Region and Civilization

Ðwolf civilization paper:

“[W]e need to invent new ways of thinking about the heterogeniety and transformative nature of human arrangements, and to do so scientifically and humanistically at the same time.”  Wolf Inventing Society AE [1988] 15[4]: 753.

1.  Problem in the discipline: a contradiction in behavior of anthropologists

Á  ÁThe term culture area entails some inherent contradictions.
Nevertheless, modern sociocultural anthropologists assume the existance of broad cultural regions, even if they scarcely ever define them.

In this paper I examine a certain contradiction, or at least an ambiguity, in the way certain anthropologists treat the problem of

do:  They teach courses on what might be called “civilizational areas” such as “Latin America” or “Subsaharan Africa”, and list their research interest in terms of culture areas, but as a whole they tend to avoid formulations of what a culture area is.  Admittedly, the problem is trivial in some parts of the world, where broad culture areas — civilizational areas — are easily glossed in geographic terms.  In Subsaharan Africa and Australia, for instance, the outlines of geography arguably correspond to broad configurations of culture.  But some commonly recognized civilizational areas get little help from geography:  notably, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.  With respect to these areas scholars have struggled to develop adequate formulations of the senses in which the regions can be distinguishable culturally.  Wolters [????] has proposed, for instance, that what distinguishes Southeast Asia is its diversity — and thus turns a analytical problem into a virtue.  Emmerson [1984] argues that Southeast Asia was distinguished essentially for military reasons; its particular configurations of cutlure, diverse as they are, had little to do with its identity as a “culture area.”  Definitions of the “Middle East” have fared little better.  The bases on which scholars have defined the Middle as a culture area have been diverse, and of course, depending on the criteria, different geographic territories have been included in the term.*

*Fernea-Fernea, Watson, Bates-Rassam, Cressey, Patai, L.Sweet, Gulick, Coon, El-Zein.

Á ÁMy particular target in this brief essay is the definition of the Middle Eastern culture area in two widely used textbooks, each defining the area differently and so including a different territory; also each, in my opinion, leavs some important issues unexamined.  Dale Eickleman, in his justly appreciated anthropological essay on the Middle East, seems to have given upany attempt to justify his area in cultural terms:  In the first edition [1981] he identified the Middle East merely as a list of nation-states; in the second edition [1989] as “the region stretching from Rabat to Tehran …” [p. 31].  He did also say, however, in refering to common usages of the term, that “When certain features of the linguistic, religious, political and historical complexities of the region are emphasized, the term [Middle East] is often extended to encompass Afghanistan, Pakistan, and, at least in the recent historical past, those states of Soviet Central Asia which are heavily influenced by Islam” [p. 4].  Without explaining the criteria for this common usage he suggested that the bases for the recognition of the Middle East are somehow linguistic, religious [apparently Islamic], political, and historical.  My problem is not with Eickleman’s Middle Eastern area as such; I only think that a definition in terms of a list of nations leave many questions unanswered.  It suggests that criteria exist, although unstated, for examining Eickleman’s particular configuration of nations as a culture or civilizational area.  I hope here to advance our understanding of the criteria for defining an area such as Eickleman’s Middle East which he, apparently intuitively, believes is a single culture area.
 X  sense that there is some kind of cultural continuity to the area.
Á ÁThe other textbook on the Middle East whose definition of the area interests me is by Dan Bates and Amal Rassam, ÃÃPeoples and Cultures of the Middle EastÄÄ.  Their focus is on a considerably smaller zone within Eickleman’s area, which they call the “Central Middle East.” They justify this region as a culture area in terms of the factors that made for its “coherence” — which they say is evident in its political history, its long©established routes of trade and communications, its “high level of cultural integration” — and it modern strategic importance (1983: xi).  My problem with their Central Middle East is its seeming arbitrariness.  Are the Arab states of their “Central Middle East” — Egypt, Jordan, Iraq ??? — more closely integrated with Turkey, which they include, than with the Arabic speaking countries of the Maghrib, which they exclude?
Á ÁThe issue is a broader question:  Is there a way to define a civilizational area more precisely?  How do we decide on what should be included in a culture area?
Á ÁMy agenda in this paper is to emphasize the need for a clearer formulation of what is meant by a broad culture area — a “civilizational area” — and to suggest some ways to think about the construct.  In this project I borrow liberally from the ideas of Eric Wolf.

2.  Some notions on the concept of culture area or civilizational area.

Á ÁI have left some conceptual loose ends in this discussion so far that need to be tightened up.
ŒÁ ÁFor one thing, there seems to be no particular consensus on the terms to use for broad civilizational areas of the sort that Eickleman and Bates and Rassam are examining.  The term most generally in use is “culture area,” although other terms have been used.  Kroeber, who employed the term as an analytical category, used other terms such as “ethnic province”, or “civilization” as a gloss for culture area.  [Kroeber 1920: 151 [[California Culture Provinces.  U. of Cal Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, vol 17, No 2: 151-169]].  The term “culture area” has lost its saliency among contemprary sociocultural anthropologists:  The term, after all, was originally developed as a basis for classifying assemblages of artifacts in museum displays, and in any case it implies a discrete, culturally homogeneous territory that few of us find useful anymore.
ÃÃ
 X Âmodern sociocultural anthropologists have generally eschewed this sense of the term, because they are interested less in artifacts than in the frames of meaning that inform the social worlds within which such artifacts are used. Other words like “civlization” or “civilizational area” have been avoided by many anthropologists, whose cultural frame of references has been the local society.
ÄÄ
I will speak of “civilizational area” in order to avoid confusion with concepts of narrower scale.
Á ÁSuch a usage presumes that patterned cultural systems are discernible on many levels, from specific locally situated sets of belief and custom to, in a wider “civilizational” sense, sets of relations in which there are certain family resemblances of belief and custom.  A civilization, to follow Hodgson’s definition, is “any wider grouping of cultures … [that] share consciously in interdependent cumulative traditions….”  (Hodgson 1974: I, 33)  He assumed “a certain integrality” to such civilizations, notably, for him, the Islamic world which was the object of his research (1974 I, 32)
Á ÁThe problem, of course, is that the diacritica of cultural entities so expansive as civilizations are never easily identified.  Indeed, as one observer said of Europe, a region generally considered somehow a cultural unit, that its “major characterisitcs of commonality” are only identifiable “at a distance”; “close at hand” it is the “differences in time and space” that are most evident.  Kroeber [????,Wolf’s review]: 450] once pointed out that the more history that is known about an area the more difficult it is to develop a satisfactory culture area classification.  Hodgeson confessed that “the reason for distinguishing a `civilization’ cannot be a single universal one…; it must almost be special to each case…. . Each civilization defines its own scope” (1974: I, 33).

