This special issue explores the forms of coexistence that emerge in what we call ‘marginal hubs’: sites that appear geographically or politically marginal, but which emerge as areas of intense and often volatile sociability, including border posts, container markets, industrial workshops, and pilgrim encampments. Such sites, which often come into being suddenly and are remote from the great urban centres, do not fit easily either within the framework of the Asian urban nor of the continent's villages and small towns. By exploring the forms of sociability that are important to everyday life in such places, we seek to widen the spectrum of settings that are recognized by scholars across the humanities and social sciences as having the potential to offer productive insights into understanding how heterogeneity is handled in Asia and beyond. This Introduction sets out the theoretical stakes of such an approach, as well as introducing the articles in this special issue.

Through ethnographic material gathered in the Muslim woodworking mohallas (neighbourhoods) of a North Indian city, this article attends to ‘performed’ elements of everyday convivial interactions. It builds on work that situates conviviality as a normative project aimed at understanding and fostering interaction within urban space which bridges forms of difference. Through descriptive accounts, the article illustrates how convivial exchanges can embody degrees of instrumentality and conceal relations of power and marginalization that act to silence outrage or contestation. This ‘performed conviviality’ is dealt with in a broader context of ‘scale’ to consider how marginalization and connectedness—the marginal hub—intersect in even the most mundane moments of convivial exchange. By tracing processes of marginalization, boundary making, and bordering within the local, city-wide, state, and international contexts, the article follows the production of a marginalized or ‘border’ subjectivity through to the individual level. The subjectivities produced in this context act to enforce degrees of self-imposed silence among those subjected to processes of marginalization. In addition—and again attending to scale through an acknowledgement of the connected nature of the mohallas—the article also considers the role of conviviality in global chains of supply through the creation and maintenance of bonds and obligations that facilitate production in the city's wood industry.

This article introduces South China's jiagongchang household workshops as marginal hubs of affective and industrial labour, which are produced by migrant women's yearnings for people and places far away. Temporary sites and precarious forms of low-wage production serve as fragmented and provisional resources of sociality and labour as migrant workers and urban villages gradually become incorporated within the urban fabric. The unrequited longings of migrant women who work in factories and as caretakers demonstrate how marginal hubs are created through disjunctures of emplacement and mobility, which are intensified as these women attempt to bridge the contradictions entailed in care work and industrial labour across the supply chains.

This article addresses how wilderness—through its qualities of remoteness and wildness—plays an essential role in the production of a vital religious centre in Tibet. By drawing on in-depth ethnographic observations in Yachen Gar, a mega-sized Buddhist encampment in the nomadic grasslands of China's northwestern Sichuan province, I examine the spatial and material features of the encampment, how various agents utilize these features to produce specific relations with it, and how, in this process, Yachen has become a centre of the Buddhist revival in Kham Tibet. I will present three ethnographic accounts—which focus on a Tibetan nun from the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), Chinese pilgrims, and reactions to the spread of electricity in Yachen—to address the ways in which Yachen is emplaced within the spatial and material tensions implemented and imagined by different participants. These accounts ultimately show how materiality plays a crucial role in forging the various contesting relations, actions, and meanings that constitute a social space.

This article asks what can be learned about affinity and alterity by considering how villagers and state troops collectively live in remote and often dangerous borders. Situating this question along South Asia's longest international boundary—the India-Bangladesh border—I query the political possibilities of conviviality that bear upon altering notions of reciprocity, exchange, and trust, and which have not attracted the attention of either urban or border scholars. I argue that reciprocal webs of exchange brought Garo matrilineal kinship and Christian religiosity into relations with seemingly impersonal worlds of state control and border rule. The exchange of valued domestic objects, and the broader set of political and gendered affinities that surrounded these, are evidence of the border's changing role and temporality in mitigating difference and danger. Although these relations are embedded in the history of border-making in the Garo Hills, recent national security measures and border infrastructures have disrupted prior exchanges. These have disembedded the troops from their immediate rural environment in attempts to contain trans-border relationships.

This article explores the joking relations that constitute conviviality in one of the largest marginal bazaars in Moscow. The marketplace is known as a hub for migrant workers and traders, and is often stigmatized in the media. It remains one of the largest commercial nodes in the bazaar network that stretches across and beyond much of ex-Soviet Eurasia. Scholars of conviviality have often claimed that convivial living represents more than hilarity and laughter; exactly how laughter actually happens and what sets of relations and interactions make it possible have been largely left out of the discussion. I will explore how a certain joking repertoire both connects Russian customers with migrant sellers and traders from Central Asia, Vietnam, Ukraine, and elsewhere, and animates relations between sellers themselves. I argue that these relations are characterized by volatility, which incorporates play and improvisation within different registers of uncertainty, conflict, enjoyment, proximity, and—ultimately—virtuality.

What kinds of governance agendas emerge at frontiers of commercial expansion, where routine economic relations traverse differences of ethnicity and degrees of formality? In the Balim Valley in the highlands of Indonesia's easternmost Papua province, mobilities and trade intersect at adjoining peri-urban markets and minivan terminals. The ‘terminal economy’ at the edges of Wamena, the region's bustling hub, is a threshold between rural and urban life, where indigenous livelihoods are subordinated to Indonesia's expanding commercial networks. Here, a cosmopolitan population—including indigenous Papuan highlanders and newcomer merchants from distant Indonesian regions—gathers to buy and sell local horticultural produce and imported commodities, transit between modes of transportation, and engage in a variety of formal and informal economic activities. This article traces the emergence of a multifaceted commercial regulation agenda, in the wake of demands for the recognition of indigenous contributions to the regional economy. It considers recent indigenous-formulated regulation policies in the context of the region's commercial history, one that is marked by a colonial devaluation of indigenous economic life and, more recently, by uprisings, inter-ethnic tensions, and government attempts to control and contain informal vending. The article conceptualizes commercial regulation as a convergence between efforts to contain disruption and demands for the revaluation of marginalized economic practices. It argues that commercial regulation is especially salient in regions that have been relegated to an end-point position in national and global commodity distribution paths.

In this article, I set out to explore the possibility of a shared life between two places in the highlands of Pakistan and Tajikistan—a region dissected by Afghanistan's narrow Wakhan corridor, by present-day nation-state boundaries, by historical divisions between Central and South Asia, and by a former Cold War frontier. Moving away from a take on conviviality as specifically tied to urban spaces and face-to-face encounters, I attempt to trace the processes that determine the coming and going of shared modes of being. In doing so, I first situate the two places—Karimabad and Khorog—in their respective post-Cold War borderlands and point to their historically ambivalent status as ‘marginal’ places at the frontier, culturally diverse ‘hubs’, and sites of globalization. Then I analyse the historical build-up—material and ideological—that led to the establishment of specific forms of connection and disconnection between the two places. In the last part of the article, I discuss how people in and from Karimabad and Khorog seek out opportunities to attain shared instances of common sociality, which often remain ephemeral and subject to regimes of power. Finally, I argue that the cases of these two ‘marginal hubs’ highlight the importance of looking beyond the conventional ‘imperial centre’ when debating the dynamics that lead people to desire, create, and abandon ties across difference.