For the nations on its borders, the rapid rise of China represents an opportunity-but it also brings worry, especially in areas that have long been disputed territories of contact and exchange. This book gathers contributors from a range of disciplines to look at how people in those areas are actively engaging in making relationships across the border, and how those interactions are shaping life in the region-and in the process helping to reconfigure the cultural and political landscape of post-Cold War Asia.

Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond provides a new look at the old anthropological concern with materiality and connectivity. It understands materiality, not as defined property of some-thing, nor does it take connectivity as merely a relation between discrete entities. It sees materiality and connectivity as two interrelated modes in which an entity is, or more precisely – is becoming, in the world. Throughout the four-year research process that led to this book, the authors approached this question not just from a theoretical perspective; taking the suggestion of 'thinking through things' literally and methodologically seriously, the first two workshops were dedicated to practical, hands-on exercises working with things. From these workshops a series of installations emerged, straddling the boundaries of art and academia. Throughout the pages of this volume, the reader is invited to travel beyond imaginaries of a universe of separate planets united by connections, and to venture with us instead into the thicket of thing~ties in which we live.