Sidestep

So I’ve been doing this whole steps-along-the-Silk-Road(s) thing, and it’s been getting more and more difficult, but it’s a fun challenge. This week, however, it’s just been...beyond trying. And I finally decided that, if this were a step along this Silk Road(s), it would be stop and rant about things every so often. I realize a lot of what I write here probably comes across as pretty rant-like, but this one, I assure you, is definitely the real deal.

Last week, I read an interesting article about the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan by a man with the wonderful name of Finbarr Barry Flood. And I must admit that I have very probably slandered him, because, while I still feel that his style was shoddy and his writing sub-par, my conclusion on his article was that he failed to convince me that the destruction of the Buddhas by the Taliban was entirely political and modern in nature. It is very clear to me now, though, that not only had he convinced me of these things, but he equipped me to be able to argue them.

I read first this week an entry from the Encyclopedia of Race and Culture Studies on UNESCO. It pretty much outlines UNESCO’s mandate to prevent racism and educate people to further the goal of the total elimination of racism. So far, so good. The next entry from the encyclopedia was on the UN, and was pretty much a history of anti-racism campaigns and projects.

With this in mind, I picked up my scanned pages of Art and Archaeology of Afghanistan, and started with an article entitled “UNESCOS’s Rehabilitation of Afghanistan’s Cultural Heritage Mandate and Recent Activities”, which brought me to the following questions1

1.       WHY is an organization mandated for the elimination of racism restoring art?

2.       Why do the ALREADY-DESTROYED Bamiyan Buddhas get all this huge international attention and SO MUCH money when it says at the very beginning of the article that the UNESCO working groups agreed to leave Bamiyan alone and tend to sites with more pressing needs?

For the first: I kind of ended the article being all “Well, cultural heritage, it’s like...you’re destroying someone else’s religion and stuff, so...UNESCO can totally get involved in that...I guess...

For the second: I thought and thought and still came up with 2+2=5, so I was already a little sceptical when I picked up the next article, “Afghan Cultural Heritage and International Law: The Case of the Buddhas of Bamiyan”.

Here beginneth the rant – which is pretty much a transcription of thoughts as they went through my mind as I read.

1.       So WHY do we care about iconoclasm? And where do we draw the line between suppressing one religion in favour of another? Also, if someone like ___ can write an article that’s all “Yeah, you guys are stupid – iconoclasm? This is all political”, then how can you honestly call yourself an educated author and just...stick with what appears to be the status quo opinion of popular media?

2.       HOW IS LOADED AND OFFENSEIVE VOCABULARY IN A SCHOLARLY PAPER ANY BETTER THAN “ICONOCLAMS”?!

3.       How can you commit a “crime against culture”?

4.       So this kind of invective is pretty anti-Islam, which is counter to UNESCO’s ACTUAL mandate to work to the elimination of discrimination based on race, gender, religion, etc. So that’s not cool, UNESCO-people-publishing-this-thing.

5.       Since when are 2 statues allowed to be referred to as “all Afghan cultural heritage”, and wince when are we allowed in scholarship to draw these giant generalizations?

6.       Okay, so, actually? Stop talking about this “Northern Alliance” as if it’s so great. I wrote a paper on the application of Just War Theory to Afghanistan, and, let me tell you, you only have to dig a little bit to discover that the “Northern Alliance” were fierce, bloodthirsty, ABSOLUTELY BRUTAL warlords. Acknowledge, please, that they were not the legitimate and superior government?

7.       Okay, so, I can see how a bunch of conventions were broken by the breaking of the Bamiyan Buddhas – nobody’s arguing that that wasn’t a “good” action or whatever. But, like, dude. Does that justify this harsh, loaded rhetoric?

8.       So because UNESCO says that the destruction of the Buddhas “affected everyone”, we accept that? Why so we just accept these pronouncements that often have, as the UNESCO encyclopedia article showed, TONS of scholarly disagreement surrounding them, and don’t ever (except that one time in 1964) have anything resembling scholarly consensus at their inception?

9.       This focus on “yay cultural preservation!” is weord, given that

a.       NOBODY CARED ABOUT CULTURAL PRESENTATION IN VIETNAM/Cambodie/etc – that was all about human rights violations

b.      AFGHANI CHILDREN ARE STILL STARVING. Like, I know the money and manpower donated for restoration was in addition to instead of taking away from humanitarian aid, but something about this big iddue we have with preserving some statues who aren’t exactly going anywahere, while the main problems of the region haven’t been solved or anywhere NEAR solved is...irksome. Terrifying. And doesn’t speak well for humanity.

