Here's the link to my final project! Hope you enjoy!
www.silkroadtripping.tumblr.com
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Judaism In China and Last Remarks
Judaism in China? I guess I shouldn't be surprised given the fact that every other religion we have talked about this year is (or was) represented in some part of China at one time. It just goes to show; if there is a passable over-land route and people to trade with, merchants - regardless of ethnic or religious background - will definitely go there. Which raises an interesting point. If there are Jewish traders bartering and intermarrying with Han Chinese in China, are there Han traders doing the same in the Middle East?
Throughout this course - and I guess, since this is the last post, this is a good time for a retrospective - we have very much focused on the eastern portions of the Silk Road. This has to do with Prof. Goodman's expertise in Buddhism and Chinese issues... but one wonders what we have missed through this focus. We learned next to nothing about the Roman Empire, or the influence of Cyrus the Great. We did learn much about the effects of Hellenism on the development of the Buddha image, which was fascinating.
So Much is left to be learned. Why did the Silk Road meet its demise as a viable trade route? Or does it still operate at a fraction of its former self? How did trade between the Indian subcontinent and China occur... did it go over the Tibetan passes, or were there southern dendrites reaching into India via the Hindu Kush?
Regardless, this year has been extremely informative and thoroughly enjoyable... I'm glad to have shared it with you all!
Throughout this course - and I guess, since this is the last post, this is a good time for a retrospective - we have very much focused on the eastern portions of the Silk Road. This has to do with Prof. Goodman's expertise in Buddhism and Chinese issues... but one wonders what we have missed through this focus. We learned next to nothing about the Roman Empire, or the influence of Cyrus the Great. We did learn much about the effects of Hellenism on the development of the Buddha image, which was fascinating.
So Much is left to be learned. Why did the Silk Road meet its demise as a viable trade route? Or does it still operate at a fraction of its former self? How did trade between the Indian subcontinent and China occur... did it go over the Tibetan passes, or were there southern dendrites reaching into India via the Hindu Kush?
Regardless, this year has been extremely informative and thoroughly enjoyable... I'm glad to have shared it with you all!
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
The Great Game
I find it interesting how Wood speaks about "the Great Game"; Chapter 10 would have the reader believe that the Great Game was some inter-personal duel between foreign dignitaries out in the back-of-beyond of Central Asia... and in a certain way, it was. But Wood doesn't give us the stakes. The term "Great Game" more usually refers to the struggle for supremacy between the great powers of Europe, especially from the Treaty of Vienna onwards. What is often forgotten is that the second half of the 19th century in Europe was actually a time of unbroken peace. From the end of the Crimean War until the first World War, aggression between the five great powers was defused by a complex system of treaties... or, of course, exported and enacted vicariously in the colonies. What Wood doesn't mention is the international ramifications of the an incautious remark between adventurers. Literally, world (well, European anyway) peace was at stake.
Wood's book is excellent on many fronts, but I have always felt that it doesn't really get at the motivations behind the many explorers who risked life and limb to retrieve treasures (and human skulls!) from some of the most inhospitable places in the world. Glory, yes... but also specifically European political interests.
Wood's book is excellent on many fronts, but I have always felt that it doesn't really get at the motivations behind the many explorers who risked life and limb to retrieve treasures (and human skulls!) from some of the most inhospitable places in the world. Glory, yes... but also specifically European political interests.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Place and Politics
It was striking how a number of commentators, in discussions that preceded the war, regularly failed to connect the predicament of women in Afghanistan with the massive military and economic support that the US provided, as part of its Cold War strategy, to the most extreme of Afghan religious militant groups (Hirschkind and Mahmood: 340-341).
Yay! Anthropologists! And some very good anthropologists too, I might add. I enjoyed the Hirschkind and Mahmood article for a number of reasons, the first being that it makes the American agenda in Afghanistan explicit and marks the way that the discourse being circulated in popular media completely ignores the role that American foreign-policy has played in creating "terrorism" and "fundamentalism". This article allows us to begin to understand "terror" as the end product of something other than an ideological incompatibility between the "Muslim world" and "the West"; we begin to see the events of September 11th (or the subway bombings in London, or the train massacres in Spain) as a particular genre of response to the (often dehumanizing) pervasiveness of global capital, made meaningful by the powerful symbols enacted on all sides.
This is the thing that is often ignored. Sure there are training camps for wannabe militants, but its not like Osama Bin Laden meets with all the various global terrorists and gives them direct orders. The destruction of the Twin Towers created an image and style of violence that set a precedent. This kind of violence had been enacted before, but it was largely directed at embassies, and so thought of as a political statement. The great civilian death and immense media coverage of Sept. 11th - perhaps counter-intuitively - depoliticized the violence. The way that the event was handled left most Americans feeling like they had been attacked by madmen, and the only way that that madness could be explained was to pin it to Islam. A political statement couched in a religious idiom was misinterpreted as a religious insanity with little or no political pretensions.
