Silk Road-Tripping

FINAL PROJECT!

2010-03-30T06:44:00.000-07:00

Here's the link to my final project! Hope you enjoy!

www.silkroadtripping.tumblr.com

Judaism In China and Last Remarks

2010-03-23T07:58:00.000-07:00

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!

The Great Game

2010-02-23T06:48:00.000-08:00

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.

Place and Politics

2010-02-09T06:38:00.000-08:00

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.

The Spread of Islam and Imagining Islam

2010-02-02T07:00:00.000-08:00

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?

Manichaeism

2010-01-12T07:12:00.000-08:00

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.

Tang Dynasty and Nestorian Christianity

2010-01-10T18:24:00.000-08:00

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?

Dunhuang

2009-11-24T07:50:00.000-08:00

From silkroadtoronto.wordpress.com blog:

Nov. 24: Online Group Topic – for this group topic I want you to focus on daily life at Dunhuang. What is the socio-political situation at the site, and how does Buddhism figure in? What do we know, and what do we not know, that might help us reconstruct the actual practice of Buddhism in the Dunhuang region?

1. Anxiety

As far as the socio-political situation of Dunhuang is concerned, we know that the town and religious complex were situated on the periphery of Imperial China; Dunhuang was a frontier town, comparable to the dusty streets of the Wild West in some small way. So far removed from the administrative, cultural, and safely guarded heart of China, one assumes the citizens of Dunhuang were anxious about maintaining their continued support from the Emperor. Without imperial support and troops, the little town would surely fall prey to the 'barbarians' from beyond (in fact, it often did), shattering the lives that Dunhuang residents tried to build for themselves.

Anxiety is an interesting emotion because it is involves a mental state that cannot easily assuaged. Perhaps adherence to Buddhism, and especially adherence to a calming meditative regime, may have helped to keep fear and troubles in check.

2. Hierarchy

There is evidence that Chinese society at Dunhuang was very hierarchical within a system of class-merit differentiation. Perhaps Dunhuang citizens actively competed with each other for prestige. One excellent way of accumulating prestige would be to actively display wealth and piety. Therefore, in this context, leaving one's mark upon the Cave of the Thousand Buddhas could be considered an important strategic move.

Donors commissioned paintings and sculptures in the caves, and likenesses of these patrons were probably accurately depicted within these works of art. Therefore, it is possible that Buddhist ritual sites offered Dunhuang citizens a chance to immortalize their legacy, compete within the political arena, and engage in pious (even redemptive) acts.

3. Daily Practice

In order to understand daily life at Dunhuang, it is important to remember that the everyday can sometimes include the sublime, and that religious experience can often become perfunctory. Buddhist prayer and meditation punctuated everyday life in a habitual and banal way. Similarly, the banality and pain of existence necessitated the Buddhist message in the first place. If we are to accurately reconstruct life at Dunhuang we must take into account the interpenetration of sacred and profane.

But how? We have many ancient texts and can glean much from archaeological excavation, but we do not have access to the bodily practice of Buddhism in Dunhuang during the Silk Road period. An interesting experiment might be to construct an accurate theatrical representation of a day-in-the-life of a Dunhuang citizen. This would involve a great many other reconstructions in order to effect a believable stage, and so might only be possible in a very limited way.

Zorastrianism

2009-11-03T07:36:00.000-08:00

First of all, I just thought I would point out something that I found very interesting. Quoting from Mallandra's An Introduction to Ancient Iranian Religion:
(p. 39) "One of the initially bewildering features of Zarathustra's exposition is his use of verbal tenses. This difficulty is rooted in the fact that the Indo-Iranian languages possessed a special verb form, the injunctive, which is reserved for the expression of myth and timeless truths. Whereas one tends to regard all events, whether mythological or not, as taking place in a nonrecurring historical order, archaic man understood mythical events, which took place in mythological time, as being everpresent."

Fascinating. This reminds me of the aliens from Slaughterhouse Five. If "archaic man" (and I shall presume "archaic woman" as well) understood mythical events in this way, where along the way did we lose this ability? Here Mallandra has made a bit of a jump. It is not that archaic people had an ability that we do not possess, but that Zarathustra's language provided him (and by this I mean the later scribes who wrote as him) with the ability to present the world in this way. Navajo language also affords story-tellers this ability, a point which Basso drives home in his book Wisdom Sits in Places as a part of his discussion of cultural geography/ecology. What is interesting here is that the infinite, timeless continuity of this language form drives home both the immediacy AND ancient authority of moral teachings. I wonder if there is a similar medium in contemporary society. The closest thing I can think of would be that of cinema.

