Spirits and Ships : Cultural Transfers in Early Monsoon Asia.
- 1st ed.
- 1 online resource (587 pages)
Intro -- Contents -- 1. Introduction: Re-connecting Histories across the Indo-Pacific -- 2. Fearsome Bleeding, Boogeyman Gods and Chaos Victorious: A Conjectural History of Insular South Asian Religious Tropes -- 3. Tantrism "Seen from the East -- 4. Can We Reconstruct a "Malayo-Javanic" Law Area? -- 5. Ethnographic and Archaeological Correlates for an Mainland Southeast Asia Linguistic Area -- 6. Was There a Late Prehistoric Integrated Southeast Asian Maritime Space? Insight from Settlements and Industries -- 7. Looms, Weaving and the Austronesian Expansion -- 8. Pre-Austronesian Origins of Seafaring in Insular Southeast Asia -- 9. The Role of "Prakrit" in Maritime Southeast Asia Through 101 Etymologies -- 10. Who Were the First Malagasy, and What Did They Speak? -- 11. Sastric and Austronesian Comparative Perspectives: Parallel Frameworks on Indic Architectural and Cultural Translations among Western Malayo-Polynesian Societies -- 12. The Lord of the Land Relationship in Southeast Asia -- Index.
This volume seeks to foreground a "borderless" history and geography of South, Southeast, and East Asian littoral zones that would be maritime-focused, and thereby explore the ancient connections and dynamics of interaction that favoured the encounters among the cultures found throughout the region stretching from the Indian Ocean littorals to the Western Pacific, from the early historical period to the present. Transcending the artificial boundaries of macro-regions and nation-states, and trying to bridge the arbitrary divide between (inherently cosmopolitan) "high" cultures (e.g. Sanskritic, Sinitic, or Islamicate) and "local" or "indigenous" cultures, this multidisciplinary volume explores the metaphor of Monsoon Asia as a vast geo-environmental area inhabited by speakers of numerous language phyla, which for millennia has formed an integrated system of littorals where crops, goods, ideas, cosmologies, and ritual practices circulated on the sea-routes governed by the seasonal monsoon winds. The collective body of work presented in the volume describes Monsoon Asia as an ideal theatre for circulatory dynamics of cultural transfer, interaction, acceptance, selection, and avoidance, and argues that, despite the rich ethnic, linguistic and sociocultural diversity, a shared pattern of values, norms, and cultural models is discernible throughout the region.