In simpler times it was easy to find your enemy... you simply pointed across an ocean and talked about the Japanese, the Germans, the Viet Cong, the Russians... enemies were once nation-states, and the violence enacted by nation-states is in some way legitimated by their codification in terms of "war". War operates by rules, it has clear objectives, and it has clear opponents; but to call the American initiative to protect it's citizenry from global insurgency a "War on Terror" is wishful thinking at best, and a calculating way to manipulate popular sentiment at worst. There is no opponent in this war; he is a ghost - a decentralized, non-hierarchical, non-national ghost. Regardless, to focus the hate away from the incompetence of the American government, an opponent was created using images of "traditional" Islam:
What gives Islamic fundamentalism such explanatory power? To begin, note the variety of ideas, images, and fears that Islamic fundamentalism evokes in the American imagination: women wearing headscarves (now, burqas), the cutting off of hands and heads, massive crowds praying in unison, the imposition of a normative public morality grounded in a puritanical and legalistic interpretation of religious texts, a rejection and hatred of the West and its globalized culture, the desire to put aside history and return to a pristine past, and the quick recourse to violence against those who are different. In other words, the notion of fundamentalism collapses a rather heterogeneous collection of images and descriptions, linking them together as aspects of a singular socio-religious formation (Hirschkind and Mahmood: 348).
In any event, this all relates to the Silk Road in some interesting ways. It shows that America (and Canada, and Russia, and certainly Great Britain) is part of the Silk Road just as much as Sogdiana or Tang China. Central Asia has been an important geopolitical context for thousands of years, where the big players have tried to control the movement and behaviour of people over huge tracts of land. Nothing has changed. Right now we're bombing mosques and shooting rebels to keep our busy little fingers in Central Asia permanently.
Yay! Anthropologists! And some very good anthropologists too, I might add. I enjoyed the Hirschkind and Mahmood article for a number of reasons, the first being that it makes the American agenda in Afghanistan explicit and marks the way that the discourse being circulated in popular media completely ignores the role that American foreign-policy has played in creating "terrorism" and "fundamentalism". This article allows us to begin to understand "terror" as the end product of something other than an ideological incompatibility between the "Muslim world" and "the West"; we begin to see the events of September 11th (or the subway bombings in London, or the train massacres in Spain) as a particular genre of response to the (often dehumanizing) pervasiveness of global capital, made meaningful by the powerful symbols enacted on all sides.
This is the thing that is often ignored. Sure there are training camps for wannabe militants, but its not like Osama Bin Laden meets with all the various global terrorists and gives them direct orders. The destruction of the Twin Towers created an image and style of violence that set a precedent. This kind of violence had been enacted before, but it was largely directed at embassies, and so thought of as a political statement. The great civilian death and immense media coverage of Sept. 11th - perhaps counter-intuitively - depoliticized the violence. The way that the event was handled left most Americans feeling like they had been attacked by madmen, and the only way that that madness could be explained was to pin it to Islam. A political statement couched in a religious idiom was misinterpreted as a religious insanity with little or no political pretensions.
In simpler times it was easy to find your enemy... you simply pointed across an ocean and talked about the Japanese, the Germans, the Viet Cong, the Russians... enemies were once nation-states, and the violence enacted by nation-states is in some way legitimated by their codification in terms of "war". War operates by rules, it has clear objectives, and it has clear opponents; but to call the American initiative to protect it's citizenry from global insurgency a "War on Terror" is wishful thinking at best, and a calculating way to manipulate popular sentiment at worst. There is no opponent in this war; he is a ghost - a decentralized, non-hierarchical, non-national ghost. Regardless, to focus the hate away from the incompetence of the American government, an opponent was created using images of "traditional" Islam:
What gives Islamic fundamentalism such explanatory power? To begin, note the variety of ideas, images, and fears that Islamic fundamentalism evokes in the American imagination: women wearing headscarves (now, burqas), the cutting off of hands and heads, massive crowds praying in unison, the imposition of a normative public morality grounded in a puritanical and legalistic interpretation of religious texts, a rejection and hatred of the West and its globalized culture, the desire to put aside history and return to a pristine past, and the quick recourse to violence against those who are different. In other words, the notion of fundamentalism collapses a rather heterogeneous collection of images and descriptions, linking them together as aspects of a singular socio-religious formation (Hirschkind and Mahmood: 348).