IN CONCLUSION to my rant: I have no answers to these questions. But, knowing what I know about Afghanistan, and, thanks to Finbarr Barry Flood, what I know about Islamic iconoclasm and the interesting political position of Taliban Afghanistan, I can honestly say that I’m in the interesting state of confusion that is not knowing what “side” to be on. On the one hand, I am hugely saddened by the destruction of art, On the other, I’m all “well, they had no other choice!” On the one hand, I’m pretty supportive of actions to restore art and make people aware and proud f their cultural heritage. On the other, I don’t know if I can support UNESCO’s activities in Afghanistan. This sidestep is stop and rant a while because it seems to be the only thing to do, and I feel like ranting some more will probably help me come up with answers to my questions. Until then, I think I’m going to stay pretty confused.

Step Fifteen

The word "cosmopolitan" gets used as an adjective, but if we look to the original Greek, it's actually a combination of "cosmos" and "politas" - "citizen of the world". It's been appropriated as an adjective, like in reference to a city, where it can mean "Having the characteristics which arise from, or are suited to, a range over many different countries; free from national limitations or attachments." or "Composed of people from many different countries." (both OED Online)

Regardless of nitpicky details about parts of speech, I figure, when we're talking about cities anywhere along the Silk Road(s), and especially ones near the ends, we're talking about the latter definition. So when we're talking about Xi'an (Chang'an, on some maps), we're talking about a city that is ridiculously ethnically/culturally/linguistically/religiously/etc  diverse.

This was my thought process (with some help from the internet - I don't carry the Oxford English Dictionary around in my head, unfortunately) when I dug out my course outline in my attempt to write something that actually fit with the week's theme instead of just branching randomly and haphazardly from the readings.

And then I read some articles. Two really stuck out at me: Bundy's essay "Missiological Reflections on Nestorian Christianity during the Tang Dynasty" and the first chapter of a book by Edward Schafer - romantically entitled Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of Tang Exotics. I'm going to go with a tri-layered argument refinement process here, to boil down a concrete strategy for how to deal on the Silk Road once you reach your destination.

I would like to sum up Section One, before I begin it, with the phrase: "like the new Star Trek movie!" Bundy's focus on the Nestorians' awesome survival method reminded me so much of that movie, in an abstract sense, it was ridiculous. Basically, if you haven't seen it, J. J. Abrams, bless his heart, managed to craft this movie that satisfied both the hardcore Trek nerds (tribble in Scotty's office was such a nice touch) and made a whole new fanbase of people who found it a genuinely good movie without needing to know any Trek lore at all. How does this relate to the Nestorians? They were, essentially, J. J. Abrams. They kept, as far as I can tell from Bundy's article, the basics of their religion so that the original adherents stayed cool with it, while changing and revitalizing things to appeal to the whole new fanbase that they found in China.

So, really, the Nestorians and good ol' J.J. make the point that one should adapt to the times/places in which one finds oneself - to make whatever it is that one is both something that one can fully own, and something that can be equally owned by the other people of the time/place.

In the margins of the article, next to "Step 15: IT'S JUST LIKE STAR TREK!" is the scribble "although it kinda failed the Nestorians but wtvs." And I was pretty worried - was the one awesome argument that I'd found in Bundy's article totally called into question by the fact that the Nestorians were kind of subsumed into broader Chinese culture so that we have very little information about them at all - Bundy makes it seem as though he presents the bulk of the extant material in all of 11 pages - and so that they essentially disappeared as a cultural subset?

It turns out that Schafer is very helpful in answering that question with a resounding "No!" Schafer details an elegant, slightly disorganized (so much getting lost. So many delicious little tangents.) history of Tang China with reference to commerce and luxury items and traders and stuff. It's all really wonderful and opulent and happy and "oh, so traders liked to live here..." until he starts getting into expulsion edicts and the idea of making monastics of all religions disrobe and join secular society for tax purposes and then the revolts and killing of foreign traders and it all gets pretty terrifying.

The basic idea of Schafer's chapter, in connection with my lacklustre conclusion from Bundy, is that, in Tang China, particularly during the end of the dynasty, it was less about cultural survival and more about survival. Period. The Nestorians, then, did it right - they adapted as much as they needed to in order to survive, and if that meant not being foreign, and if that meant getting rid of monastics (which Bundy maintains were the backbone of the religion), and if that meant protecting your family from overzealous revolutionaries however you could, then you did it. I think, too often, in academia we forget about the nitty-gritty, the everyday life aspect of things, and we say "Gee, the Nestorians didn't do themselves any favours!" but what we really mean is "Gee, the Nestorians didn't do us any favours!" and we don't see that, on an individual level, they survived. Dying for your faith is all well and good, but if you can preserve your religion in quiet while preserving your life as well, then, you know, I'd vote for that.

Additionally, as the latter part of the Schafer's chapter makes very clear, whatever your culture was pre-Tang-blowup doesn't matter. Even if you had a strong, non-adaptive presence, after you're gone, they'll find their imaginations are more exciting than you ever were.

It's a sobering thought, that, even if you were really radical and strong and didn't adapt at all, you might not make a mark. And I think it makes the middle point a lot more important, because if even your culture won't survive, you might as well start to think about yourself as an individual/member of a family and get on weathering the storm.