Á ÁNevertheless, anthropologists and historians presume that broader sociocultural entities exist, manifest in common usages like Latin America or “the Subcontinent” [or “South Asia”], or “the Far East.”  Some of these terms imply the cultural contentby which they are defined ©© for example, “ÃÃLatinÄÄ America” or “the ÃÃIslamicÄÄ world.”Ó  ÓÓ   Ó Other terms that strictly denote geographic regions, such as “Europe”, “the Far East ” or “India,” are sometimes used as glosses for civilizational areas.  For example when Marc Bloc (1961: xix) said that “Europe was a creation of the Middle Ages,” he use the term “Europe” in a cultural sense.  A unit of territory our generation takes for granted as a geographic entity was, he said, effectively constituted by a certain culture, or at least a certain constellation of cultures.  Europe, he said, was a “civilization” that “rose and flowered, until in the end it covered the face of the earth, among those that dwelt between the Tyrrhenian, the Adriatic, the Elbe, and the Atlantic Ocean.” Fernand Braudel’s statement that “the Mediterranean is an urban region” (1972 [1949]: I, 278) made that sea a cultural world. Bloc’s European “civilization” and Braudel’s “urban region” were in these usages geographically situated culture areas. Civilizations, said Braudel in another work, are “ways of ordering space” (1984 [1979]: 65). They are also, in a similar sense, ways of ordering time, for they emerge and recede through time, marking historical periods. The Europe that Bloc referred to “began” before the dawn of feudalism (1961: I, xix), and Braudel’s “urban” Mediterranean belonged to the sixtennth century (1972: I, 277©278). The spatial and temporal ordering of civilzations is reflected in a few of our terms for geographic regions. Today the “Near East,” for example, suggests an area and a culture distinguished from the “Middle East,” not, as formerly, by its closeness to Europe, but by its historical period; for the Near East in current usage denotes the Fertile Crescent in Ancient times, or sometimes, the Ottoman territories in Medieval times; “Middle East,” variously defined, is, in contrast, a modern cultural region.
Á ÁWe have said, then, that civilizational areas are territories whose identity is marked by a somewhat distiguishable culture whose boundaries, such as they are, shift over time.  However useful it is to express this process in these terms such a formulation masks the fact that the recognition of a cultural entity such as a “civilization” is itself an analytical act.  That civilizations are commonly presumed to exist is as much a part of the “reality” of civilizations as their internal cultural features.  The recognition of civilizations in their historical and spatial contexts is a construction of social reality imposed upon geography and history. The culture and civilizations we choose to identify become distinct to us for reasons important to us. The Mediterranean did not become for Braudel a discernible, examinable social entity until he began to ask how its social and cultural dynamics affected the sixteenth century empire of Phillip II, when the Spanish empire was led to direct its power upon the Atlantic (1966 [1944] I, 19, 20). The boundaries of Braudel’s object ©© Mediterranean society and culture at the height of Spanish imperial power ©© were in part set in a spatial and temporal context by his question. Cultural entities, indistinct and approximae as the always are, take form in somerelation to the questions being asked and the perspectives being taken.
Á ÁIt is hardly a major consession, therefore, to acknowledge that in fact, the spatial and temporal configurations of civilizations as they have been generally understood have been shaped by the perspectives of the EuroAmericans and are therefore reflective of EuroAmerican conceptions of vital strategic and economic issues associated with these regions. In the nineteenth century India, for instance, whatever internal cultural integrity it may have had, was from the European viewpoint, the locus of a cluster of British interests ©© political, economic, and, for the missionaries, religious.  The Eurocentric term “Middle East” came into use because of European geopoltiical interests.  As used today the term reflects the World War II experience, when it was placed under a unified Allied command (Eickleman 1989:3).  Likewise, Southeast Asia was first recognized as a region when it was placed under Lord Mountbatten’s World War II command, and it is still recognized in such post©war political instituitions as the South East Asia Treaty Orginization; and indeed the precise boundaries of Southeast Asia have shifted back and forth in recent decades in respect to political developments (Emmerson, 1984).
Á ÁThis may be added the footnote on funding:  for the impirical?? existence of the culture areas now commonly recognized is further cemented in popular consensus by the commitment of the major funding agencies to the “reality” of such culture areas.  One wonders what flexibility there is in the current system to ajust to the emerging world system in which the geopolitical interests are realigning.

Á ÁLet us make one more assertion about civilizations, or “civiliational areas”:  in so far as they exist they are the property of only certain individuals within the region; civilizations are cultural entities carried by, reproduced by, only certain persons in this wide field of social relations.  Different social elements carry different cultural elements, different traditions.  The “little” traditions are carried and reproduced by individuals whose contacts and training are limited; the “great” traditions are carried and reproduced by people who have enjoyed a wider experience, through education or travel — literati, priests, sometimes artists or other valued specialists, people who are usually based in cities and associated with cultural centers such as temples, courts of adjudication, or bureacracies.  It is the great traditions that provide the common ground of discourse through which “civilizations” are said to be bound together.  Even when populations over a wide area are politically divided, some of them — the carriers of the “great” traditions — share a common world of similar ideas, values, and customs, so that what is taught, preached, written about, or otherwise promulgated by specialists of the great tradition has strong threats of commonality.
 X ÂEmbodied in “sacred books” or “classics”, sanctified by a cult, expressed in monuments, sculputure, painting, andarchitecture, served by the arts and sciences, the Great Tradition becomes the core culture of an indigenous civilization and a source, constantly examined, for defining its moral, legal, aesthetic and other cultural norms. … [It] is a vehicle and standard for those who share it to identify with one another as members of a common civilization.  (Redfield and Singer 1954: 63)
In so far as a civilization may have a “consciousness” it is manifested in the shared culture that the great tradition provides.  A great tradition is both “a condition for and a consequence of the functional integration of city and country and of the different spheres of society” (Singer 1972:7).

??Á Áthe orientations of people whose contacts and relations extend over a wide area can become the integrative orientation of a civilization, a broad frame of reference, a complex set of related idioms of social interaction that serve the interests of states and leaders over a wide area.  The “great traditions” are not merely deep historically; they are connected widely, over a relatively broad swath of territory.  The connections between societies separated by different rulerships and scattered over wide areas are transmitted by specialists — literati, priests, artisans — most of whom live in cities and are associated with cultural centers such as schools, or mosques, or courts of adjudication, or bureacracies.  “Cities and their communications, communications and their cities, have imposed a unified human construction on geographical space,” said Braudel (1972: I, 277).  Because the specialists of great traditions in the urban centers share a common world of symbolic forms — language, rules of etiquette, social statuses, tools, artistic designs, architectural styles, and the like — they can culturally integrate regions that are otherwise politically separated, as Buddhist monks integrated Central Asia in the ??? centuries (Lattimore ???) and as the seekers of hadith and mystical knowledge have integrated the peoples of the Islamic world.  Through the movement of individuals, manuscripts and other creations of men, the populations over a wide area — or at least certain elements the populations — are tied together.  Through individual specialists who share a common idiom of communication, a common set of techniques and skills, and through them similar ideas, values, and customs, are taught, preached, written about, or otherwise promulgated over a great span of territory.
??
Á ÁBut besides presuming the existence of a great tradition that provides the strands linking certain elements of a region it is useful to think of other traditions, some of them more broadly connected than others, multiple traditions, only some of which connect societies in broad webs of shared intersubjectivity.  Multiple networks of social interaction, only partially interlinked with each other, foster the reproduction of multiple traditions.  Different classes, ethnic groups, and religious groups, perpetuate different traditions; as members of different social blocs may not closely interact, theirorientations on life can persist alongside each other with little affect on each other.  The orientations of people whose social world is relatively isolated can persist through time with varying affects on the wider field of human beings in the area.  Accommodation between different adjacent traditions occurs “over a cultural gap of greater or lesser distance and not over an unbridgable divide; and … the ‘traditions’ are not global, general, and unified but varied and contextualized” (Antoun 1989: 43).