In any event, this all relates to the Silk Road in some interesting ways. It shows that America (and Canada, and Russia, and certainly Great Britain) is part of the Silk Road just as much as Sogdiana or Tang China. Central Asia has been an important geopolitical context for thousands of years, where the big players have tried to control the movement and behaviour of people over huge tracts of land. Nothing has changed. Right now we're bombing mosques and shooting rebels to keep our busy little fingers in Central Asia permanently.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
The Spread of Islam and Imagining Islam
To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure why we were assigned the readings we were for today. Ayoub only mentions Central Asia and China briefly, and Ernst not at all. Furthermore, Ernst's reading is something like preaching to the choir... there may be a cross-section of the Canadian and American public that are completely ignorant and hostile towards Islam, but I don't count myself (or the rest of the class) among this group. The intent behind these readings, I suppose, is to stimulate debate about the basic terminology and position we use to understand Islam. Even that last sentence marks the supposed bias that scholarship apparently takes towards the Muslim... we studying them.
For myself, I don't have any problem whatsoever understanding or accepting the unity between the Muslim and Western "worlds". In the first, the interaction and cultural cross-fertilization between Islamic and Christian nations from the medieval period onward is well documented. Only a completely and intentionally ignorant person could describe Muslim-Christian interaction across history as solely a clash of "civilizations". That being said, there were clashes. Many people describe Islam as a violent religion. This is fascinating when you consider how much violence has occurred in the name of Jesus Christ, or any other religious system for that matter. Religion, as an expression of humanity, is by nature violent... what's actually reprehensible here is Christian and secular-capitalist hypocrisy. In a similar vein, some people become enraged with Islam's treatment of women... while completely ignoring the startling levels of domestic abuse and rape that go on in the so-called "Christian" countries of the West. Also, check the New Testament... Jesus Christ wasn't particularly feminist either.
Any critique of Islam can also be raised against Christianity, certainly, and against our modern society in general. When it comes down to it, you can only judge people as people. Kindness, justice, and courage coexist with cruelty, apathy, and deceit in people. Just like we've been asked to study religion in terms of how it is expressed locally and in practice, let us also judge human beings by their behaviour rather than assuming that entire populations adhere to a totalitarian code.
By the way, I also have a suspicion - and this may just be a little nationalistic hubris - that Islamophobia is far more virulent in the United States than in Canada. I don't think this has anything to do with Canada being an "Enlightened" people, or any such nonsense. Rather, I believe that in light of September 11th, huge sections of the American population have been manipulated via news media to perceive Muslims a certain way, so as to manufacture support for real politik war efforts. This isn't a conspiracy... its quite blatant. In Canada the manipulation is far more specific, directed not at Muslims in general, but toward Afghanis. Even in this case the vast majority of news literature (I don't have a TV) is focused on vindicating Canadians of Afghan dissent from the fallacious accusations and illegal detentions imposed upon them by the American government.
Also, unless we're going to identify the academy as "Christian" or "Jewish", which is patently bogus, lets stop with this "US" and "THEM". I grew up with Muslims... one of my best friends in the world is a Muslim. And I'm not a Christian or a Jew. So who is "US" anyway?
For myself, I don't have any problem whatsoever understanding or accepting the unity between the Muslim and Western "worlds". In the first, the interaction and cultural cross-fertilization between Islamic and Christian nations from the medieval period onward is well documented. Only a completely and intentionally ignorant person could describe Muslim-Christian interaction across history as solely a clash of "civilizations". That being said, there were clashes. Many people describe Islam as a violent religion. This is fascinating when you consider how much violence has occurred in the name of Jesus Christ, or any other religious system for that matter. Religion, as an expression of humanity, is by nature violent... what's actually reprehensible here is Christian and secular-capitalist hypocrisy. In a similar vein, some people become enraged with Islam's treatment of women... while completely ignoring the startling levels of domestic abuse and rape that go on in the so-called "Christian" countries of the West. Also, check the New Testament... Jesus Christ wasn't particularly feminist either.
Any critique of Islam can also be raised against Christianity, certainly, and against our modern society in general. When it comes down to it, you can only judge people as people. Kindness, justice, and courage coexist with cruelty, apathy, and deceit in people. Just like we've been asked to study religion in terms of how it is expressed locally and in practice, let us also judge human beings by their behaviour rather than assuming that entire populations adhere to a totalitarian code.
By the way, I also have a suspicion - and this may just be a little nationalistic hubris - that Islamophobia is far more virulent in the United States than in Canada. I don't think this has anything to do with Canada being an "Enlightened" people, or any such nonsense. Rather, I believe that in light of September 11th, huge sections of the American population have been manipulated via news media to perceive Muslims a certain way, so as to manufacture support for real politik war efforts. This isn't a conspiracy... its quite blatant. In Canada the manipulation is far more specific, directed not at Muslims in general, but toward Afghanis. Even in this case the vast majority of news literature (I don't have a TV) is focused on vindicating Canadians of Afghan dissent from the fallacious accusations and illegal detentions imposed upon them by the American government.