Now, continuing on to my discussion of Zorastrianism proper. What does everybody think about this concept of twin Divinities, one Evil and one Good? In the Abrahamic religions (the cases with which I am most familiar) God is held up in contradistinction with the Devil, Shaitan, or Iblis... yet parity between the two parties is never inferred in official dogma. However, one gets the sense that at least in folk Christianities, that the Devil holds an equal position in terms of Judgement: the promise of Salvation is met with an equally powerful Temptation. Interestingly, the same imagery that appears in Zorastrianism resurfaces in Christian lore. God is the Light (as in Jesus' claim "I am the Light, the Way, and the Truth) and the Devil is the Darkness. God's retribution is meted out in terms of flame. The examples go on.

Do you think that this imagery is built directly into the human psyche, perhaps as an effect of our species' evolution as diurnal and an ancient recognition of the immense adaptive advantage of fire? After all, we see a similar adoration of fire cross-culturally. Or perhaps this imagery was appropriated by Judaism from Zorastrianism long ago. Or perhaps such similarity is an effect of the manipulative translation and rendering of Zorastrian texts by monotheist-biased scholars.

What is Religion?

2009-11-03T06:41:00.000-08:00

As the "Studying Religion" website indicates, no one unified "theory of religion" is likely possible, and no one definition practically useful. However, there is another position that neither the website nor our encyclopaedia reading explores fully, that of understanding "religion" as a political strategy. For, despite its rather amorphous quality, the notion of religion holds considerable power. In classifying a set of practices, beliefs, symbols, or whatever else as a religion, that "religion" can access certain privileges within the context of the liberal state. Charity status and certain tax exemptions are available for new "religions" with a significant number of adherents; such benefits are not offered to (the sitgmatized and denigrated appellation of) "cults".

It is not my purpose here to compare the taxation laws of various countries. Rather, I simply wish to point out that any working definition of religion must take into account the way that groups of human beings make use of similar definitions to pursue political goals. In his course on Indigenous Spirituality, anthropologist David Turner at U of T explained that his initial fieldwork experience with the Aboriginal people of Grute Island, Australia can be understood in this way. Grute Islanders had long practiced a series of rituals and shared a collection of narratives about "the Dreaming" prior to colonial contact. Islanders had never considered these elements "religious", seeing them instead simply as their "way of life". However, faced with increasing antagonism from the missionaries in the 1960s, the Natives of Grute Island invited Dr. Turner to work with them in compiling an Aboriginal "bible", a document containing a systematic description of their history/mythology, practices, and symbolic vocabulary. In order to counter missionary claims about their "barbarity", the Islanders sought legitimize their "way of life" as a "religion" and, in so doing, legitimize their right to keep it. The extent to which the Islanders were successful is not important in this discussion. Regardless, this example demonstrates how "religion" can be deployed as a political strategy.

In conclusion, if we are to take seriously the Encyclopaedia of Cultural Anthropology's claim that "things religious pervade other cultural systems and cannot adequately be studied separate from those contexts", then we also must investigate how those contexts (political or otherwise) infiltrate and shape "religion", and the various attempts we make at defining it.

Sogdiana

2009-10-20T07:31:00.000-07:00

       There is always the tendency when speaking about ancient people to conflate language with ethnicity. This is very problematic. The idea that "the language makes the people" is a fairly recent one, an ideology about language that really only emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe. This concept was used in two ways. First, it was used to legitimate and facilitate national unification, as in the case of Bismarckian Germany. On the other hand, it was used as a rallying cry for the liberation of subjugated people, such as the Hungarians striving for independence from the Austrian-Hapsburg Empire. In either case, language and ethnicity were imagined as the constitutive elements for the centralized European nation-state. This political architecture is historically and geographically specific, and in no way should it be extended conceptually to include ancient civilizations. I fear that as a result of the fragmentary nature of the historical record, and the brevity of Wood, Marshak, and Negmatov's treatment, the "Sogdians" have been partially misconstrued.
        Who exactly are we talking about when we speak of the "Sogdians"? They appear to have been a semi-nomadic group of traders operating across the central stretch of the Silk Road, sharing some sort of affiliation with the city state of Samarkand. Our readings claim that they were at some points Buddhist, Zoroastrian, and Manichean in their religious outlook. Their art-form is likewise eclectic incorporating both style and subject matter from a host of other traditions. By all accounts the Sogdians were a varied group.
       All of this evidence would seem to imply that the "Sogdian" identity, constructed here by our readings over the course of a few centuries, was not as centralized as the type of nationalized identities we are familiar with today. Apparently, many other people could speak Sogdian: were these people in some way Sogdian as well? Some Sogdians became Chinese citizens: were they still Sogdians? How could the Sogdians living and trading with the Indian peoples be considered the same as those living so far away in Turfan? My question is, what - if any - were the decisive characteristics that made someone a Sogdian?
   I do not wish to imply that "the Sogdians" never existed as a unified concept; I am only seeking to problematize this week's rendering of that concept. Perhaps my concerns have already been addressed through intricate scholarship too specialized to include in a survey course. It would be very interesting to see what kinds of geographical and temporal subdivisions existed within - and were important for - the Sogdian peoples.

