First Entry!

Well, here goes my first entry! I guess I'll begin with a quick intro into who I am and why I'm taking this course.

My name is Liam Lawson, and I'm a fifth year student finishing up my degree in socio-cultural anthropology. Over the course of my studies I've become increasingly interested in the anthropology of religion; this course affords me the opportunity to learn about a wide variety of unfamiliar religious traditions. Furthermore, as a socio-cultural anthropologist (as opposed to an archaeologist) it is very rare that I have a chance to study civilizations that no longer exist. I am looking forward to brushing up on my ancient history! Finally, later this fall I will be applying to graduate schools across Canada, Britain, and the United States. One of the requirements of the application process is that I must indicate where I want to do my field work. However, due my enthusiastic interest for all anthropology, I'm having trouble deciding what general area I want to focus on! This semester I am taking several "area courses", hoping that one area will especially spark my interest.

With regards to the reading, it is clear that the "Silk Road" is more than just a path that ancient traders used to get around. First of all, for the Chinese and the Romans these trade routes represented an area beyond "the frontier", a place both geo-politically and symbolically "other" to their respective empires. As such, we can see a sort of ancient "Orientalism" (or for China, "Occidentalism") at work here. I suspect that the Silk road was a place where the higher class citizenry of Europe and China could project their fantasies, fears, and ambitions. This becomes apparent when we consider the zest with which Europe and China sent out adventurers and explorers to catalogue and consume the unknown mysteries of the liminal spaces at the edges of "civilization". And of course this is also the case for our class today! However, while Marco Polo traveled through space to satisfy curious and imaginative minds, we have the convenience of merely traveling through time!

The Silk Road is something of a "Middle Earth" or a "Narnia", despite our best intentions to portray its history accurately and in good faith. Some might recoil at such a romantic treatment, but I don't think such repulsion is necessary. For, just like The Lord of the Rings and The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, the Silk Road is a collection of stories, few of which remain entirely free of fiction, embellishment, or mythology. To use the parlance of symbolic anthropologists, the Silk Road is a collection of "texts". This does not mean that it is impossible to ascertain "truth" about the Silk Road, only that some truths can be found in the fictions. For example, what could it possibly mean that both European and Chinese explorers spoke of a tree that sprouted heads instead of fruit? This fiction leads me to believe that these explorers encountered a commonly circulating myth endemic to the region. Whose myth was this? What role does the myth play in this society? What differences exist between the Chinese and European retelling of this myth?

Finally, of course, the Silk Road was more than just a storybook, more than just piece of land between the Romans and the Chinese. It was an intricate system of cultural and economic trade mediated by a constant flux of ritual, sexual relations, and violence. The Silk Road was, if you will, people and the interconnections between people. Wheelers and dealers, mystics, thugs, explorers, nomads, peasant farms, thirsty camel-riders: people on the move. And this is what differentiates the "Silk Road" as a heuristic device from its constituent ethnic groups. The Silk Road is a story about flows of people, and with these people their commodities and ideas. Culture in motion, or perhaps, the motion of cultures.