadsides conversation essay, Christina Schwenkel and Alessandro Rippa discuss Christina’s recent book, “Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam” (Duke University Press, 2020)
Building Highland Asia in the Twenty-First Century
In this article we review the most recent literature on infrastructure in the social sciences and show its relevance for the study of Highland Asia. We consider the spatial, scalar, and temporal aspects of construction and, in so doing, develop new conceptual tools to evaluate the social and political configurations of states and citizens in some particularly “out of the way places.” Importantly, we show that many of the largescale development in…
Borderland Infrastructures
Asian Borderlands presents the latest research on borderlands in Asia as well as on the borderlands of Asia -the regions linking Asia with Africa, Europe and Oceania.Its approach is broad: it covers the entire range of the social sciences and humanities.The series explores the social, cultural, geographic, economic and historical dimensions of border-making by states, local communities and flows of goods, people and ideas.It considers territorial…
China's Belt and Road Initiative
a bundle of intertwined discourses, policies, and projects that sometimes align but are sometimes contradictory. We move beyond policy-level, macro-economic, and classic geopolitical analysis to study China's global investments "from the ground". Our case studies reveal the BRI to be dynamic and unstable, rhetorically appropriated for different purposes that sometimes but do not always coalesce as a coherent geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy.…
Zomia 2.0
Since the 1990s, several 'special zones' have appeared along China's border with Myanmar and Laos. Often described as lawless enclaves of vice, gambling and smuggling, the study of those spaces has focused mostly on their exceptionality and ambiguous form of sovereignty. However, rather than simply keeping the state out, those special zones bring the state in, through investments, infrastructures and deals with government officials. Through an an…
Development for all? State schemes, security, and marginalization in Kashgar, Xinjiang
The past decade of development schemes has been experienced very differently by various groups within the city of Kashgar in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. The recent exacerbation of social inequalities, stratification, and tensions in Kashgar is a structural consequence of two phases of government policies: an accelerated formalization of the economy and remodelling of the city-scape as part of modernistic development implemente…
Cross-Border Trade and "the Market" between Xinjiang (China) and Pakistan
A significant part of China-Pakistan cross-border trade falls within the category of shadow economy. Most Pakistani traders in Xinjiang cannot afford to ship containers through the Khunjerab Pass and rather carry the goods purchased in China with them on the daily buses to Sost, Pakistan, thus avoiding customs duties. This form of border economy, though falling outside of the regulatory regime, is far from being informal. Rather, it is based on a…
Road animism
In recent contributions to the emerging anthropology of infrastructure, the issue of agency often plays the role of the proverbial elephant in the room-an area that most scholars are reluctant to engage with. In this paper we highlight the implicit dichotomization between human and non-human that characterizes this body of literature. In so doing we approach the question of agency not as a subjective property emanating from a conscious self-what …
The Amber Road
This paper investigates the new and hitherto unstudied boom in cross-border Burmese amber (Burmite) trade between Myanmar and Tengchong, Yunnan province. Based on interviews with amber dealers and local officials, it describes how since 2012–13 the amber trade has become increasingly lucrative for Chinese and Myanmar traders, and has attracted a large number of people to Tengchong, which, within Yunnan, virtually monopolises the trade. After a br…
Re-Writing Mythology in Xinjiang
The Chinese Communist Party has often used history as a tool to serve its political purposes. This article analyzes the ways in which mythological accounts have been manipulated in order to strengthen Beijing’s control over the restive northwestern province of Xinjiang. Relying on an analysis of various materials (including museum exhibitions, textbooks and travel guides), I explore how the figures of the Queen Mother of the West and King Mu of t…
China's Belt and Road Initiative
a bundle of intertwined discourses, policies, and projects that sometimes align but are sometimes contradictory. We move beyond policy-level, macro-economic, and classic geopolitical analysis to study China's global investments "from the ground". Our case studies reveal the BRI to be dynamic and unstable, rhetorically appropriated for different purposes that sometimes but do not always coalesce as a coherent geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy.…
Cross-Border Trade and "the Market" between Xinjiang (China) and Pakistan
