![]() Interdisciplinary AnalysesMadhavi Thampi CHINA AND BEYOND IN THE MEDIAEVAL PERIOD: CULTURAL CROSSINGS AND INTER-REGIONAL CONNECTIONS Edited by Dorothy C. Wong and Gustav Heldt Manohar Books,New Delhi, 2014, pp. 441, Rs. 3500.00 VOLUME XXXIX NUMBER 12 December 2015 This is a splendid book on cultural interactions
across Eurasia from approximately
the 3rd-10th centuries
CE. In keeping with its title, the book itself
crosses many boundaries—disciplinary, national
and conceptual—to provide us with
an awe-inspiring picture of the ‘different
forms of transmissions, transgressions, hybridizations,
dialectic encounters, syntheses,
and transformations that occurred when
peoples and cultures came into contact’ (Introduction,
p. 16). Although the focus is on
China, the canvas is actually much wider,
covering West, South, South East, Central
and North East Asia, together with Europe.
The subject matter encompasses diverse elements
of social life and material culture, including
art and iconography, ritual practices,
literature, science and technology, trade, diplomacy,
gender and rulership. Each of the
studies is a model of scholarship in its own
specific field, as testified to by the impressive
bibliographies of primary and secondary
sources appended to each essay. While
this means that from the point of view of the
non-specialist reader, some parts of the book
make for difficult reading, it also means that
the important insights provided by this book,
which illuminate a whole range of issues,
stand on a solid bedrock of scholarship.
China and Beyond can be seen as a product
of the current emphasis in academia on
a world scale, which rejects national and disciplinary
limitations on scholarship, and lays
greater stress on cross-disciplinary understanding
and inter-regional connections. As
the Epilogue by David Summers points out,
‘in a world of vastly greater contact and interdependence,’
there is an ‘ever-growing
interest in connections, and a corresponding
decrease in putative cultural essentialisms’
(p. 425). Nevertheless, it is rare to find such
an array of diverse studies on this theme
(twenty-one in all) in one volume. The editors
have done a commendable job of pulling
it all together in their Introduction. The
essays have been grouped together under the
rubrics ‘Networks of Exchange’, ‘Silk Road
Crossings’, ‘Textual Centres and Peripheries’
and ‘Buddhist Art and Iconography’.
This book is valuable for the general
reader because it helps to undermine several
questionable historical and cultural stereotypes. One of these concerns the nature and
significance of the so-called Silk Road. As
several of the studies make clear, the extent
and diversity of the commercial and cultural
transmissions across Eurasia are not adequately
conveyed by the term ‘Silk Road’,
which privileges one route (the overland
route from China to Europe) and one commodity
(silk). As Summers’s ... Table of Contents >> |