Writing Travel in Central Asian History

Description

Exploration and information at a global crossroads

For centuries, travelers have made Central Asia known to the wider world through their writings. In this volume, scholars employ these little-known texts in a wide range of Asian and European languages to trace how Central Asia was gradually absorbed into global affairs. The representations of the region brought home to China and Japan, India and Persia, Russia and Great Britain, provide valuable evidence that helps map earlier periods of globalization and cultural interaction.

Introduction: Travel, Writing and the Global History of Central Asia Nile Green

Part I. Identity, Information and Trade, c.1500-1850
1. Early Modern Circulation and the Question of 'Patriotism' between Central Asia and India Sanjay Subrahmanyam
2. Prescribing the Boundaries of Knowledge: Seventeenth Century Russian Diplomatic Missions to Central Asia Ron Sela
3. Central Asians in the Eighteenth Century Qing Illustrations of Tributary Peoples Laura Hostetler
4. The Steppe Roads of Central Asia and the Persian Captivity Narrative of Mirza Mahmud Taqi Abbas Amanat and Arash Khazeni

Part II. Empire, Archaeology and the Arts, c.1850-1940
5. 'The Rubicon between the Empires': The River Oxus in the Nineteenth Century British Geographical Imaginary Kate Teltscher
6. Buddhist Relics from the Western Regions: Japanese Archaeological Exploration of Central Asia Imre Galambos
7.: A Russian Futurist in Asia: Velimir Khlebnikov's Travelogue in Verse Ronald Vroon
8. Narrating the Ichkari Soundscape: European and American Travelers on Central Asian Women's Lives and Music Tanya Merchant

Sujets

• Former Soviet Union
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• URSS
• General officer
• Russia
• History of Asia
• Central Asia
• Anthropology
• General
• Asia
• Russie

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 02 janvier 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253011480
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