3.  Some layered views of the culture history of “the Middle East” that suggest
Á ÁPropose that we layer the historical information available to us on the wider region of the mE, and organize its history in terms that seem to reflect …  NB this is a deliberate contstruction, an attempt to order in such a way as to suggest some useful collectivities of the cultural elements that need to be examined together.
Á ÁWhat is strking about Eickleman’s Middle East is its reselmblance to the geographic configuration of the Islamic empire during the period of the High Caliphate in about the ninth century.  In tha time of cultural climax Islam held sway over the territory from Spain and the Maghrib to the Indus River and in Central Asia as far north as the ???? desert [ie. beyon Bukhara and Samarqand.  In was in the period of the High Caliphs that Islamic cultrue flourished.  Baghdad and many other cities of the Islamic orbit became magnets for the specialists of belle lettres, arts, architecture, and and sciences of the many peoples that were now a part of the Islamic community.  Greeek, Persian, Hindustani, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Mithraist, Zoroastrian, Mazdaist etc ideas were absorbed into a metropolitain culture to become the discourse of the Islamic community /// 😕  That configuration of culture that congealed in that period stamped Islamic world with idioms of learned and public discourse that would thereafterwards give Islamicate society a certain characteristic form.  Notions about authority, public rights and status, the proper proceedures of argumentation, the premises of sublimity and ultimate significance w — these and other things were woven into a fabric that was considered essentially Islamic.
Á ÁThis culture took form, as already noted in the great cities of the Abbasid Islamic empire:  Fez and Cairo in North Africa; Damascus and Baghdad in the Firtile Crescent; Nishapur and Bukhara in Khorasan.  The limits of the empire in, say, 900, were scarcely secure, as the boundaries would change, but the culture that took form in the urban societies of the Islamic empire presided over by the Ummayyads and Abbasids would be a characteristic foundational culture that would be carried on to further Islamic lands in subsequent generations and on which those societies would build their own particular expressions of Islamic culture.  This Arabic language world would be the essential feature of the Islamicate society that would be spread far beyond the limits of the empire in the 9th century.
Á ÁEickleman’s Middle East roughly reflects a widely felt notion that the discernible homeland of the Islamic world is not merely its Arabian cradle but the wider geographic context of its youthful florescence, which was the period when under the oversight of a vaunted Caliphate situated in Damascus and Baghdad in the eighth and ninth centuries reached a climax that could be called “Arabic Islamicate culture.”  Eickleman’s Middle East is in fact a cultural entity, one that was melded out of a configuration of elements, disparate in origin, that congealed as an Arabic cultural florescence under the aegis of an Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs.Œ—
Formative society in High Caliphal Period

Islam of Imperial elites vs of the religious elites vs the rural [and relatively unislamized] populations
–Á ÁRural populations
–Á ÁImperial elites:  courts
 X Â-Á ÁIslam was an idiom of legitmation and sanction for the imperial office; the caliphate patronized Islamic art and architecture, sponsored the study of philosophy, science and literature.  The architecture drew inspiration from the Sasanid and Achaemenid palaces in the pre-Islamic era.  Ummayad caliph held audiences “dressed in crown and royal robes, seated on a throne, and veiled from the rest of his audience by a curtain” (Lapidus 1988: 83)
 X Â-Á Á”vice regent of God on earth.  Caliphal magical powers upheld the order of the cosmos, providing for the rain and the harvests, keeping all persons in their places … He was the symbol of civilization; agriculture, cities, arts, and learnign depended on his blessings” (Lapidus 1988: 88); “the court poets address[ed] the Caliph as ÃÃkhalifat allahÄÄ (the deputy of God)” (Lapidus 1988: 85).  The `Abbasid caliphs, seeking to capture the eschatological vision of the populace that put them in power, took titles enshrouded with notions of saviorhood:  al-Mansur (“the victorious”), al-Mahdi (the “guided one”, “messiah”) (Lapidus 1988: 87).

–Â X Âcorrection on comments about the Umayyads:  some of them fled to Spain and set up dynasty there.

–Á ÁUrban Islamic elites. Ulama, etc.
 X Â-Á Ádominated by Arab populations; in cities:  middle class.  Main leadership:  ulama, ÃÃqurra’ÄÄ, sufi ascetics; sources of counsel.  loosely affiliated; diverse views, disputes.
 X ÂVariants:
 X Â- Sunni scripturalists.  [struggle with al-Ma’mun (r.813-33) over mu’tazili doctrine that Q was created, not of divine essence].  Ahmad b. Hanbal
 X Â- Sufis:  two variants: Khurasani [tawakkul, resignation to God’s will expressed through volutary poverty and renunciation of work; ignored obedience to Quranic commands and conformity to the law; stressed intoxication with God; ÃÃshathÄÄ, theopathic utterances; al Hallaj; claimed greater authority than ulama or Caliph]; Baghdadi [ascetism and renunciation of worldly things combined with the cultirvation of practical virtues such as patience, trust, gratitude, and love of God; believed in observance of the quran and conformity with Muslim law; more closely integrated with ordinary Muslim religious practice and belief;Á Ámystic was considered a healer, a magician, a worker of miracles, and a pillar of the universe
 X Â- Shi’ism:  hadith of Ali; popular resistance [vs Umayyads,vs Abbasids]; Ismailism [L: p. 131]; numerous heretical /radical movements; often little clear doctrinal content.

