Intimate Geopolitics is a timely and important intervention in Himalayan studies. Sara Smith explores how territorial politics is enacted on the body through the intimate spaces of love and marriage. When religio-territorial boundaries and international conflicts define whom one may or may not love, marry, and have children with, this leads to intimate geopolitics. In Ladakh in North India, intermarriage between Muslims and Buddhists was common until the 1990s but waned over the years. The bodies of women, in particular, are the sites on which territorial battles are waged. At the same time, bodies can resist geopolitical territorialization because of bodily flows (breast milk, semen) that transgress boundaries and because of the materiality of the body (health, disease, reproductive functions, etc.) that deters full conscription into a territorialist design. I see intertextual resonances between Smith's concept of geopolitical bodies (p. 9) and Thai historian Thongchai Winichakul's concept of the “geo-body,”...

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