Troubling lessons of the Silk Road(s) boiled down into Step Fifteen: Adapt, and you have a chance of survival. Because even cosmopolitan cities can decide that the world is just too big to include inside their walls, and the weeds that stick up beyond the grass are the ones that get pulled out. 

Step Thirteen

So one thing we've seen time and again in history is that religions travel well. Religions seem to travel better than language (Jews stayed Jewish when they moved out to Eastern Europe, but they dropped the Hebrew and Yiddish grew up), or food types, or anything, really, except tangible goods. And even then, I'll bet that Jesuit missionaries were pretty frequently shipwrecked or robbed somehow along the way but still managed to spread their religion.

In my ongoing quest to be the best/most successful Silk Road-er ever, I think this is an important lesson to learn. And I think that the story of Xuanzang, or at least as Sally Hovey Wriggins tells it, is an excellent case study to support this point.

So Xuanzang is this Buddhist monk who decides to contravene a direct order from the emperor and head out on what turns into a sixteen-year walk, all the way to India, with the interest of re-discovering Buddhism. He's a profound Mahayana Buddhist (not surprising), and he's wondering how to reconcile Mahayana beliefs with Theravada texts that he's been reading (to his profound consternation), and what better place to do that than in Theravada Buddhism's home? So off he goes, and it's quite a story.

Amidst all the miracles (which are all pretty cool - Xuanzang's biographer had quite the dramatic flair, even if everything is 100% true and accurate) and all the flattering state visits and all the 'Oh heavens. These people are rather strange. Nice, but straaaaaaaaannnngggge...' moments, Xuanzang discovers more than just an obscure part of his religious roots: he discovers the power of religion.

His monk's garb gets him lots of help along the way, as do his institutional ties, but his personal practice is what really gets things done. In every conflict that he has with a ruler, for instance, the demonstration of his dedication to his principles or his Awesome Buddhist Arguing Skills or his stick-to-his-guns attitude where Mahayana and Theravada clash manage to let him come out on top in some way or another, but I want to look at this on a more fundamental level.

I want to take Xuanzang's journey and say that being religious was the only way he could travel at all, really. Looking back to some readings from last week/the week before/some time that was not very far away but is also not now, there's this story of the first Buddhist missionaries being merchants! Which was framed as this way to show that Buddhism was tied to commerce, but I want to say that it really shows that commerce was tied to Buddhism, which is a pretty minute distinction, but one that I feel is important. It's not that Buddhism went where commerce went, it's that commerce grew where Buddhism was present and BECAUSE of Buddhism.

I don't think it's anything inherent to Buddhism - I'm sure any other religion could have done the same thing - but I think that Xuanzang' story shows just how much Buddhism dragged commerce along with it.
Xuanzang left China with essentially nothing, and ended up with massive amounts of presents and things, given by King A for Kings B through B-prime. This is a form of goods exchange - the kings he visited gave him presents back in exchange for these, and he heads off every time to see someone else and give and get presents. Really awesome presents, too.

Furthermore - and finally, I guess - the information exchange that we see between trade partners is the same information exchange we see here. Xuanzang is learning about Theravada Buddhism (and teaching about Mahayana, something that I think is super important given his route through the Himalayas and the interesting contents and origins of Himalayan Buddhism), but he's also learning about all the petty kingdoms - and the not-so-petty ones, and the nomadic tribes, and India itself. Xuanzang ends up becoming an advisor to the emperor when he gets back, and all because he has this wealth of information about lands previously shrouded in mystical mystery. And the trade relations between India and China really start happening once the emperor has this adequate information about India and once all the various Indian rulers have this adequate information about China. Commerce followed on Xuanzang's heels (sometimes so close it was essentially in his shoes), as commerce follows on the heels of religion in general.

Things Xuanzang has taught me: that Step Thirteen should be Be a religious pilgrim - you get to explore the world, get presents, get political clout, and get credit for starting commerce. 

Step Twelve

Imagine, Matrix-style, that you've got a rid pill and a blue pill between which you have to choose. One of them is BE WARLIKE AND CONQUER EVERYBODY and the other is BE TRADERS AND GET CONQUERED BY EVERYBODY. Weighing the pros and cons, I would have totally picked the former - and then I read Liu's article on interaction between nomadic and sedentary socities.

Liu uses the Yuezhi-Kushan (whose identities are shrouded in layers of fog, which she does a pretty fair job of unraveling) as a model for other nomadic societies, talking about their widespread influence in East and Central Asia and through to the Hellenistic Afghanistan area. My first thought: "AHA! These are those awesome steppe traders that Christian was talking about!" because Liu gives them credit for being the first real users of the Silk Road.