A significant part of China-Pakistan cross-border trade falls within the category of shadow economy. Most Pakistani traders in Xinjiang cannot afford to ship containers through the Khunjerab Pass and rather carry the goods purchased in China with them on the daily buses to Sost, Pakistan, thus avoiding customs duties. This form of border economy, though falling outside of the regulatory regime, is far from being informal. Rather, it is based on a…
Infrastructures and b/ordering
Border regions worldwide have gained prominence for how nation-states order, divide and understand the world. This is increasingly made explicit in the selective management of global commercial and human flows, leading to a paradoxical development and a major dilemma for the contemporary bordering practices in border regions: that of concurrently facilitating differentiated mobility while ensuring territorial integrity, securing both territories …
Development for all? State schemes, security, and marginalization in Kashgar, Xinjiang
The past decade of development schemes has been experienced very differently by various groups within the city of Kashgar in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. The recent exacerbation of social inequalities, stratification, and tensions in Kashgar is a structural consequence of two phases of government policies: an accelerated formalization of the economy and remodelling of the city-scape as part of modernistic development implemente…
Road animism
In recent contributions to the emerging anthropology of infrastructure, the issue of agency often plays the role of the proverbial elephant in the room-an area that most scholars are reluctant to engage with. In this paper we highlight the implicit dichotomization between human and non-human that characterizes this body of literature. In so doing we approach the question of agency not as a subjective property emanating from a conscious self-what …
Hunting, Rewilding, and Multispecies Entanglements in the Alps
The rewilding of Alpine landscapes has often triggered the expansion of wildlife populations and the 'return' of previously near extinct species. Among those, the wolf has generated much debate and is a frequent object of contention between mountain communities and environmentalist groups. This paper aims to reorient such polarising debate by foregrounding multispecies entanglements through the experience of wildlife hunters in an Italian Alpine …
The Amber Road
This paper investigates the new and hitherto unstudied boom in cross-border Burmese amber (Burmite) trade between Myanmar and Tengchong, Yunnan province. Based on interviews with amber dealers and local officials, it describes how since 2012–13 the amber trade has become increasingly lucrative for Chinese and Myanmar traders, and has attracted a large number of people to Tengchong, which, within Yunnan, virtually monopolises the trade. After a br…
Infrastructure and the environment in anthropology
This article maps out a nascent field that is currently taking shape, one that bridges anthropological considerations of infrastructure, political ecology, and science and technology studies with transdisciplinary approaches to ethics of care beyond the human. This emerging field stimulates a re-thinking of the relationships between the built and the non-built environment and encourages exploring infrastructure as indexes by which to grasp, ethno…
Zomia 2.0
Since the 1990s, several 'special zones' have appeared along China's border with Myanmar and Laos. Often described as lawless enclaves of vice, gambling and smuggling, the study of those spaces has focused mostly on their exceptionality and ambiguous form of sovereignty. However, rather than simply keeping the state out, those special zones bring the state in, through investments, infrastructures and deals with government officials. Through an an…
Where tourism fails
This paper develops the notion of post-working landscape to describe how labour, largely no longer performed, continues to shape how local communities understand their landscape in two Alpine valleys in Italy's Trentino Province. Following the abandonment of mountain agriculture, the landscape here is undergoing a process of rewilding, as part of which human traces (terrace fields, mountain pastures, etc.) are being erased. Post-working landscape…
Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia
Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong and the Center for Asian Studies at the
Building Highland Asia in the Twenty-First Century
In this article we review the most recent literature on infrastructure in the social sciences and show its relevance for the study of Highland Asia. We consider the spatial, scalar, and temporal aspects of construction and, in so doing, develop new conceptual tools to evaluate the social and political configurations of states and citizens in some particularly “out of the way places.” Importantly, we show that many of the largescale development in…
Re-Writing Mythology in Xinjiang