–Â X ÂHow this [High Caliphal] period seems to structure a certain level of Islamic society.  Some of the points of view on history and culture:  L-S, in the minds of people; Geertz; Wolf, “civilization” simply reconstituting itself out of previous elements.  The rough limits of the empire in 945; how it resembles Eickleman’s “Middle East”:  it is the range of the Arabic dominated world
——–
Á ÁOf course, this configuration of elements did not continue in this form for long, for the empire of the Abbasid Caliphate was in fact on the verge of collapse by the end of the ninth century.  The ÃÃecumeneÄÄ that we recognize as a cultural entity, and that Eickleman implicitly captures in his “Middle East”, was already being reshaped by new political developments.  Through a series of political vicissitudes the Islamic world would enlarge and at the same time take on new cultural features.  A new cultural configuration would take form and a new kind of society, an extension on some of the premises of the Arabic islamicate cutlure would develop other relations between people and resources.  A new ecumene would emerge, or rather, in a sense the established Islamic world would segment into two two sub-ecumenes.  In the west by the 10th century the Ismaili Fatimids had come to dominate Egypt and the Mediterranean coasts of North Africa, claiming, even, to be the rightful caliphs in contradistinction with the Abbasids who despite their weaking political grip were nevertheless still the titular heads of most of the land east of the Mediterranean.
Á ÁThe period from mid-tenth century when the first formal cracks of the Abbasid empire appear in the east, to the time of the Mongol invasions in the 13th century a new configuration of alignments took form.  That new pattern was in place by early in the 11th century when the Samanids, Ghaznavids, Qarakhanids and Seljuqs rose to prominence in the eastern Islamic territories.  In the west the Fatimids and other Arabic speaking regimes perpetuated the Arabic Islamicate tradition, which in the east these new regimes presided over the formation some new elements in Islamicate culture; the Ghaznawids and their successors the Ghorids pushed their particular expressions of Islamicate culture into the Indo-Gangetic plain all the way to the Bay of Bengal.  The geographic scope of the Islamic world now has escaped the zone of Islam’s florescent youth; we are no long talking about a culture whose geographic limits correspond to Eickleman’s Middle East; it looks more like the region previously — that is, especially before wWi — called “the Near and Middle East”, by which was meant the whole scope of the Islamic world to at least as far as the limits of India, although not necessarily excluding the important Islamic regions beyond, that is, in the Malaysian peninsula and Indonesia.  The Middle East of the earlier period included the region of the Indus and eastward where Muslims in the period from the 11 century to the 13 century were a dominant minority.  ŒÁ ÁThis culture was marked by the following cultural features:
The new Islamic society that was formed under these new administrations:
 X ÂÃÃPersian languageÄÄ:  Dari [Sassanid language]; Samanid uses of Dari; Firdowsi [poetry as idiom of political expression, sans-Arabic]; translation from Arabic into Persian.  Ghazni:  Modern Persian, enriched with Arabic
 X ÂÃÃRise of Turkish empiresÄÄ:  Turks vs Persian [never perfect distinction]; Turkish ghulams in Islamic lands [Baghdad, in Bukhara]; Turkish tribes in Cent Asia.
 X  X ÂÃÃSamanids vs QarakhanidsÄÄ: Alptigin fled to Nishapur, Ghazni; Qarakhanids over Samanids
 X  X ÂÃÃGhaznavidsÄÄ:  court patronage; learned authorities; raiding in India > Lahore; the internal ethnic composition:  Turks, Persians, Ulama – 3 languages.
 X  X ÂÃÃQarakhanidsÄÄ:  fostered Turkish
 X  X ÂÃÃSeljuqs:ÄÄ princely lineage from Ghuzz Turkish tribe; spread w; courts, painting, literature; flattery of rulers by learned.
 X  X ÂÃÃGhaznawids, Ghorids, Delhi SultanatesÄÄ [took over in 1206]:  culture, paintings
 X ÂÃÃDevelopment of society dominated by the cachet of Islam:ÄÄ before this, Islam was rel of dominant.  Under Samanids: ulama; threat of Ismailis; Hanafi vs Shafa`i disputes.  Invasion of Qarakhanids, ulama complicity; later Qarakhanid dep on ulama for governance > bureacratic class; prominence of public prayers; central use of ulama in decaying social order; for first time ulama were allowed into administrative prominence.  Cities became agregates of credal communities lead by relig leaders; Ulama married into prominent families.  Mosques, shrines in architecture; lexicon; public rituals; more ordinary Muslims.  The cachet of Islamic loyalty, as legitimacy.  Caliphs endored Sunni orthodoxy.  The threat of Fatimids in 10th c.  Sultanate, as endorsed by caliph.  Islamic permeated the learning of the elite classes.
 X ÂÃÃDevelopment of ecumenical [trans-national] communities of religion affiliationÄÄÃÃ.ÄÄ.  ÃÃArabic literaray communityÄÄ.  scholars.  ÃÃHadith seekersÄÄ.  extensive travel. scholarly networks.  ÃÃthe Shi`aÄÄ.  Sayyeds/Alids tolerated.  Ismailis despised.  Shi`a begin public curing of Mu`awiya; stress loyalty to family of Ali [vs doctrine].  Miracles of the saints/imams.  ÃÃSunni schoolsÄÄ.  Hanafis, Hanbalis, Shafa`is.  Introduction of madrasas under Seljuqs.  ÃÃFactional groupsÄÄ.  [asabiyya, futuwwa, ayyars].  Karramis [sufi and orthodox].  ÃÃSufisÄÄ.  alternative Islamic ideas, theosophy; sufi orders, political services.

Á ÁThe effect of the rise of Turko-Persian Islam — which would be especially strengthened by the Mongol and Timurid invasions — was to divide the Islamicate world into two sub-ecumenes, the zone of division falling around the drainage of Mesopotamea.  To the west of that area Arabic Islamicate culture continued.  To the east of it the Turko-Persian version of Islamicate cultureprevailed.  The Mongol invasions of the 13th century and the Timurid invasion of the 14th century strengthened this division, as they introduced more Turkic and Mongol-Turkic elements into the eastern Islamic world, which would affect the nature of the Islamic world that would arise, especially after 1500 in the eastern Islamic lands.