The most interesting thing, though, is the contrast between the survival of cultures - I'm going to broad-brush-strokes it as a continuum from the Xiongnu through the Yuezhi-Kushan through the Bactrians.

How much do we know about the Xiongnu? I read an interesting article last week about their depictions in Chinese histories, and, frankly, we have very little either than those Chinese records on which to base our reconstruction of Xiongnu society. The Xiongnu were a crazy society that Han China (and all the other dynasties, it looks like Liu is suggesting) really hated, largely because the nomadic warrior-types were always trying to conquer China proper. Really aggressive, not much trading potential, angry-angry-angry people.

What about the Yuezhi-Kushan? Liu does a great job of explaining how they spread out through nomadic migratory practices to vaguely invade lots of places from China to India, and to keep really strong trade relations, especially with China, for whom they provided horses and jade and other stuff for the war against the Xiongnu. The Y-Z had terrible problems with the X as well, it seems, although after the majority of them (which may have just been people who spoke the same language rather than sharing a culture) migrated to India's side of the continent they stopped extensive trade with the Chinese. What we know about the Y-Z is fragmentary, and highly mixed up with all the other cultures around them, but it's definitely more than just entries in Chinese historical catalogues.

And, finally, the Bactrians, along with all the other people in India's side that the Y-Z happened to "conquer". Liu doesn't go into depth on their identities, but there seems to be very little controversy and very much really diverse information - from archaeological to written sources. We seem to know a lot more about them than about the vaguely conquering-types or about the really-seriously-we-want-your-kingdom-conquering-types.

So, my hypothesis! Liu talks about how sedentary societies tend to exert an extremely powerful influence on the nomadic societies which invade them, to the point where we really have no idea what, say, Mongol culture really looked like. Or Xiongnu. So it seems to me that, when deciding between red and blue pill, we should be looking at cultural survival.

The Yuezhi-Kushan spread out through EVERYONE, and in doing so a lot of their customs and religions became those of the people they conquered-ish. One particularly striking example is the introduction of Buddhism to China, which was done by KUSHAN missionaries. This is about as close to an explicit statement of assimilation as you're likely to get - the Buddhist practitioners in India/Afghanistan/that area converted large enough segments of the conquering population to send them back home with the good news.

Why DO conquering nomads end up getting subsumed into the lifestyle/practices/belief systems of their sedentary conquerees? Liu doesn't give much of an answer, but the question is one that I think is really important to our study of history. Furthermore, she implicitly sets up a pattern but does not derive from it a rule to hold next to other societies, and nothing I've yet read suggests any reason for cultural assimilation nor any rule that we can broadly apply and see how it fits.

So, for now, I'm going to have to be content to say that Step Twelve is to be traders and get conquered by everyone - you make tons of money and, really, you end up being the only one who people accurately remember.

Step Ten

Ward H. Goodenough, that man with the most wonderful name in the world, wrote an article on Culture for the Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology. Caveat emptor: I did not read all of it before composing this bog post, which will really be yet another semi-coherent criticism of what I consider to be the failings of people significantly more educated than I.

Within the first few pages, Goodenough handily dismisses 19th century attitudes towards culture and moves on to 20th century conceptions. He starts with Franz Boas, who was a proponent of the idea of "distinctive" cultures whose differences could be explained by (a) environmental conditions and (b) "the accidents of history" - so, essentially, an early Jared Diamond. He explains that, according to this theory, "People at the crossroads of communication have benefited from new developments being transmitted from many different places". I stopped there, stuck a little star in the margin, and wrote "STEP TEN: TRY TO AVOID INFLUENCE IN THE INTEREST OF FUTURE ANTHROPOLOGISTS", because something I've been getting through all these readings is that, because of cross-cultural exchange, it can be really, really hard to tell who-developed-what and what-things-looked-like-before-these-other-guys-came-into-the-picture.

So I keep reading, and Goodenough remarks that "The diffusion of customary practices is now known to be a highly selective process", which to me negates the whole point of cross-cultural exchange. If a culture could pick how another culture influenced it, I think a lot of them would choose realities a little different from how things turned out.

The question that I think Goodenough negates in this section is of what, if anything, do we know about cultures that were completely subsumed? Christian's steppe peoples, for instance, are a bunch of cultures/a cultural structure that he can only barely reconstruct, and, if you take him at his word, he's one of the first people to acknowledge their existence. If they could "selectively" decide which Chinese or Indo-Aryan or whatever other culture would "diffuse customary practices" within their society, would they have chosen the route that left them a teensy, pale footnote in what we actually, concretely know about the Silk Road(s)? We know next to nothing about them, which to me suggests that, since Christian posits that they were "at the crossroads" of trade, they "benefited from now developments being transmitted from many different places" and thus lost their singular identities.

I shouldn't really attach a value statement to the process by using words like "lost" or "subsumed". My problem is just that I feel Goodenough dismisses very real evidence about smaller communities in favour of looking at bigger cultures who COULD be selective about what they took from others.