The Chinese Communist Party has often used history as a tool to serve its political purposes. This article analyzes the ways in which mythological accounts have been manipulated in order to strengthen Beijing’s control over the restive northwestern province of Xinjiang. Relying on an analysis of various materials (including museum exhibitions, textbooks and travel guides), I explore how the figures of the Queen Mother of the West and King Mu of t…
Re-Writing Mythology in Xinjiang
The Chinese Communist Party has often used history as a tool to serve its political purposes. This article analyzes the ways in which mythological accounts have been manipulated in order to strengthen Beijing’s control over the restive northwestern province of Xinjiang. Relying on an analysis of various materials (including museum exhibitions, textbooks and travel guides), I explore how the figures of the Queen Mother of the West and King Mu of t…
The Amber Road
This paper investigates the new and hitherto unstudied boom in cross-border Burmese amber (Burmite) trade between Myanmar and Tengchong, Yunnan province. Based on interviews with amber dealers and local officials, it describes how since 2012–13 the amber trade has become increasingly lucrative for Chinese and Myanmar traders, and has attracted a large number of people to Tengchong, which, within Yunnan, virtually monopolises the trade. After a br…
Zomia 2.0
Since the 1990s, several 'special zones' have appeared along China's border with Myanmar and Laos. Often described as lawless enclaves of vice, gambling and smuggling, the study of those spaces has focused mostly on their exceptionality and ambiguous form of sovereignty. However, rather than simply keeping the state out, those special zones bring the state in, through investments, infrastructures and deals with government officials. Through an an…
Development for all? State schemes, security, and marginalization in Kashgar, Xinjiang
The past decade of development schemes has been experienced very differently by various groups within the city of Kashgar in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. The recent exacerbation of social inequalities, stratification, and tensions in Kashgar is a structural consequence of two phases of government policies: an accelerated formalization of the economy and remodelling of the city-scape as part of modernistic development implemente…
Cross-Border Trade and "the Market" between Xinjiang (China) and Pakistan
A significant part of China-Pakistan cross-border trade falls within the category of shadow economy. Most Pakistani traders in Xinjiang cannot afford to ship containers through the Khunjerab Pass and rather carry the goods purchased in China with them on the daily buses to Sost, Pakistan, thus avoiding customs duties. This form of border economy, though falling outside of the regulatory regime, is far from being informal. Rather, it is based on a…
Road animism
In recent contributions to the emerging anthropology of infrastructure, the issue of agency often plays the role of the proverbial elephant in the room-an area that most scholars are reluctant to engage with. In this paper we highlight the implicit dichotomization between human and non-human that characterizes this body of literature. In so doing we approach the question of agency not as a subjective property emanating from a conscious self-what …
Building Highland Asia in the Twenty-First Century
In this article we review the most recent literature on infrastructure in the social sciences and show its relevance for the study of Highland Asia. We consider the spatial, scalar, and temporal aspects of construction and, in so doing, develop new conceptual tools to evaluate the social and political configurations of states and citizens in some particularly “out of the way places.” Importantly, we show that many of the largescale development in…
Borderland Infrastructures
Asian Borderlands presents the latest research on borderlands in Asia as well as on the borderlands of Asia -the regions linking Asia with Africa, Europe and Oceania.Its approach is broad: it covers the entire range of the social sciences and humanities.The series explores the social, cultural, geographic, economic and historical dimensions of border-making by states, local communities and flows of goods, people and ideas.It considers territorial…
China's Belt and Road Initiative
a bundle of intertwined discourses, policies, and projects that sometimes align but are sometimes contradictory. We move beyond policy-level, macro-economic, and classic geopolitical analysis to study China's global investments "from the ground". Our case studies reveal the BRI to be dynamic and unstable, rhetorically appropriated for different purposes that sometimes but do not always coalesce as a coherent geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy.…
Archive
In this introduction to the collection Alessandro Rippa reflects on the nexus of infrastructure and archive, and on the vast possibilities that a creative, multi-method and open-ended co-exploration of objects, practices and places can offer
Building Socialism
In this first Roadsides conversation essay, Christina Schwenkel and Alessandro Rippa discuss Christina’s recent book, “Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam” (Duke University Press, 2020)
