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 Eight

So I've been reading some sections of The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language, and I'm seriously getting the vibe that language is much too important of an issue to be relegated to a single step. Therefore, I present Further Arguments on the Importance of Language, alternatively titled Step Eight: You're not just changing the gene pool, so prepare yourself accordingly.


According the CEL (which is an acronym I just made up now, either because I am an incredibly lazy typist or an incredibly clever/witty person in general), languages are fascinatingly complex. One of the main ideas here is that of this language called "proto-Indo-European", which is supposed to be this foundational languages from which 55 languages sprung. I didn't read anywhere about a foundational language called "proto-everything-that's-not-Indo-European", but, for the sake of this post, let's just assume that there is one.

And let's assume that we have access to a time machine - one of my most cherished desires - and that, furthermore, we are fully functional crossbreeds of the historical linguist and the classic philologist (BIG NOTE: those disciplines apparently clash over the value of the historical record vs. the value of direct structural analysis, but CEL's experts have determined that the two are complementary). So, with our handy-dandy time machine, we had back to travel along the Silk Road(s) in the party of, say, a Genoese trader.

The question I have is, with a good knowledge of proto-Indo-European and any other proto-languages, would we be any better equipped than your average Genoese trader to deal with the different peoples and language groups we'd encounter?

I'm looking at this huge long process of scholarship that has led to the development of grammatical treatises and an alphabet and vocabulary for proto-Indo-European, and there's a big part of me that doesn't see the practical value in it. I suppose one could say the same thing about any number of scholarly disciplines - astrophysics, for instance, does not affect my daily life in any way - but all the examples I can think of have SOME bearing to SOMETHING in reality. I guess linguistic archaeology is something like regular archaeology, in the sense that it really ends up being knowledge for knowledge's sake, but, thinking like a traveller of the Silk Road(s), I think I would much rather understand a culture's history than understand that their language came from the same basic root as mine.

But I digress. What we're looking at here is the importance of language, and I want to bring this back to Christian's idea of EXCHANGE rather than TRADE. The CEL makes the point that sometimes it's really hard to tell the relationship between languages because the markers that would put them in the same family might only be there because of a cultural exchange - like all the French words and grammatical structures in English from way back in the Norman Conquest. To what extent, I wonder, are languages part of the Silk Road exchange - and not just, like I mentioned in Step Seven, to learn other languages, but to INFLUENCE them.

If I look at the CEL's handy map of language group distribution, I can see a ton of points of interaction between languages. The majority of the Silk Road(s) didn't include speakers of Indo-European languages, which means a massive amount of interplay not only between, say Indo-Iranian and Italic languages, but also between the Indo-European languages and other entire FAMILIES of languages.

And when you break down the Uralic languages (for which, sadly, the CEL does not have a nice little chart), or the Caucasian languages, or the Palaeosiberian or Altaic or Chinese languages, or the languages that don't fit into any of those like Korean or Japanese, you're talking a massive number of possible interactions, if you do the whole thing where you multiple <number of things> by <number of thing> to get the possible permutations of those things?

I feel like this has two major implications for journeying the Silk Road(s).

One: whatever you do, whoever you meet, they will be influencing your language and you will be influencing theirs.
Two: Step Seven is significantly easier said than done.

And implication number two brings back the question - would knowledge of proto-languages help your plight in  any way? Because if so, I feel like yet another alternative title for Step Eight would be be a linguist. 

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.