Battling the Landscape: Counterinsurgent Innovation and Rebel Adaptation.
Anna Feuer, Political Science, Yale University.
Why, given their unmatched capacity to map and manipulate the physical battlespace, do highly-capitalized counterinsurgent forces continually lose the advantage of terrain to their lower-tech opponents? This prospectus examines counterinsurgent efforts to make legible the geographically remote spaces—mountains, deserts, marshes, swamps, and other inaccessible environments—in which rebel groups take shelter. Employing archival and ethnographic methods, my dissertation will present extended case studies of three such efforts: the development of aerial surveillance in the deserts of Mandatory Iraq, the application of ground-based remote sensors over jungle and rainforest terrain to interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, and the use of digital terrain simulations in the ongoing U.S.-led war in the mountains of Afghanistan. These cases illustrate what I argue is a characteristic dynamic of counterinsurgency wars: as counterinsurgents view the battlefield from increasingly remote and detached positions, rebels use their intimate knowledge of the landscape to exploit the limits of counterinsurgents’ technologically-mediated vision. In this presentation, I will use the example of high-resolution, 3-D terrain simulations of Afghan villages, used by the U.S. military for planning and training, to illustrate a number of conceptual limitations: the abstract representation of locally specific landscapes, the neglect of geographic distinctions and a reliance on generic terrain “types,” and the understanding of physical landscapes as reducible to immaterial, digital data, as “electronic battlefields.”
Racializing Religion: Transnational South Asian Religion, Gender, and Caste in the Punjabi Diaspora, 1947-Present
Sasha Sabherwal, American Studies, Yale University.
This dissertation charts the relative absence and secularization of religion in Asian American studies. I examine the connections and shifting relationships between religion, gender, class, and caste across the Asian American diaspora. In particular, I use Punjab as a case study to analyze transnational South Asian religions—the overlapping practices among Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus that cross national borders—across the Punjabi-Indian and Punjabi-Pakistani diaspora in North America between 1947 and present. Through multi-sited ethnographies of the North American Punjabi community, I pay attention to questions of Punjabi religious practices within debates around transnational feminist studies and Asian American studies. I ask: how are religion and Punjabi-ness produced in co-constitutive ways? And how does Punjabi religion get racialized in colonial and North American contexts? By focusing on transnational religions, I excavate the multiplicity of South Asian religions in North America, rather than focusing exclusively on one religious practice (i.e. Sikhism in Punjab). I push against the conflation of Sikhism with Punjabi-ness to think about the heterogeneity in religions across Punjab that encompasses Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs.I find it necessary to articulate Punjabi-ness as a fluctuating, social, historic, and cultural category. Ultimately, I argue that while Punjabi-ness brings people together in the North American diaspora, it is not enough to keep people together, especially in the context of Islamophobia.