Imagined borderlands
Building on a ‘biographical’ approach to national boundaries, this paper traces the history of the China‐Myanmar border—its formations, disappearances and rematerializations. In doing so, it identifies three alternative imaginaries that have characterized and shaped these borderlands throughout the past one and a half century. These imaginaries—terrain, technology and trade—sketch out some of the ways in which borderlands are seen, perceived and …
From Guest Traders to Live Streamers
This article seeks to deepen our understanding of how markets are constituted and organized by foregrounding an anthropological focus on hospitality. Drawing on ethnographic insights from the gemstone market in China’s Yunnan province, I argue that the use of online retail platforms has radically transformed social relations among traders, retailers, and customers. Despite such changes, and the seeming demise of ‘hosting’ as a central aspect of t…
Infrastructures and b/ordering
Border regions worldwide have gained prominence for how nation-states order, divide and understand the world. This is increasingly made explicit in the selective management of global commercial and human flows, leading to a paradoxical development and a major dilemma for the contemporary bordering practices in border regions: that of concurrently facilitating differentiated mobility while ensuring territorial integrity, securing both territories …
Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia
Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong and the Center for Asian Studies at the
The Russia/China border
Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey. On the edge: Life along the Russia-China border. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2021
Turning Land into Capital
Hunting, Rewilding, and Multispecies Entanglements in the Alps
The rewilding of Alpine landscapes has often triggered the expansion of wildlife populations and the 'return' of previously near extinct species. Among those, the wolf has generated much debate and is a frequent object of contention between mountain communities and environmentalist groups. This paper aims to reorient such polarising debate by foregrounding multispecies entanglements through the experience of wildlife hunters in an Italian Alpine …
The Travelling Carpet
This chapter builds on ethnographic research with and among carpet dealers in Islamabad and Kashgar and aims to recount the little-known story of Xinjiang carpets from Khotan, as these have travelled between China, northern Pakistan and Afghanistan since the opening of the Karakoram Highway in the 1980s. As cross-border relations grew with the opening of the road, Pakistani carpet collectors and traders began looking for old Khotanese carpets. Th…
Where tourism fails
This paper develops the notion of post-working landscape to describe how labour, largely no longer performed, continues to shape how local communities understand their landscape in two Alpine valleys in Italy's Trentino Province. Following the abandonment of mountain agriculture, the landscape here is undergoing a process of rewilding, as part of which human traces (terrace fields, mountain pastures, etc.) are being erased. Post-working landscape…
Infrastructure and the environment in anthropology
This article maps out a nascent field that is currently taking shape, one that bridges anthropological considerations of infrastructure, political ecology, and science and technology studies with transdisciplinary approaches to ethics of care beyond the human. This emerging field stimulates a re-thinking of the relationships between the built and the non-built environment and encourages exploring infrastructure as indexes by which to grasp, ethno…
When is a Frontier? Nostalgia and Aspirations at China’s Borderlands with Burma and Laos
This article argues that nostalgia forms a crucial part of the imaginary that drives frontier economies—not in contradiction but alongside the future-oriented imaginaries of speculation, anticipation, and appearances. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted across three key locales—Pianma, Mong La, and the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone—this study introduces the concept of “frontier nostalgia” to analyze how these spaces function as sit…
Trading in troubled times
The COVID‐19 pandemic and the 2021 military coup have dramatically affected the lives and livelihoods of communities across Myanmar. Border areas in the north of the country also suffered from the prolonged closure of the Chinese border due to PRC COVID containment measures. The city of Ruili, the main trading hub between the two countries, witnessed one of China's strictest series of lockdowns, and its border with Myanmar remained largely closed…
Political science (16 works) · Law (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · China (11 works) · Geography (10 works) · Politics (9 works) · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography (8 works) · Economics (8 works) · Economy (7 works) · Law (7 works)