Á ÁThis culture, this eastern sub-ecumene of the Islamic world, would yet again be transformed by the shock of the Mongol and Timurid invasions of the 13th and 14th centuries.  the impact of these invasions, devastating as they were would contribute to the formations of new social configurations, none of them to abrogate the configurations of previous ecuminical configurations but to give to them a new charateristic form.  Sufi orders as means of social order, etc.  In a sense the Turko-Persian Islamicate society that had already taken form in the eastern Islamic lands was prodded into a new and specialized climactic form, for beginning in the 16th century a new body of Islamic empires came to dominate most of the Islamic world, the Ottomans in the west, the Safavids in Iran, and the Mughals in India.  In all of these dynasties the Sufi orders which orginally taken form in loose worship circles in the Arabic Islamicate period and had formed into stylized orders of worship in the Turko-Persian Islamicate period now provided circles of social and political organization and central idioms of legitimacy of the ruling elites.  The sufi orders had become important social means of order in the period when “society lost order “. ….  Now, by the 16tyh century and 17 century, sufism provided central idioms of legitimacy for the administration of effective control over the Islamic world.
Á ÁThe Safavids are most well known for their claims to devine inspiration and …  of the had formed in the
Á ÁSufi notions of the infusion of authority and related notions of karaamat that came through direct experience of God and through designation through sacred lines of descent were coopted by the rulers of all three of the gunpowder empires.  The Safavids most notably.  Their relation to their devoted followers was especially problematic, depending on whther the Safavid ruler need to claim his rights as the locus jof divine power to be venerated by his sufi devotees or whehter on the basis of his control of a increasingly rationalized state bureaucracy.  Less well known is the similar claims of Ottoman rulers who claimed to be not only sultans of the Ottoman empire but also caliphs of the whole Islamic community, made use of similar concepts of authority.  Moghal rulers in India similarly made use of notions of sacred descent and to direct access to God in order to foster the loyalty and devotion of their fighting forces.
Á ÁThe point is that on top of the configuration of cultural elemenst that congealed in High Caliphal times as the Arabic Islamicate culture and the Turko-Persian Islamicate culture of the pre-Mongol period there developed another pattern of cultural relations, an extension and elaboration on the previous Turko-Persian culture, that was manifest in the climactic cultural forms of the gunpowder empires of the 16th, 17th and18th centuries.  The particular cultural emphases of the Safavids, however, added a new element to the situation, for even though the three empires — and with them was a fourth, though considerably less prosperous and powerful rulership, the Uzbek Shaybanids of Central Asia — were similar in their Turko-Persian Islamicate heritage, the Safavid cultivation of Shi’ism as the state religion wrought a separation between the Sunni elements of the Turko-Persian world, cutting off the Ottomans of the west from the Shaybanids of Central Asia and the Mughals of India.  From then on, until after the arival of European infleucnes from the coastlands, the eastern and western versions of Tuko-Persian Sunnism would develop separately.  The result was that as Turko-Persian Islamicate society spread westward under the Ottomans to engulf most of North Africa in the west and as a certain variant of Turko-Persian Islamicate culture — though admittedly distict on its own — spread further into Southeast Asia the whole ecumene was subdividing again into a Western Islamic world under the Ottomans, a Shi’ite Islamic world under the Safavids of Iran, and an eastern Sunni Islamic world in the eastern realms of Islam from Central Asia to the islands of Southeast Asia.
Á ÁThe dominanat empire of the Islamic world for much ofthe period after 1500 to present has been, of course, the Ottoman, whose particular blend of TurkoPersian and Arabic cultural elements gave a particular shape to the region that Bates and Rassam have called the “Central Middle East”.  One is struck by the resemblance of their Central Middle East with the heartland of the Ottomans in the period from the 16th century to its collapse in the 1920s.  The Islamic culture that took form in the period from about 1000 to the time of the European encroachments in the 18th and 19th centuries is sometimes called the “medieval” period.  The term itself suggests the importance of the sociocultural patterns that were laid upon the Arabic Islamicate world of the period of High Caliphal cultural florescence.
Á ÁIn the modern period nation-states took form all across the Islamic world, often in conscious emulation of the nation-states of Europe.  In many places local elites found it useful to structure their interests in terms of nation-states that could interact with other similar political entities on the world scene and so solicify their positions of eminence and expand their influence.  These new sociopolitical institutions refigured the existing institutions where necessary to bring them into conformity to the interests of local state entities.  And in this process Islamic instutions — the customs associated with islamic worship and the specialists in Islamic law and theology and the sufi leadership — would be enlisted where possible to bring into existance the new sociopolitical entities in the interest of fostering local and regional control on the flow of trade and the exercise of power.  The Islamic ‘reformers” sought to make use of Islamic images to justify the existence of the new nation-states over which they sought to preside.  The renewal of Islamic institutions became the expressed concern of the new modern Islamic nation-states.  In this context local languageswere emphasized; not only Arabic and Persian and Turkish, where they were the popular idioms, but also Pushtu, Uzbeki, Urdu, and Indonesian became idioms of public discourse, as the use of the local languages served the interests of the dominant voices of the new leadership.  Leaders called for a renewed Islamic devotion as the basis of a reaction to the Western cultural hegomoney aagainst which they had alined themselves.  So Nation-states emerged, with precisely defined “national” boundaries and with representatives from the local elites who concerned themselves with international issues, representing the new Islamic nation states in the halls of the international representative bodies.  The result has been the gradual further dismemberment of the Islamic world.  What may at one time have been spoken of as a region of Arabic Islamicate culture despite diverse political divisions, or at another time as a Turko-Persian Islamicate sub-ecumene of the Islamicate world now must be spoken of as locally oriented nation-states.  The various attempts to formulate local interests in terms of a common Arab culture, or as a common Turkish culture or as a common Islamic culture [so-called ‘Pan-Islamism’] gave way to regionalized mini-empires, each with a diversity of ethnic populations within its domains, each ruled by an elite that is in some sense homogenous, usually in terms of sect but also often in terms of ethnic identity.  So laid upon the cultural configurations that formerly defined broad ecumemes or sub-ecumenes now is another pattern of cultural r3elations associated with the appearance and presumably fixed and enduring modern nation-states.
Á ÁI have said “laid upon” deliberately.  A crucial assumption in this discussion has been that the various cultural periods, when certain configurations of cultural elements took form and became diagnostic of the scope of certain geographically situated ecumenes, actually overlay one another.  For these are literate citivilizations, whose particular constellations are expressed in written form, the particular issues of public discourse being preserved in tracts and books and epigrams, in prayers and incantations that eventually in some form are not only preserved through oral indoctrination but also enshrined in writing.  New cultural periods are literally “laid upon” the former ones, as the writings and sayings and recitations and epigrams of the new generation are useually — and in these cases have certainly been — been shaped so as to rephrase or reinterpret or correct and refigure the understandings and doctrines of the previous cultural configurations.  In whatever sense we can speak of certain formative cultural periods, when certain configurations of culter were established and codified as a particular style of culture we can speak of successif periods as reactions to and refigurings of previous formulations previous understandings and relations.

hip invoked Islam a resurgent and modified IslamReformist” Islamic leaders , as well as the languages already established along side of or in place of the Turkish, Persian, and Arabicthat had already been established as the languageslanguages of political expression,

Á ÁIt is noticable that Eickleman and Bates and Rassam neglect the place of the nationalist elites in the nation-states within thier Middle Eastern “area”. ???  E. was correct to shift from a definition of his ME on the basis of a list of nations to a one on the basis of a broad territory between two great cities.  For he seems to have had little interest in the specific effects of the polities or internal problems of the nations of the ME as nations, the specific problems of the n-states.  He also had essentially no interest in the wider geopolitical issues, the issues that govern the course of public discussion about public issues among the administrative elites of these nations.