In my interpretation, Step Ten should still be Try to avoid influence in the interest of future anthropologists, although arguably it's mapping cross-cultural contact that makes the discipline of history so alive and wonderful. But I rest on the idea that my steps are MINE: for this day, this year, this age when cultural preservation is very present on people's radar screens, and they are for me: for the Western world that has exerted, at many times, an undue negative influence on cultures it deems less "advanced" than itself.

Step Nine

Reading A Concise Introduction to World Religions and some discussion thread comments from my Science Fiction class has made me really seriously think about language some more. The religion textbook tells me that Judaism doesn't really approve of translating its scripture out of Hebrew, and that Islam pretty much says you aren't reading the Qur'an if it's not in Arabic, and I'm sure if I flipped through, I'd find that the original language of sacred texts is important to some extent across the board. An interesting aside to this is traditionally that in both Judaism and Islam, religion is not a part of your daily life, but your daily life is a part of your religion, meaning that your language is incredibly important to your culture.

To me, this makes perfect sense. Why else would SF authors create new languages that usually fail completely because they don't sound exotic, just silly? Why else would Tolkien have created full grammars and dictionaries for at least two languages and probably more for his fictional Middle Earth? As any avid reading of SF and Fantasy can tell you, language is one of the main things that sets cultures apart. 

And as anyone remotely familiar with Overused Shakespeare Quotes can tell you, "That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet". I prefer to agree less with a 14-year-old lovestruck girl and more with Hubert H. Humphrey, who said that "In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be."

So, putting these ideas together: language is inherently tied into the very deepest parts of who we are as individuals and who we are as societies and, perhaps more importantly, how we relate to other individuals and other societies. 

It's because of this linkage that we can use the knowledge of a language to tell us things about the societ(y/ies) that use(s/d) it - especially with reference to religion. And here I feel like CEL dropped the ball. They do devote a nice, tidy page to Language and Religion, but really all they do is give examples of

a) religions that tie writing/language as a whole to a divinity or divinities

and

b) types of religious writing/language.

I want to know how the structure of Sanskrit can tell me about the devotional practices of Brahmins in 14th century BCE India. I want to know how learning the different words for "prayer" can help me understand the different approaches to the practice in different cultures. I want to know, I think most relevantly for this discussion, how the learning the languages of the Silk Road(s) would have helped a traveller to understand the cultures with which s/he was interacting. I want to know how language helped spread religions around, and spread animosity towards religions around. 

Step Nine is thus very clearly Tie the languages you learn to the cultures you meet. Because language is not a static thing, and language can obviously tell us so much about religions and cultures and societies, maybe, I think, even more so than archaeological records.

Step Seven

So I'm sitting here figuring that Seven is an Important Number and should thus have something vaguely scholarly attached to it, when my computer pops up with a reminder that I have programmed into my calendar: Practice Sanskrit. Languages are not my forte. But doing anything with Buddhist or Hindu studies really requires at the very least Sanskrit, and other languages are pretty helpful. Islamic studies'll take Arabic, but I figure: ONE new alphabet at a time, right?

And I'm having my little pity party as I pull out my practice notebook and my list of words and phrases to transliterate, and suddenly it strikes me: for anyone travelling the Silk Road(s), language would've been an issue, too.

I mean, for starters, even if Christian is wrong about the pastoralists, you've still got quite the large difference between people in different cities. Think about India! Or pre-colonial North and South America! Or England for most of the Middle Ages! The idea that people who are essentially next door neighbours can't understand each other takes on huge significance when we look at it from the perspective of people who lived significantly further apart, and probably had a bare minimum of common cultural practices to provide some context for conversation. And when you update the issue to the heyday of the Silk Road, when there really were only a few giant cohesive routes stretching from the Mediterranean to the Gobi Desert, well. You've got quite the conundrum.

What I want to know is: were there translators? I mean, aside from buying slaves/indentured servants along the way and hoping that
a) they spoke your language
b) they were fluent enough in their own language to function as an interpreter
c) they knew the language of your next destination
AND THEN: would you sell them when you got to your next stop and buy someone else who fit the criteria, but for the city after? And do the same coming back?

Would you communicate through signs? Body language is super different East to West, so would there be tons of miscommunication and offensive behaviour to one side or the other, and eventually gruesome death for ticking off the wrong person?

Because communication is important - not just for successful trade (although it's kinda key there as well) but also to avoid the kind of misapprehensions that come from poor communication. Orientalism is something that's come up a lot in modern scholarly work focusing on the world west of the Mediterranean, and where did Orientalism come from? The root of the problem, it seems to my untutored eye, is the lack of real communication.

