Liminal travel

The thing about Central Asia (which is the focus of much of my research , is that it's not easily shelved. I don't mean that it's a region that shouldn't be ignored (which is true, but not the point here), but that it's sort of in the middle of everything.

Central Asia straddles most of the boundaries used to demarcate the world. Go to BBC or CNN or the NYTimes, and look at their world map. Where would you click to get the news about Kyrgyzstan? Or, more relevantly for me, what shelf do you look on in the travel section of the bookstore to see if Lonely Planet has a new edition of their Central Asia volume? Is it under Asia? Middle East? Eastern Europe? Turns out everyone makes their own choice, because it's a liminal place. It cascades chaotically across our neat geographical boundaries, it aligns with different sections of the colored map depending on who's doing the drawing.

I'm now used to the fact that this project takes more time to coordinate than many others I've worked on, that it has a unique set of demands that are a tremendous drain on time. But for heaven's sake. I know where the travel section is in the bookstore. Finding the book should have taken less than five minutes, not required me to finally give up (do they really not have it? Or is it just not the shelves I have checked? Because if I were looking for a book on Italy, I'd pretty much know immediately whether or not they had it. Either it would be on the shelf under Europe or it wouldn't. But maybe Central Asia is here somewhere, on some shelf, somewhere, but I just can't find it because I don't know how they've chosen to categorize it here) and seek out someone working at the boosktore so they could check their stock and see if it is out there somewhere.

I'm off to Bishkek in a little over a week. For some design ethnography research. It should be a fantastic trip. You'll hear more about that soon.