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I cannot tell you how utterly rewarding the first day of the Indian Ocean World conference has been. The second panel gave us so much to think about my head is spinning. But I thought I would share the ideas I will spend the longest time mulling over here. 1/
Nile Green offered a characteristically insightful and clarifying vision of where the field began and where it should be heading. The Indian Ocean World was conceived in the shadow of Braudel and Goitein's theorization of the Mediterranean, which delimited both themes and methods
The lack of fit of that model for the Indian Ocean becomes especially clear when we think about the multiplicity of languages, and hence of archives, of a field which lacks something like the Cairo Geniza to give it internal coherence.
For such a world, a better model, Green suggests, might be Central Asian studies, which has not only built itself up institutionally as a field with an internally coherent model of training but has resisted securitization and maintained a commitment to humanism even today.
Moreover, the longue duree zone of contact of Central Asia, encompassing empires and those beyond its confines, is a closer analogue to the Indian Ocean as a historical space than the Mediterranean.
Sohaib Baig's brilliant presentation on Sindhi texts and Ottoman archives showed us why the Indian Ocean is a necessary rubric, as area studies or historiographies defined by state polities (South Asia/Ottoman-Turkish history) would be unable to capture the world he showed us.
He also pointed to the need for institutional support for learning Indian Ocean languages as well as an intellectual home of the kind @TheNakhoda and I were missing and which impelled us to put together this conference in the hope it will grow into a regular meeting and community
Anne Bang and Iqbal Akhtar showed us the possibilities, as well as the tricky politics and ethics, of archival conservation in an area where the very climactic conditions are against us. Anne Bang's caution about turning living textual traditions into heritage objects is vital.
Kai Kresse's lovely ethnography of texts showed us how we must contend with the fluid interplay between textual objects, performance traditions and ritual contexts in thinking about our archives in the Indian Ocean world- relevant as much to South Asia as to the Swahili coast.
Finally Teren Sevea gave a beguiling presentation on the Southeast Asian magical texts he works with, showing us how the line between the autochthonous and the colonial is always blurry even in vernacular texts produced in the Indian Ocean.
I should say, Teren's book is my favorite work in the history of religions since Richard Eaton's book on the rise of Islam in the Bengal frontier and I know of no higher praise. Buy it! https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/miracles-and-material-life/56488EC391B731F34A9D66E8F2B1AE30
Thanks to everyone who participated so generously. I can't wait to see you for @TheNakhoda's panel on commerce and capitalism and mine on labor and mobility, featuring @NancyUm1 @TamaraFernando3 @Riteshjais17 and more amazing scholars. Sign up here! https://iowconference.org/schedule/index.html
