Abstract
The term translocality evolved during the mid-1990s in discussions about the social production of place and space. It goes beyond geographical notions and questions cultures as closed entities bound to nation states. The inflationary and often unreflected use of “trans-terminology” (trans-nationalism, trans-culturalism, trans-gender) exposed such words to the danger of becoming empty signifiers – catchall phrases completely lacking any theoretical or analytical value. The paper, therefore, interrogates translocality with regard to its diverse conceptualizations as a research perspective, a middle-range theory or a social fact, its potential added value and its operational limits. Taking the example of the Indian Ocean – a seascape that is produced and transformed through movement – the paper discusses one possible gateway to the study of a translocal phenomenon.
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- 1.
The discussion in the 1980s and 1990s, especially within the field of cultural anthropology, demanded the abandonment of “culture” as an analytical tool.
- 2.
On the conceptual level, this research project successfully cooperated with the group projects on translocal relations in the Sahara-Sahel zone. For further information see www.zmo.de/forschung/projekte_2004_2005.html.
- 3.
Comparison with North–South relations or with relations within the North would certainly be a very interesting yet demanding endeavour.
- 4.
For a fundamental critique, see Hamzah 2005: 117–119.
- 5.
For a detailed analysis, see Hartwig 2002: 21.
- 6.
INORI was founded by the members of the group project “Indian Ocean – Space on the Move”, which was based at the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies in Berlin. The following researchers were involved: Ravi Ahuja examined working patterns of maritime labour in colonial India. Jan-Georg Deutsch studied social biographies in Zanzibar, Friedhelm Hartwig worked on Hadhrami diasporic family histories. Brigitte Reinwald investigated the processing and representation of intercultural relations in film, and I studied the perception and construction of ethnic and cultural difference in Swahili newspapers of the 1950s and 1960s.
- 7.
A term coined in discussions to situate the study of the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean within and in opposition to area studies.
- 8.
Although from a completely different perspective, this approach was reproduced in Kitiri N. Chaudhuri’s works, in which he assumes unchanging Indian Ocean civilizations that have reproduced themselves over a thousand years’ time span. By so doing, he replaces Braudel’s concept of longe durée by stationary time and the principle of invariance.
- 9.
This was the title of a follow-up group project on the Indian Ocean at the ZMO between 2003–2007.
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Bromber, K. (2013). Working with “Translocality”: Conceptual Implications and Analytical Consequences. In: Wippel, S. (eds) Regionalizing Oman. United Nations University Series on Regionalism, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6821-5_4
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