And not just on the part of, say, Chinese national to Venetian dude. No, Venetian dude'll tell the rest of his trade caravan what Chinese national said, and a Genoese dude who splits from the party to head back early with a half dozen other guys + entourages, encounters a Ladakhi guy on his way back. And he tells this story to the Ladakhi, who goes on his way to wherever he's headed. He stops in an inn on the way and talks to a Buddhist pilgrim who's on his way to Bodghaya, re-telling the story. The Buddhist, in Bodghaya, stays with a Muslim who's on his way to Mecca for his own pilgrimage, and tells him the story one night when it's too hot to sleep. On his way to Mecca, the Muslim stops at the home of a distant cousin, a trader who's on his way to Venice, and recounts the story to him because they don't have much else to say to each other. The trader cousin gets to Venice, and is sitting on the quay watching the sunset one evening when a Venetian dude sits down next to him. They start to talk, and the trader cousin tells the Venetian dude his story, and the Venetian dude - the same one from the beginning - doesn't recognize the tale. Information getting ANYWHERE along the Silk Road must've been a massive and disgustingly confusing game of Broken Telephone, and a dangerous one, too.

The last time I played Broken Telephone, I didn't end up believing what I heard at the end because I knew that it was inevitably distorted. But trading information and stories along the Silk Road(s) was not a game, and nobody knew that everything would be inevitably distorted.

Obviously, miscommunication happens even when people speak the same language. But, really: how much worse is the situation when hundreds of languages are in play?

Therefore, logical Step Seven is hereby christened Learn some languages. Or hire an amazing translator who knows everything. 

Step Six

I figure that, at this point, it's a good idea to consider the notion of knowing where you're going. I really have no articles to quote or class notes that brought up this idea, but I've really been thinking about it, this concept of trip planning.

I'm a compulsive planner. I have lists upon cross-checked lists upon timed lists upon lists attached to detailed calendar sketches of what my days look like. I double and triple check all my meetings, visits-with-friends, class times, etc. When plotting my schedule this year, I made up about six tentative ones including sub-ins for each class in each schedule. I plan everything out in obsessive detail. But when I read things like Ernest Shackleton's South, the story of his journey to the Antarctic, or this fictional book about Marco Polo whose cover I can visualize but whose title and author escape me, there seems to be a lack of evidence of planning. And this piques my curiosity.

My question really is: is an adventure an adventure if you plan it out? And furthermore! Were the people travelling on the Silk Road(s) LOOKING for adventure?

For the first, I don't have an answer. I can't conceive of not planning an excursion of any kind - so for, me, I suppose, I would have to say that I certainly hope one can still have an adventure if one has a plan. Otherwise my life looks pretty boring from here on in. But at the same time, what makes even the adventure of a new school exciting is the unknown, right? That allure of the mystery of things, the unpredictable nature of them, the adrenaline rush of nerves, etc, etc. And is an adventure without the excitement really an adventure at all? Something several of my classes this semester are making me think much more consciously about the problem of definition, and this really isn't the place to get into a debate about what adventure IS, but one facet of the discussion applies, I think: the nature of something can vary incredibly based on one's vantage point.

In the case of the adventure of the Silk Road(s), I'd say that this idea of the allure of the unknown was definitely present - but perhaps not on the part of Christian's pastoralists or Xinru's religious pilgrims. The Silk Road history that I've read up 'til now has come from a largely European perspective, with overtones of Orientalism. In this sense, we can relate the feeling of adventure as the allure of the unknown to concepts of "the Orient" in Europe during the Silk Road's heyday: that the fascination with the Other was what drove a large part of Eastward-headed traffic on the Silk Road.

Obviously that's a sweeping generalization, but I think it's something worthy of consideration. That's what adventurers DO, right? They search for the adrenaline rush and therefore don't plan as obsessively as I do so that they can have that delicious prickle of newness and excitement. And so for Europeans headed out - for trade, yes, and potentially with religious goals in mind - was it a conscious decision to go on an adventure in search of the elusive and expansive unknown? Or was it simply that they had know way of knowing what exactly they were getting into, so they had no way to sketch out list after list after travel route after emergency contact information?

Either way, I think a valid Step Six might just be Figuring out how much you need to know about where you're going.

Step Five

Consider Religious Pilgrimage.
I want a button made up that says that. OR A T-SHIRT.

So I've been reading "Silk and Religion in Eurasia, C. AD 600-1200" by Liu Xinru. And in it she talks about the connection between religious traffic and silk traffic in the years stated. I have to say <criticism> that she doesn't extrapolate enough to effectively tie the two phenomena together </criticism>, but I will say that if she had, I think her argument might've been incredibly convincing.

The idea here is that silk has prized by at least Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism, so by tracking silk trade figures, we can track religious movement as well. I'm honestly not sure how successful that was, but what I DID get from this article was a great sense of the mobility of religion in the past - how Christians in Byzantium very quickly started buying Islamic silk, for instance - and the links between silk and politics or silk and religion - usually in the form of luxury laws or strict dress codes.

