Social Construction of Power, Identity, and Geography: The Voices from Korea, India, and Tibet

Abstract

Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances. By Jae-Jung Suh. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 304 pp., $75.00 hardcover (ISBN-10: 1-4039-7928-6). Sikh Nationalism and Identity in a Global Age. By Georgio Shani. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. 198 pp., $150.00 hardcover (ISBN-10: 0-415-42190-X). Geopolitical Exotica: Tibet in Western Imagination. By Dibyesh Anand. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 209 pp., $75.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4765-1). I no longer have much love for books. Ever since they have been transformed into work, I lost the genuine passion for them. As a recovering book fanatic, I arrange the unread copies upside down so that my eyes cannot catch the titles on the book shelves too fast. The Dewey decimal classification has lost its hold on me. An old Chinese saying goes, “It will take five hundred years to read three thousand books.” All of this is to say I have become more selective about which books I commit to reading. I look for clarity in argument, persuasiveness in logic, rigor in presentation of evidence, and succinctness in writing style. The books reviewed below were like a boxful of chocolates for different levels of readability and intellectual appeal. As a sociologist holding an MA degree in International Relations (IR), I find efforts to cross-fertilize between the disciplines meaningful. Just as sociological reality is often too murky to be explained by a single theoretical tenet, affairs between nations are often complex enough to invite explications from multiple perspectives. Both Sociology and IR are currently undergoing salient transformations with the lessening of exclusionary intellectual praxis. Class, race, and gender are losing their validity as the defining concepts of Sociology. With the fortuitous rise of the social memory genre, the field is reconfiguring itself and becoming more transdisciplinary. The seemingly simple mnemonic acts of remembering and forgetting entail the complicated processes of storage, erasure, commemoration, and retrieval of a certain historical memory. The findings from neurology and evolutionary psychology sometimes shed helpful light on the genre. A similar observation can be made about IR. The English school, in particular, factors in cultural variables such as norms and identity in explaining relations among nations. Alexander Wendt's social constructivism and Nicholas Wheeler's humanitarian …