This working paper is derived from a larger research project exploring
what I consider to be a tenuous but persistent form of “public culture”
extending between Inner Asia and Europe over the course of the 18th
and, especially, 19th centuries. This “stranger relationality,” as Michael Warner
would have it, was mediated by new forms and routes of Eurasianist
textual circulation. In this late imperial period, spread along the frontiers
of the Qing, Tsarist, and British empires, Tibetan, Mongolian, and Buryat
monks read works by European and East Asian intellectuals on all manner
of technical knowledge, and began writing not to fellow scholastics or local
readers, but to a global community of “the knowledgeable” (Tib. mkhas pa;
Mon. baγsi, nomčin).
The social site of what I am exploring as a new form of reading, interpreting,
and writing in Asia’s heartland was the dispersed web of monastic
colleges (Tib. grwa tshang; Mon. datsang) that connected generations of
polyglot and cosmopolitan scholastics across the otherwise diverse and
segregated socio-political blocs of late imperial Central and Eastern Tibet,
north China, all Mongolian territories, and Siberia. My ongoing research is
revealing how the practices of secularity (as defined by the Multiple Secularities
framework) enacted by this commonwealth of frontier, synthetic
scholastics was repurposed in the early 20th century, in the ruins of the
Qing and Tsarist empires, to invent the social imaginaries, national subjects,
civil societies, and other products of socialist secularism that produced
modern Inner Asia (and continues to legitimize claims by Russia
and the PRC on its Inner Asian frontiers).
In this working paper, I will briefly introduce the social sites of my
sources, the Buddhist monastic colleges that spanned the Sino-Russian
frontiers, and provide a few examples of synthetic scholastic products
that emerged in this previously unstudied form of Eurasianist public culture
(c. 1750–1930s). I will also share some preliminary arguments I have
drawn about the ways that practices of secularity amongst the actors my
work considers led directly to the creation of the modern public sphere,
civil society, and ironically, revolutionary institutional forms and models
of history that had violently erased scholastic culture from public life.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:36140 |
| Date | 14 November 2019 |
| Creators | King, Matthew W. |
| Contributors | Kolleg-Forschergruppe 'Multiple Secularities - Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/submittedVersion, doc-type:workingPaper, info:eu-repo/semantics/workingPaper, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa2-167259, qucosa:16725 |
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