Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. vii, 326 pp. (Maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-98763-0.
Itinerant People is the third volume in the trilogy, Asia Inside Out, an ambitious transdisciplinary project edited by two historians and an anthropologist with deep expertise in the region. Each volume in the series coheres around a fundamental conceptual rubric and seeks to subvert it, or turn it “inside out.” The first volume, Changing Times (2015), upends conventional periodizations of Asian history. The second volume, Connected Places (2015), dislodges static categories of Asian geography. This third and final volume disrupts fixed analytic categories of many sorts, including geography, nation, ethnicity, religion, and language, by showing how different sets of boundaries and identities come to the fore (or recede) when tracing the movement of Asia’s peripatetic people.
The introduction orients the reader to the notion of Asia (conceptually and empirically) as an accordion-like space which waxes and wanes depending on who or what is in motion. The stated objective is not to present new paradigms for the study of Asia so much as to expose hidden crosscurrents elided by pre-existing ones. Each of the 12 case studies meticulously excavates, through ethnographic or archival research, hitherto unexamined, lesser studied, or historiographically hidden mobilities across the continent. Collectively, the chapters in the volume range over half a millennium of history and a vast swath of territory extending from Istanbul to Tokyo. It is the specialist’s zoom lens deployed in each chapter, combined with the panoramic sweep of the volume as a whole, which give both concrete and lofty expression to the idea of Asia as an “incongruently organic entity” (21).
The book invites the reader to follow the fascinating journeys of a diverse array of “sojourners and seekers.” They decamp either voluntarily or under duress, crossing rivers and oceans, lingering in port cities, oasis towns and littoral regions, in pursuit of various and sundry endeavours, among them commerce, medicine, religious pilgrimage, political/religious activism, sport, music, entrepreneurship and sheer survival. In many cases the objects and ideas in circulation are as central to the analysis as (and sometimes more so than) the humans who carry them. Examples include Leung’s examination of China’s centuries-in-the-making materia medica and the medical knowledge it codified, Ludden’s study of cowry shells exchanged on the frontiers of the Qing and Mughal empires, Teng’s focus on a pioneering cookbook written by a “Chinese food evangelist” in America during World War II, Chekhab-Abudaya’s analysis of Islamic pilgrimage manuscripts, such as traveling miniature Qu’rans in different regions of the Islamic world, and Erami’s study of Persian carpets moving to new markets in contemporary Southeast Asia.
Geographic hubs or junctures figure prominently in many chapters due to their importance as crucibles of invention and dissemination. Leung’s essay, for example, highlights the maritime Lingnan region as a key geographic node for the integration of different medical traditions and the consolidation of a coherent “southern” East Asian identity during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Ludden highlights the centrality of the island port of Syhlet in North Bengal where tribal Khasias formed an itinerant coastal culture in the heart of “cowry country” before it was dispersed by British imperialist forces. Drawing on their ethnographic research on the efflorescence of Islam in the southeastern Chinese port cities of Guangzhou and Yiwu, Xiang and Ma coin the term “mobility assemblage” to highlight the dynamism that results when multiple migration streams intersect in one hub. “Hubbing synergy” (244) is the term used by Ching to capture the importance of historical connections built between multiple hubs over time. Her essay traces the emergence of a distinctive Cantonese soundscape and a linked Cantonese-speaking culture in the triangulated space between Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macau, and later Shanghai.
If hubs constitute the geographic junctures which draw people, objects, and ideas from unlikely places into dynamic encounters, historical disjunctures propel and disperse them to new destinations. Macro-forces such as collapsing political orders and epistemic shifts can turn princes into paupers and displace values, aesthetics, skill sets and entire worldviews. Picket narrates the harrowing tales of exiled and abducted elites searching for new footholds in Persianate Asia at a moment when encroaching nationalisms and vernacular knowledge forms threaten to displace the Perso-Islamic ecumene. Alavia considers the case of two nineteenth century Omani princes whose mobility and profiteering in the Indian Ocean arms and slave trade are propelled by the decline of empire. Tamara Loos shines a new light on Siamese Prince Prisdang and his iconoclastic vision of a unified Buddhist ecumene, cultivated during his decades in exile at the turn of the twentieth century while hopscotching across imperial Asia. The exceptionally creative ways forced-sojourners such as Prince Prisdang, the Omani Princes, and Perso-Islamic elites adjusted to cataclysmic change and the connections that sprang from their movements, make them, in the words of the editors, “intriguing symbols of Asia ‘inside out’ in singular, human form” (14).
Scholars and serious-minded students of Asia will find the ground-level analysis of expansions and connections across time and territory in this volume fascinating and instructive. Students unfamiliar with Asian and premodern world history may struggle to absorb the density of empirical detail or appreciate the radicalness of the historical revisioning. And yet, the non-chronocentric, unbounded vision of Asia the volume presents is imperative to grasp for anyone who seeks to apprehend Asia as it actually is (and was) rather than how it is imagined to be. With the anomalous exception of the Cold War fragmentation of states and regions, integration and connectivity across the Asian continent is the historical norm. To recognize this, as the volume encourages us to do, helps us see more clearly the cross-regional and non-Sinocentric connectivities that knit Asia together today, in ways that are at once divergent and descendant from the past.
Caren Freeman
University of Virginia, Charlottesville