WRITING TRAVEL IN CENTRAL ASIAN HISTORY
WRITING TRAVEL IN CENTRAL ASIAN HISTORY
Edited by Nile Green
This book is a publication of
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2014 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Writing travel in Central Asian history / edited by Nile Green.
pages cm
This volume had its origins in the conference The Roads to Oxiana: The Writing of Travel at the Crossroads of Asia, hosted by the UCLA Program on Central Asia in November 2010.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01134-3 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-253-01135-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-253-01148-0 (ebook)
1. Asia, Central-Description and travel-Congresses. 2. Travel writing-History-Congresses. 3. Travel writing-History and criticism-Congresses. 4. Visitors, Foreign-Asia, Central-History-Congresses. I. Green, Nile.
DS327.7.W75 2013
915.804-dc23
2013034752
1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17 16 15 14
To the memory of Owen Lattimore
Contents Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction: Writing, Travel, and the Global History of Central Asia \ Nile Green Part I. Identity, Information, and Trade, c. 1500-1850 1 Early Modern Circulation between Central Asia and India and the Question of Patriotism \ Sanjay Subrahmanyam 2 Prescribing the Boundaries of Knowledge: Seventeenth-Century Russian Diplomatic Missions to Central Asia \ Ron Sela 3 Central Asians in the Eighteenth-Century Qing Imperial Illustrations of Tributary Peoples \ Laura Hostetler 4 The Steppe Roads of Central Asia and the Persian Captivity Narrative of Mirza Mahmud Taqi Ashtiyani \ Abbas Amanat and Arash Khazeni Part II. Empire, Archaeology, and the Arts, c. 1850-1940 5 The Rubicon between the Empires : The River Oxus in the Nineteenth-Century British Geographical Imaginary \ Kate Teltscher 6 Buddhist Relics from the Western Regions: Japanese Archaeological Exploration of Central Asia \ Imre Galambos 7 A Russian Futurist in Asia: Velimir Khlebnikov s Travelogue in Verse \ Ronald Vroon 8 Narrating the Ichkari Soundscape: European and American Travelers on Central Asian Women s Lives and Music \ Tanya Merchant Index Contributors
Preface and Acknowledgments
T HIS VOLUME HAD its origins in the conference The Roads to Oxiana: The Writing of Travel at the Crossroads of Asia, hosted by the Program on Central Asia at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in November 2010. The conference was in turn linked to a series of Program on Central Asia seminars and conferences addressing the intersection of mobility and literature. For both funding of and organizational assistance with the original conference, I am grateful to the UCLA International Institute and the UCLA Asia Institute. I would like to extend especial gratitude to my colleagues C. Cindy Fan and R. Bin Wong for generous support of Central Asian studies and to Nick Menzies and Elizabeth Leicester for superb organizational acumen. I would also like to thank Sebouh Aslanian, Ra anan Boustan, Robert Buswell, Randal Johnson, Nancy Levine, Hannah Reiss, Rahim Shayegan, Monica L. Smith, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Ronald Vroon for their close involvement in various Program on Central Asia activities and to Ali Behdad for acting as panel chair at the Roads to Oxiana conference. I am also grateful to the several other scholars who wrote or presented papers in relation to the conference and book project: Roshan Abraham, Dhara Anjaria, David Chioni Moore, and Daniel J. Sheffield.
In tracking down the travel texts and secondary literature consulted for the introduction, I am especially thankful for the opportunity to use the rare book holdings of the Forschungsstelle zur historischen Reisekultur (Research Hall on Historical Travel Culture) in Eutin, Germany. I have also relied greatly on the British Library and the Young Research Library at UCLA; my special thanks to Dr. David Hirsch, Librarian for Middle Eastern, Islamic, South Asian, Central Asian, and Jewish Studies at UCLA. I would also like to thank the American Institute for Afghanistan Studies for the award of the John F. Richards Fellowship (2011), which funded research in Kabul and Germany. For suggestions and advice on a variety of Central Asian matters, I offer thanks to Ingeborg Baldauf, Thomas Barfield, Jason BeDuhn, Alanna Cooper, William Dalrymple, Touraj Daryaee, Johan Elverskog, Frantz Grenet, Zsuzsanna Gulasci, Andrew Hale, Cheri Hunter, Ali F. Igmen, Nikki Keddie, Arash Khazeni, Karen Leonard, Claude Markovits, John Mock, Christine Noelle-Karimi, Elena Sadovskaya, Richard Salomon, John Schoeberlein, Martin Schwartz, Nicholas Sims-Williams, Ursula Sims-Williams, Jon Thompson, and Joel Walker. Final thanks to Rebecca Tolen at Indiana University Press for believing in the value of this project.
The publishers gratefully acknowledge the following organizations for permission to print illustrations: Fidra Books for figure 5.2 , and the Anahita Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico, for figure 8.1 .
WRITING TRAVEL IN CENTRAL ASIAN HISTORY
Introduction
Writing, Travel, and the Global History of Central Asia
Nile Green
From a Silk Road to a Road of Texts
From the medieval Divisament dou monde of Marco Polo to the modernist prose of Robert Byron s The Road to Oxiana , Central Asia has been made known to the wider world through the medium of travel writing. 1 At a time when Central Asia is increasingly drawn into global political affairs, such travel writings allow us to map the cultural dimensions of an earlier geopolitics that ranges from Qing Chinese empire builders to Russian missionaries and Japanese archaeologists. By reading the polyglottal prose written at the crossroads of Asia, the following chapters trace distinct stages of global connectivity by joining the early modern age of camel caravans and horsemen with the modern age of railroads and motorcars. Focusing on little-known travel writings of literary and ethnographic no less than historical interest, the chapters explore the different meanings given to Central Asia in the far corners of the world during the region s most intensive periods of globalization between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. By framing Central Asia as a cultural contact zone between different peoples and polities as much as a transit zone for material commodities such as silk, cotton, and oil, this book aims to connect Central Asia to the larger field of global history. The aim here is to add new layers to our understanding of both Central Asia and globalization, giving due recognition to the shifting politics and fluctuating trade patterns of the region but asking how these hard developments were inseparable from the cultural productions of the travelers who were globalization in human terms-and vice versa, for as we will see in the following chapters, neither the commerce nor politics of Central Asia can be fully understood in isolation from the travel accounts that so often formed the basis of mercantile and military action.
In laying out a general model, we can suggest a distinct informational profile for the travel writings on the region, a profile that is quite different from that of other historically inaccessible regions such as the islands of the South Pacific or the interior of Africa, conceived as they were in terms of the romantic imagination and the civilizing mission respectively. If this profile was not unique to Central Asian travel writings, then it was certainly emphatic in them. Except in certain expressions of Russian (or perhaps Japanese) Orientalism, Central Asia rarely appeared a place of imagination and enchantment (excepting, on its edges, Tibet), seldom as a perilously pestilent vector zone from which few returned alive, and never as an unspoiled Eden or New World populated by noble savages. 2 It is for this reason that the terminology used here is of travel writing rather than travel literature, with its suggestion of primarily aesthetic intentions, for self-consciously literary works form only a small proportion of the more robustly informational writings on the region. Given the range of languages and literatures brought together here, the term travel writing is used to define a broad category of texts-including visual texts-that emerged from acts of travel and often (but not always) described them. We are therefore speaking about a much wider body of writings than the singular genre of the travelogue and its equivalents in Asian literatures. And so the writings examined in this volume include merchant manuals and histories, ethnographies and autobiographies, archaeological reports and poetic notebooks as well as straightforward travelogues. In keeping with the informational profile that so many of these works have in common, it is worth drawing on Mary Campbell s adage that the travel book is a kind of witness: it is generically aimed at the truth. 3 For the purposes of this volume, we might qualify this statement by saying that travel writings aim