Á ÁMy proposal then is that several configurations of culture can be distinguished, one one of them conforming to the the cultural configuration that E called the ME — which is the Arabic Islamicate culture that harded into a kind of climatic configuration in the High Caliphal period.  Upon this configuration was laid other configurations that “climaxed” in succeeding periods:  The TP Islamicate culture, which then became a crucial basis of the empires of the eastern Islamicate world before the 13th c, but then was further carried over a much wider part of the Islamic world in successive centuries, notably under the influence of the gunpoweder empires.  In these two climactic periods, the geographic scoke of the Islamic world was different.  The TP culture beore the Mongol and Timurid invasions of the 13th and 14th centuries included the zone from the Medi to Bengal; in the gunpowder empire periods this culture was under the Ottomans carried further Ea. etc.  Upon these cultural layers were the Reformist movements that foster the emergence of nation-states on the image of Europe polities et.c

Á ÁThis exercise has a special interest to me because in our times the Islamic world, like the rest of the world, seems to be undergoing not only a major cultural refiguration but also confronting a major reshaping of geopolitical alignments.  New geopoltiical issues seem to be driving the world polities

Á ÁSince we have seemed critical of the works of E and B-A, it is fitting to conclude with some recognition of their achievements.  We acknowldge that we may usefully examine any set of relations in any part of the world; we don’t have to believe in the existence of a “Middle East” as a cultural entity, as an examinable ecumene.  I have suggested, however, that at least for the ME there is use in examine the layers of cultural ecumenes that have existed in this part of the world, with varying shapes and varying extents at different periods, as a series of layers that can be usefully sorted out as different clusters or constellations of sultural elements.  The ways we consdier the ME, however it is constituted, can thus be recognized as cultural entities.  One problem is that the cultural configurations that make the ME in one sense is compromsed or complicated by themany other senses in which its cultural elements relate to the cultural elements of other areas.  My contention is, howeve,rt that at base the ME that is examine by E and B-R is a certain distillation is essentially an Islamic society as it existed in a certain historcial period, overlaid with the influence of other periods when the ecume of the society was aprt had not only different cultural configurations by a different spatial configuration.  Quote Wolf here.
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Periods in the history of Islamic political culture [cf chart of chronlogy]:  1.  Early Islam up through 4th caliph; 2.  High Caliphal period; 3.  Rise of Persianate Islam [Samanids, Ghaznawids, Seljuqs, Ghorids]; 4.  Mongol and Timurid disruptions and renewals; 5.  Gun-powder empires; 6. Confrontation with the West and decline; 7. Secular states; 8.  Contemporary period, radical reactions.

The periods, culturally defined:
–Á Á*Periods 1 and 2:  Arabic dominated

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–Á ÁPeriod 4.  Mongol-Timurid period:
Á ÁÁ ÁEcumenes:  Arabic; Turko-Persian
 X  X Âorganized sufi orders;
–Á Á*Period 5.  Gun-powder empires
 X  X ÂEcumenes:  Arabic/North African; Turko-Persian [Ottoman; Safavid; Central Asian/South Asian]
–Â X ÂÂ X ÂÁ€ ÁPeriod 6.  Early contact with Europe and weakening of empires
Á ÁÁ ÁLocal and fractional alginments
–Á Á*Period 7.  Twentieth Century Period:  Secular
 X  X ÂRise of nation-states, with national educational and bureacratic institutions, growing sense of international relations, international arenas of contact and influence; Pan-Arabism; Pan-Turkism; Pan-Islamism
–Á ÁPeriod 8.  Contemporary period:  Rise of radical reactions

xxxx

ÃÃ2.  I got into this in thinking about the relation of Afghanistan to its wider geographic context and its Islamic history.
ÄÄ
Á ÁThe problem caused me no concern until I began to be interested in the cultural antecedents of modern Afghanistan, especially to know the Islamic culture that was in place at the dawn of the modern society of Afghanistan, as that configuration of social alignments and orientations provided the context for the development of contemporary Afghanistan political relations.  The interest in cultural anticedents obliged me to consider the relation of the peoples in Afghanistan to the peoples in neighboring areas.  That is, the peoples in the region ÃÃnowÄÄ calledAfghanistan, for in fact that nation did not exist as a discernible political entity until the early modern period, beginning no earlier than the time of Ahmad Shah of Kandahar; and even then the region we call Afghanistan was not entirely under his control while other parts of South Asia were.  The modern nation of Afghanistan as we know it now, in its current geographic shape, was finalized at the end of the last century.
Á ÁThat is to say, the peoples of Afghanistan, until the borders of a nation-state were drawn [by the European state, the British, in the image of a European nation-state] about a century ago the peoples of the region belonged ÃÃculturallyÄÄ to a much wider area.  They participated in the wide flow of ideas and goods that drew the peoples of a wide region together in some kind of informal, culturally constituted social world.  Of course that network extended, in the abstract, around the globe.  But in the region of Central Asia there was a relatively dense flow of ideas and commerce which for generations gave the region — defined somewhat variously — a distinguishable history and a recognizable cultural tradition of its own.

Indeed Bosworth (1984:2 “The Coming of Islam to Afghanistan,” in Islam in Asia Westview) argues that the eastern lands of Iran, known as Khurasan, and the Mountains to the south, have long been a distinguishable region, for geopolitical and economic reasons:
 X Â
 X ”[C]ontrary to first appearances, Afghanistan is a well-defined geographical and cultural region, and not just a buffer-zone between the Indian, Iranian and Central Asian worlds”.  “[T]owns like Bamiyan, Kapisa .. and Kabul, have frequently been the centre of empires, dominanting lands both north and south of the Hindu Kush, and sometimes comprehending Bactria and Transoxiana and the plains of northern India; in pre-Islamic times these included the empires of the Sakas, the Kushans and the Hephtalites.”

Also, he notes that the other route around the Hindu Kush, on the west, from Herat to Sistan to the “lower Indus”, has been the route of major conquerors.

Á ÁBut the cultural world to which the peoples of this region (the “Afghanistan” that Bosworth considers regionally distinguishable) belonged, that is, the sea in which there was a relatively dense flow of ideas and commerce — this cultural world varied in scale and scope over time.  What can be considered a “core area” was the region known from pre-Islamic times as Khorasan, “the place where the sun rises.”  ÃÃÄÄ

ÃÃ2.1Â X ÂAfghn as a regional entity in pre-modern times did not clearly exist:  Khorasan, Sistan, Ghandhara …? etc.

2.2Â X ÂIn fact, at different times the culture that was the anticeedent of contemporary Afghn Islamic culture was at different times prevalent over varying territories:
ŒÂ X  X ÂIn 11 c. was Central Asian/ Khorasanian

 X  X ÂIn 13th c. was all over the Western Asian/South Asian world

 X  X ÂAnd continued to be widespread although changing much due to Mongol and Timurid invasions and due to local cultures that shaped the Islamic TurkPersian culture differently.

2.3Â X ÂIn fact, if we were developing courses on the various “civilizational worlds” in different periods of Islamic history we would have done it differently at different times.

3.  The problem of defining culture area:

3.1Á ÁWhy it has fallen out of use among sociocultural anthropologists:
-Á ÁWhat it originally meant and why the term was invented
-Á Áfocus on local cultures,
-Á Áobvious problems with broader formulations:  Kroeber’s problems with definition of civilization

but this term was developed as a basis for classifying assemblages of artifacts in museum displays

3.2 Problems of defining culture area of the Middle East:

 X ÂEickleman’s dilemma:  The fiction that we are still studying “local cultures”.