Silk was a massively huge part of the Big Three Religions of Afro-Eurasia (although let's not get carried away - various Chinese religions, things like Bon, Judaism...they were around, too, and I don't have the stats to pick a Big Three), which connects back to Christian's argument about how there was sort of a pervasive Afro-Eurasian culture. In this sense, I think he would be right: it seems like EVERYONE had use for silk, especially for their religious ceremonies.

Also for their political hierarchies, but that feels like a major tangent in her article, so I'm not really going to deal with it, fascinating thought it may be.

The silk routes, though - and this is awesome - were not, at the beginning, much populated by traders. The first Silk Road Navigators were pilgrims travelling in one of three cycles (Sino-Indian, Byzantine-European, Islamic World) and carrying silk for devotional purposes, for donational purposes, or to provide safe passage for themselves on behalf of higher religious officials who were using them as envoys (sometimes). So it seems as though one of the big things you need to do to be successful on the Silk Road is to be a religious pilgrim.

Although carrying that much wealth must've made you a target for bandits who were not of your religion, I suspect. The main point stands, though: silk was HUGE with religion, and the reason the silk trade started was because the different religious institutions wanted that to happen.

It makes me think: what would the world be like today if none of the religious traditions in the Afro-Eurasian area cared at all about silk? Would trade still have begun? If it did, would it continue as briskly for so long? Would silk have entered into our lives in the modern Western world? What far-reaching affects would the ripples in Time caused by THAT major of a difference have? I think we need to thank our lucky stars that we have some ancestors/distant cousins/people not even related to us, really that braved the terrors of the Road(s) for the love of god(s) or  a desire to devote part of their life/time/wealth to their religious practice.

What could WE do if we cared that much about the things that shape our society? What could WE do if we had something like religion that bound us together? (Because, let's face it: religion just isn't cutting it anymore.)

The answer to these questions will doubtless come upon the completion of Step Five: Consider Religious Pilgrimage

Step Four

Looking at David Christian's article from yesterday, because it's starting to become a bit of an obsessive thing to check on as many of his sources as I can (my Sanskrit homework is suffering, as, doubtless, are the people around me on the train who have to deal with my rustling of papers and thundercloud looks), I can say that while his pastoralist argument is a bit suspect, the argument that he's quoting from Frank and Gills is actually kinda cool.

Apparently, the main use of the Silk Roads was to establish and maintain a kind of inter-continental cultural construct, where everyone in above-the-Sahara Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia was tied together by common technology, common goods, common germs, and some interbreeding. Jared Diamond has a great book which I bought a couple of years ago and just never got around to reading, Guns, Germs, and Steel, which brings to bear on this issue. Diamond's idea is to "provide a short history of everything for the last 13,000 years" (9) without resorting to racial differences. He talks about the main connecting points of different civilizations and the main growth points of individual civilizations, giving reasoning for why each one has a different trajectory. Really, as he points out in his prologue, he's attempting to answer the question of why the distribution of wealth/power in the modern world is the way it is now, by going back to ask why human development took all its different courses which led it to the modern world.

Diamond is potentially relevant to studying the Silk Road(s), so I'ma have to give him a read, I suppose.

End of tangent. Essentially, what Christian is saying - and what I think the main point of his article might ACTUALLY be - is that there is some sense of unity to the Afro-Eurasian world during the heyday of the Silk Roads. What, exactly, did they share?
A preliminary, tentative list would include:
- livestock power in agriculture, transportation, and war
- the use of hides and wool
 - compound bows/crossbows
- armour in cavalry warfare
- the stirrup
- siege warfare
- gunpowder
- print and paper-making
- religious motifs (more on those later)
- silks/carpets/metals/ceramics/furs/livestock produce
- stylistic motifs
- languages
- periodic bacterial exchanges and therefore a shared/common immune system

And furthermore! The Afro-Eurasian area has a single history based on the development of these things, a history totally separate from that of the Americas, or sub-Saharan Africa, or Oceania, or, presumably, Europe. I don't know if I necessarily agree with the idea that trading together and thereby exchanging these technologies/techniques/ideas/goods necessarily means that we can talk about one comprehensive Afro-Eurasian history or culture, but, then, Christian isn't the one making the argument - he's just quoting. I think.

The interesting part, I think, is the religious motifs business. While the only one that Christian specifically mentions in shamanism (and of course he doesn't explain it - man, I just don't get this guy and how he got published. Maybe I should read his articles when not tired), it got me thinking: what are the things that religions have in common? In my World Religions class, we've been talking about theories about the origin of religion in general, trying to make broad statements about the history of religion and of religious studies. And the idea of these broad statements, of course, is that they apply to all religions. Is that what Christian is trying to say? I think yes. I think his main idea here is to explain that there are religious traditions - prayer, for instance, which is common in Hinduism/Islam/Christianity/Judaism/certain branches of Buddhism/Confucianism (in the form of ancestor respect rituals)/Shinto/Bon/and potentially other religions that I can't remember or don't know enough about to say - there are religious tradition that transcend boundaries, that every religion exercises slightly differently, but that somehow tie them together.

