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 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.