 X ÂÁ ÁThe difficulties have therefore deterred some specialists in cultural regions from seriously attempting to define the sense in which they can be considered at all integrally related. Eickleman (1981), for instance, in his seminal essay on the Middle east, made no effort ot identify the cultural grounds for identifying such a region, and in fact only presented it a s list of nations.  He defines it in the second edition (1989) simply as “the region stretching from Rabat to Tehran…” [p. 3].  On the next page he acknowledges that “When certain features of the linguistic, religious, political and historical complexities of the region are emphasized, the term is often extended to encompass Afghanistan, Pakistan, and, at least in the recent historical past, those state of Soviet Central Asia which are heavily influenced by Islam.” He does not indicate what those features are, but acknowledges that “The epicenter of the total Muslim population lies between Iran and Pakistan, …” * ŒÂ X Â*Nowhere in his book does mention the ??? million Muslims in India, even though he frequently cites W. Cantwell Smith’s excellent examination of modern Islam, which has a strongly South Asian Islamic orientation.)
 X ÂAnother version of the problem in Middle Eastern studies:  the difficulty of anthropologists in dealing with Islam vs ‘islams’

3.3 The difficulty as it bears on definition of other culture areas;

 X Âthe absence of a concern for the problem in parts of the world where geography helps:  Sub-saharan Africa, America, Australia, India

 X Âbut in certain areas the necessity to address the problem of culture [or civilizational] area has appeared because geography does not help, notably southeast Asia and the Middle East.

3.4 In fact, there was a general tendency of anthropologists not to grapple with the definitional problems of culture area

3.5 The contradiction for anthropologists:  their bread and butter courses are often “area” courses, “peoples and cultures of XX” courses.  NB the way anthropologists list their interests.

 X ÂThe definition of culture areas has been confused because of the necessary conjuction of culture and locality in the term.  The early useage of the term culture area has never seemed particularly useful to social anthropologists, the term having been invented to organize displays of artifacts in museum displays.  (Kroeber 1939 on cultural and natural areas) Nevertheless, social anthropologists have commonly betrayed their interest in the spatial contexct of culture, as they commonly give courses in such presumed civilizational regions as “Latin American”, the “Middle East”, “South Asia”, , etc.

3.6 Point: to stress the need for clearer thinking about the broader sociocultural entities that are loosely taken for granted in our work, and to make a couple of modest proposals aimed to generate a more precise discussion about the discussion of culture area.

4.  Attempts to define the problem more clearly

Á Ácommon usage of area terms
culture areas culturally defined.

My own problems of defining it.

[culture as social relations and social processes]
Œ3.  Culture as social relations and social processes

3.1 The Social organization of tradition
Á ÁThe agencies through which the orientations and cultural systems of a society are perpetuated are of course people.  Traditions are socially organized.  That is, they are cultivated and transmitted by individuals in interaction.  Thus, the transmission of tradition is affected by such social institutions as marriage, trade, friendship, religious affiliation, and political allegiance (Redfield 1956a: 49 ff.).  The “organic linkage” between the cities of India is effected by “networks of direct relationship structurally and by a common culture and communications network” (Cohn 1971: 155).  “A society, like a mind,” said Marc Bloc (1961: I, 59), “is woven of perpetual interaction.” Á Á”Neither thought nor feeling”, say Geertz (1968: 18) is … a self©contained stream of subjectiveity, but each is inescapably dependent upon the utilization by indivividuals of socially available [19] “systems of significance,” cultural constructs embodied in language, custom, art, and technolgy ©© that is to say, symbols. … [R]eligion is a social institution, worship is a social activity, and faith a social force.”

E. 1989: 258: When first applied, the Great Traditon/Little Tradition contrast had the effect of rekindling an interst in how popular understandings of religion … were related to more literary ones of placing these understandings in the wider context of complex societies. It also meant paying attention to discerning the carriers of particular religious interpretations and practices ©© persons influential in thier own society or marginal to it, so that links between religions, authority, and influence could be explored. Nonetheless, in many anthropolgocial monographs the concept subsequently meant little beyond juxtaposing statements of ‘essential” Islamic pricnciples as eleaborated in statandard scholarly texts and by educated Muslims with inventories of local religious practices.”

POLITIES WITHIN ECUMENES
Á ÁBesides the idioms that integrate civilizations through the informal informal contacts between specialists in different places and even in different political domains there are also the idioms that express and reinforce the influence and power of rulers.  The boundaries of polity and civilization do not coincide.
Á ÁIn fact, there are other strands of power and influence that draw societies in wider spans of terrritory together into relationship.  Wolf (1982), in attempting to explain the dominance and impact of capitalism upon the peoples of the world after the fifteenth century, argued that human social affairs are controlled by “modes of production,” i.e., the “historically occuring set[s] of social relations whrough which labor is deployed to wrtest energy from nature by means of tools, skills,organization, and knowledge” (1982: 75).  For Wolf the course of history and the structure of social life are controlled by the social mechanisms for mobilizing labor and developing technologies and resources.  Cultures are for him not organized or patterned; they are not “integrated totalities in which each part contributes to the maintenance of an organized, autonomous and enduring whole.  They are [instead] only cultural sets of practices and ideas, … [which are] assembled, dismantled, and reassembled, conveying in v arious accents the divergent parths of groups and classes.  These paths … grow out of the deployment of labor, mobilized to engage the world of nature.  The manner of that mobilization sets the terms of history” (1982: 390-1).  In these terms the divergent societies of the world have become connected through multiple strands of influence that mobilize labor and organize certan productive activities.  The wider world is integrated through the exercise of power.  Rulers make use of specialists of all sorts — teachers, clerics, artists, and of course their own bureacrats — to secure their control over their domains and generally to legitimate their hold on power.  In the kind of society we will examine in this book the ruler and those loyal specialists who serve his interest exert a coercive influence on the symbols that represent his claims and serve to link his domains into a sytem that serves his interests.  In polities the specialists employed by rulers are pressed into service because they are means of exercizing the “symbolic capital” through which domination is actualized, reproduced, and furthered; they are the idioms through which a certain representation of reality is projected in the interests of those who dominate (Bourdieu 1977: 165).
Á Á
MULTIPLE SCALES OF CULTURAL AFFILIATION
Á ÁWe have distinguished, that is, the variation in scale characteristic of cultural orientations.  Orientations, cultural systems, vary in scale, from those that are the intersubjective medium of social concourse in a tightly integrated local community, to the wider mediums of affairs perpetuated among societies connected essentially through their subjection to a common ruler, to the intersubjective mediums shared by the informally connected communities of a wide region.  In civilizations diverse societies are integrated through the specialists who by their wide associations with each other can reproduce in key sectors of their societies similar traditions of thought and orientation.  Wide spans of territory are thereby connected into a single ecumene, in which, despite many differences in background and social affiliation, and even sharp political divisions between the dominant rulers of the region, the idioms of social interaction, the symbols of authority and power, the rules of etiquette, and even terms of dispute that define intense political antagonisms are similar.