Also, unless we're going to identify the academy as "Christian" or "Jewish", which is patently bogus, lets stop with this "US" and "THEM". I grew up with Muslims... one of my best friends in the world is a Muslim. And I'm not a Christian or a Jew. So who is "US" anyway?
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Manichaeism
The most interesting aspect of Manichaeism is certainly its syncretic nature. It obviously combines many religious traditions: here we see Jesus described in many aspects, simultaneously a "buddha" and an aspect of the (ancient Mesopotamian) moon god; Mani's explication of the end of the world takes directly from the Christian gospels, but uses them to explain how the Zoroastrian principles of light and darkness will one day be separated into pure forms. However, unlike the model of syncretism we debunked in class, our readings suggest that Mani was an actual person, and was largely responsible for the synthesizing all the religious elements in his teachings. This may afford us a new way of understanding syncretism. In the face of a confusion of religious influences, individual people sometimes attempt to organize the deities of different religions into a single system, postulating a system of rules and a body of narratives that allow the different religious influences to coexist. Obviously, which religions are included, and which overarching systems are used to bring them into communication, are dependent on the lived context of the synthesizer. This model would be acceptable to our class' criteria, given that it re-imagines syncretism as a localized and historically specific practice of individuals.
If I may critique the readings by Klimkeit and Aitken slightly, neither of these readings successfully present Manichaeism as a lived practice. Where did Manicheans worship? What kinds of relationships did Manicheans have with adherents of different religions? A case study, based on historical and archeaological evidence, would have breathed life into their discussions.
If I may critique the readings by Klimkeit and Aitken slightly, neither of these readings successfully present Manichaeism as a lived practice. Where did Manicheans worship? What kinds of relationships did Manicheans have with adherents of different religions? A case study, based on historical and archeaological evidence, would have breathed life into their discussions.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Tang Dynasty and Nestorian Christianity
For my blog post today, a couple of disparate reflections:
1. I wonder what the Nestorian tablet meant to Christians living in Changan during the Tang Dynasty. Assuming that the vast majority of people could not read, what did this object signify to the everyday observer? To a Nestorian Christian, perhaps this monument was a holy and venerable site, an object of worship as much as an inscription of church history. To an imperial official the tablet may have represented nothing more than a quaint foreign artefact, of no particular importance at all.
2. Hansen describes Changan as a city under constant surveillance, a heavily codified and rigid separation of classes. How would being a Nestorian Christian affect a person's place in this hierarchy? How far could a Christian rise in the imperial government? I gather that the Emperor was very lenient with regards to other religions in the capital city, but both Hansen and Bundy suggest that Nestorian Christians experienced some prejudice at the hands of ethnic Tang Chinese.
3. Bundy suggests that:
"The loss of cultural and intellectual centres as well as internal political strife making communication with Baghdad difficult, if not impossible, combined to weaken missionary activity and, probably, to increase the rapidity of general cultural assimilation."
This would suggest that a religion, as a social body, needs networks of economic and information exchange. To view religion in this way seems very different than the approach we have taken in this course thus far. We have been asked to understand religion in terms of localized practices... this quotation asks us to imagine religions in terms of institutions, institutions which attempt to unify and control localized practices. Are these schema compatible?
1. I wonder what the Nestorian tablet meant to Christians living in Changan during the Tang Dynasty. Assuming that the vast majority of people could not read, what did this object signify to the everyday observer? To a Nestorian Christian, perhaps this monument was a holy and venerable site, an object of worship as much as an inscription of church history. To an imperial official the tablet may have represented nothing more than a quaint foreign artefact, of no particular importance at all.
2. Hansen describes Changan as a city under constant surveillance, a heavily codified and rigid separation of classes. How would being a Nestorian Christian affect a person's place in this hierarchy? How far could a Christian rise in the imperial government? I gather that the Emperor was very lenient with regards to other religions in the capital city, but both Hansen and Bundy suggest that Nestorian Christians experienced some prejudice at the hands of ethnic Tang Chinese.
3. Bundy suggests that:
"The loss of cultural and intellectual centres as well as internal political strife making communication with Baghdad difficult, if not impossible, combined to weaken missionary activity and, probably, to increase the rapidity of general cultural assimilation."
This would suggest that a religion, as a social body, needs networks of economic and information exchange. To view religion in this way seems very different than the approach we have taken in this course thus far. We have been asked to understand religion in terms of localized practices... this quotation asks us to imagine religions in terms of institutions, institutions which attempt to unify and control localized practices. Are these schema compatible?
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