Han Dynasty

2009-10-13T06:40:00.000-07:00

I was very much intrigued by Emperor Wu's poem quoted in Wood. I thought that it might be fun to repeat it here with annotations.

The Heavenly Horses are coming,
Coming from the Far West.
They crossed the Flowing Sands,
For the barbarians are conquered.

       Out somewhere in the 'barbaric' wilds, in the exotic west across the deserts there lies the home of the Heavenly Horses. Doesn't this sound like the opening to a Spaghetti Western? Cue the piccolo from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Continuing in the vein of my previous post, we see that the magical and the mysterious is imagined as exterior. Said describes an Orientalism, a construction of the East simultaneously in line with European rationality and European fantasy; interestingly, Imperial China shared a similar Occidentalism. What could it possibly mean that Empire creates magic outside of its borders so that it can appropriate this magic through conquest? I am reminded of Michael Taussig.

The Heavenly Horses are coming
That issued from the waters of a pool.
Two of them have tiger backs:
They can transform themselves like spirits.

       The Futurists of Italy might have identified with this passage. Imagine the visual experience of seeing an Arabian stallion at full gallop in a time where speed was hard to come by. Rapid travel is an everyday experience for us thanks to the invention of motorized transportation. To the Han Chinese, watching a horse fly about at high speeds would have been a novel, thrilling, perhaps even erotic experience. What imagery would they have used to describe the experience? The speed and power of a rushing river? The mercurial transformation of ghostly spirits? I bring up the Italian Futurists because one of the conventions they used in their painting was to depict high speed by condensing movement over time into a single image. This yeilded images similar to a photo taken with a low shutter speed: blurred images of trains, scurrying wheels instead of legs. This technique gives the images a liquid, or perhaps ghostly effect. An interesting connection.

The Heavenly Horses are coming;
Jupiter is in the Dragon.
Should they choose to soar aloft,
Who could keep pace with them?

        Jupiter? I lack a frame of reference to interpret this stanza. Perhaps Jupiter is the Heaven that Emperor Wu writes of, or perhaps it is an auspicious star ascendent in an auspicious astral house. What is certain, however, is that Jupiter does not refer to a "planet" as Han astrology did not have the telescopic technology to make that determination, nor does it carry the same semiotic value we might attribute to it out of the Classical tradition. As Jupiter was the king of the Olympian gods, so too do we imagine the massive Jupiter as the king of the solar system. How does this differ from Han notions? Where does that "wandering star" fit into the Han cosmic order? Sometimes I think I would enjoy studying ethnoastronomy.

The Heavenly Horses are coming;
Open the gates while there is time.
They will draw me up and carry me
To the Holy Mountain of K'un-lun.

       The Holy Mountain is a recurring image throughout many cultures, perhaps even in the contemporary Canadian experience. Both internally and abroad Canada is imagined as a land of vast forests and stunning mountains, high peaks that are exponentially removed from the lowlands of the everyday, work, "the profane". Durkheim might classify them as "sacred" in constrast. Is it so far a stretch to connect Alpine "holiday" with Alpine "holiness"? Further, what is the connection between relative elevation and dominance? Heaven, the seat of the Ruler of the Universe, is imagined as above us; this is an imagery of domination infinitely replicated throughout human experience. The flag above the conquered terrain, the raised throne over the courtroom dais, polite Japanese bows, dogs mounting each other with yelping and snarling. And it is to this position of dominance the Heavenly Horses will carry the Han Emperor. Is Wu really talking about a K'un-Lun mountain, or is he speaking of global supremacy?

The Heavenly Horses have come
And the Dragon will follow in their wake
I shall reach the Gates of Heaven
I shall see the Palace of God.

       Acquisition and transfiguration. Only one step removed from cosmetics commericals.

       Both in Wood and Waugh we get the sense that despite the temporal, spatial, and social difference seperating us from the Han, we share so much in common with them. Similar motives, similar aspirations. But it was repeatedly impressed upon me that there is an alienly semantics at work in the Han court. What can we make of ritual castration? What can we make of mutual hostage taking? The answer is perhaps not so obvious as we would assume.

First Entry!

2009-09-22T06:52:00.000-07:00

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.