Á ÁThe term “cultural tradition” is consciously used here to refer to the set of received understandings embodied in the symbolic forms through which the predominant peoples of this region have communicated, augmented and preserved their knowledgeand attitudes (cf. Geertz 1973:89). The primary focus of the term is on the content of those understandings and its manifestaitons is historical and social contexts. The term “cultural tradition” focuses on a wider spectrum of identifying cultural features and a cultural unit of a wider scale than the “cultures” that are associated with specific localities. As a sub©unit of a civilization it implies, as does the word “civilization” that the sets of understandings that distinguish it are shared among populations that may belong to different political units; when people take sides on an issue they more or less understand the terms of the argument. In any case, the emphasis is on cultural relations: social life is perpetuated in such physically observable forms as the rhetoric and knesics of communication, the architecture that houses social life, the iconography of social affairs and communion, and the calendrical and ritual observances of everyday life.

Á ÁWider social systems are importantly integrated through the movement of persons and goods, and changes in the technological means of interpersonal relations affect the scale of integrative social relations.  In the latter half of the nineteenth century, for instance, railroads on land and steamships on the sea fueled a radical thrust of European power in Asia.  Railroads “provided the infrastructure of transportation that would permit a vast increase in the tranfer of goods from the sites of production overland to points of transshipment on the coast.”  They radically reduced the cost of freight, “amounting in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to a decrease of more than 90 percent” (Wolf 1982: 293).  Similarly, the development of the steamship and the construction of the canals at Suez and Panama drastically reduced the cost of shippin on the high seas (1982: 293-5).  The technology of transport seems expecially useful for understanding certain features of civilizations and their historic transformations in their spatial contexts.  For civilizations are integrated through corridors of movement, protected by soical conditions and effected by the technologies of transport.  Such corridors are thus the lines through which a dominant “high” culture is carried.  Cultureal elements are diffused into different areas of a cultureal region at different rates.  In the zones of relatively greater movement and interaction the pace of trade and communication is more closely linked to affaris outside the region, and through these zones new cultural elemtns are introduced and assimilated into the cultural region as a whole.  ONly certain parts of India, said Braudel, “can really be said to have lived at the same pace as the outside world, keeping up with the trades and rhythms of the globe — and even then not without a measure of difficulty and time-lag … and what was true of India could be said of every popoulated area of the globe. … There are some ares [that] would history does not reach, zones of silence and undisturbed ingnorance … But even in advanced countries, socially and economically speaking, world time [ the process of the most actgive interaction among peoples] has never accounted for the whole of human existence” (Braudel 1984[1979]: 18).  The controllingfactor in this differential involvement in “the trades and rhythms of the globe” is of course the differntial flow of traffic.  Certain avenues of travel have formed in respect to the location of resources and the feasibility of movement and they have been further established as corridors of traffic by the developlment of improved means of transport.  Trasport systems and traffic corridors are the arteries of cultural regions.

RESIDUE
Geertz 1980:9 “… it [Negara] was still one example of a system of government once very much more widespread. … one can construct, therefore, a model of the ÃÃnegaraÄÄ as a distinct variety of political order, a model which can then be used generally to extend our understanding of the developmental history of Indic Indonesia (Cambodia, Thailand, Burma).”

4.  How historians have tried to deal with prob.  because is a historical problem.  define it more precisely.

Á ÁLeads me to the term ecumene/oikumene [Hodgson] that is used by historians.  Our interest in history as part of the cultural explanation for the structures we find “in place” drives us to consider more explicitly what we mean by ecumene — which is the historian’s gloss for what anthopologists have avoided labling as “civilizational areas” or, using the earlier terminology “culture areas”.

Kroeber’s usage, Hodgson’s usage, Frye’s usage.

Hevertheless, the problem of historians in specifying what they mean.

What I mean by ecumene:  A definition.  Then an series of examples from different periods in TurkoPersian history.

 X ÂThis def must assume varying degrees of influence spatially [centers]

 X ”” [socially, elites, middlemen,

 X Âvarying scales of hegemony: empirial, regional, local

End:  This is preliminary, but aimed at stimulating some discussion about how we should define the broader sociocultural units we examine.ÄÄ

A succession of ecumenes in the Islamic world

–Á ÁArabic dominated
Œ–Á ÁLater Abbasid period, rise of TurkoPersian societies; to Mongol invasion
Á ÁÁ ÁEcumenes:  [W] Arabic; [E] Turko-Persian

–Á ÁMongol-Timurid period:
Á ÁÁ ÁEcumenes:  Arabic; Turko-Persian
 X  X Âorganized sufi orders;

–Á ÁGun-powder period
 X  X ÂEcumenes:  Arabic/North African; Turko-Persian [Ottoman; Safavid; Central Asian/South Asian]

–Á ÁEarly contact with Europe and decline
Á ÁÁ ÁLocal and fractional alginments

–Á ÁTwentieth Century Period:  Secular
 X  X ÂRise of nation-states, with national educational and bureacratic institutions, growing sense of international relations, international arenas of contact and influence; Pan-Arabism; Pan-Turkism; Pan-Islamism

–Á ÁContemporary period

NB:  the periods are marked by developments not nec permanent or enduring in their contribution to the pool of symbols that are perpetuated into successive periods.  NB.  the gun-powder empires were succeeded by short-lived “empires” whose advantages accrued to advantages of the musket and portable gun as opposed to the canon, so the disorder of the Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah periods reflected the changes in technological advantages of local cavalry.  But both, as Wolf says, are manifestations of the “tributary mode” of production.

Arabic Islamic cultural period
L: 226-7.  The Arabs were transformed into an urba-dwelling occupational differentiated pop which included workers, artisans, mercnats, and anew religious elite of Q readers, schoalrs of law and Arabic letters, and scetic and charismatic preachers.  Tow popus were also stratified on the basis of political office holding, landownership, and tribal chieftainship,a dn organized into new religious sects and political movemetns. … the Caliphate acopted Byzantine and Saanian instituiosn and concepts of imperial rule while giveng them a new Islamic definition. … Abasid centerd on a royal court, govered thre provs through clients an servants of the rulers using a comb colaiton of elites. brought together Arab soldeire, Iraq, Egy

TP period:
L: 139.  … ME states came to be built around similar elites and institions.  Everywhere the old landowning and bureaucratic elites lost their authority and were replaced by new militaray and poltical elites composed of nomadic chieftains and slave soldier.  Everywhere the cohesion of the state came to dependupon slave armies and a semi-feudal form of administration.  Each state became the patron of a regional culture.  In the Arab provinces poetry, manuscript illumination, architecture, and minor arts developed.  In Iran a new regional type of Islamic civilization based on Persian language and arts emerged.  At the same time, the ulama and the Sufis, who in the earlier impoerial age had been the informal spokesmen of Islamic religious values, became the heads of communal organizations.  The preside over the conversion of ME peoples, organizsed schools of law, Sufi brotherhoods and Shi`i sects, standardized Islamic religious teachings and articulated an Islamic social and poiltical ethic.  Despite political fragmentation, a new form of Islamic state, community, and religion came into being.”