Now, I think that that's a far cry from saying that this relationship implies a common history and cultural evolutionary path, but I can agree that, especially through religious similarities, cultures can be tied together. In Mary Renault's The King Must Die (Greek mythology. Novelized. Love.), for example, Theseus and 13 other Athenian kids get trucked off to Crete. Some of them worship Poseidon, some the Earth-Mother, some random tribal gods, etc - but they realize along the voyage that they all share devotion to the Earth-Shaker in some incarnation, whether they have similar practices or names for him or whathaveyou, so they band together in this commonality of worship. And thus are a bunch of scared kids tied together. Cultures shouldn't be different, right? Or at least, in theory.

I suppose I'd have to read the original to come away convinced, but for now, I'm just going to say that an appropriate Step Four is to Rejoice in mixed heritage which allowed for the spread of ideas, technologies, religion, goods, and germs as it mingled the gene pools of Afro-Eurasia.

Step Three

It turns out that to dominate the Silk Road, you have to be a pastoralist (nomadic herder) - at least according to David Christian. In his article "Silk Roads or Steppe Roads? The Silk Roads in World History", Christian argues a bunch of different things, among them the idea that the established "civilizations" on which the historiography of the Silk Road focuses were not the only peoples to benefit from the trade route, nor, in fact, were they the dominant type of people. 

But first: there was definitely more than one Silk Road. This actually makes sense to me - there are about three dozen ways to get to my dorm room from the other side of campus, and I do sometimes feel like an adventurer figuring them out. And if I were a truly methodical person (alas, I am only a pretender to the title), I would have an ongoing map where I could plot out the routes with times and obstacles and places for potential SMC students (the bandits in this scenario) to lurk. I also don't have appropriate measuring tools, and the face of Devonshire Place seems to be changing almost daily - I blame the drunken parties for knocking over the giant vases - so imagining my route exponentially longer, harder, and more dangerous leads me, in a roundabout way, to think it's rather intuitive that there be several Silk Roads. 

So, all of these trade routes were miniature, according to Christian, as in not stretching from the Mediterranean into the heart of China. There were tons of inter-relationships going on in the areas that the Silk Road on my map sprawls through - as early as the 2000s BCE! And the majority of this exchange (Christian prefers the word to "trade" because "exchange includes ideas, diseases, and the inevitable procreation) happened between the agrarian settlements and some majorly badass pastorialans.

These horse-raising folk lived in the steppes of the Urals and the Himalayas and the Altais and the Karakorums and the Tianshans and the Kunluns and the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush and all the other mountain ranges that I'm missing and traded pretty far into Mesopotamia. In fact, Christian blames them for this idea that there was one mostly homogeneous Afro-Eurasian path of development and overarching cultural structure. But more on that in Step Four. There was a definite plus, it seems, in being a nomad, even if it meant you couldn't read or write and you didn't build cities (although you apparently stopped long enough to raise wheat every so often).

What I want to know is, if, as Christian painstakingly points out, it's super hard to merge the archaeological record of the pastoralists with the historical/textual record of the agrarians, how come it only takes him 26 pages to make his the-pastoralists-win argument (among like three others that all mixed together at times)? He provides a lot of "evidence", I'll give him that, in the form of quotes from lists of products and horse-raising statistics and draws a lot of conclusions about dates based on quantities of silk in places. As logical as it sounds - heaven knows the discipline of history ignores things all too often - I just don't feel justified in being convinced. Granted, I AM convinced, I'm just trying to figure out why I am. Maybe it's my soft spot for nomadic-horse-raising-kickass-warrior-types. Maybe I kept hoping his people of the steppes included the Tibetans, who were ridiculous horse-raising-kickass-warrior-types for a decent chunk of their history. Maybe I was sucked in by the romance of these people of the steppes galloping through the hills Lord of the Rings style, on a mission to bring mountain wool to the people of the cities/towns/villages and return with metallurgical objects. 

Anyways, maybe I'm only dubious of his research - that's it, I'm dubious of his research, not his conclusions - because he quotes himself so much. He's an interesting fellow - PhD at Oxford, in Russian history. Wrote lots of books - including a history of vodka. Is now really interested in "Big History" which is essentially the story of the ENTIRE UNIVERSE from Planck time onwards (the course description says from the Big Bang onwards, but I read some theoretical physics this summer, so I know that's impossible). So I'm not sure how he's qualified to do any of that? But he's been alive for a while. Lot's of independent research. 

Anyways: me becoming disillusioned is beside the point. If we take Dr. Christian at face value, and I stick with my original thoughts on the article, Becoming a Pastoralist is an absolutely perfect Step Three along the route that my map says is the Silk Road.