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Survival in the Frontier Zone: Comparative Perspectives on Identity and Political Allegiance in China's Inner Asian Borderlands during the Sui-Tang Dynastic Transition (617–630)*
Jonathan Karam Skaff
Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania
| Cross-cultural contact is a fundamental issue in world history. Throughout history peaceful and violent encounters between cultures and civilizations have been prime causes of social, economic, political, and material changes. Although scholarship on cultural contact has garnered increasing attention in recent years, the growing body of literature has bfeen dominated by studies on European colonialism.1 In order to place European expansion in broader historical context, there is a need for more studies of intercultural relations in premodern times. This paper will attempt to take a step in this direction by examining cultural contacts along the premodern China–Inner Asia frontier and then placing these findings in a comparative framework. |
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This paper fits within a growing body of historical, anthropological, and archaeological scholarship that views frontiers as dynamic zones of political, cultural, and economic interaction. This recent research challenges ideas about the frontier and cultural contacts that dominated the academy for much of the twentieth century and ultimately were based upon assumptions derived from nineteenth-century European nationalism and imperialism. In the 1800s circumscribed territorial boundaries of newly created western European nation-states led to the tendency to view all frontiers as "natural" geographical, political, cultural, and sometimes economic dividing lines. Moreover, nationalism bred the assumption that the cultures restricted within the boundaries or countries were static and homogenous. In the case of expanding frontiers, such as in colonial America or Africa, nineteenth-century imperialism implied that cultural change could occur, but only when "advanced" peoples engulfed and civilized "barbarians" (Sahlins 1989, 1–9; Whittaker 1994, 2–8; Lightfoot and Martinez 1995, 473;Power and Standen 1999, 1–9). Although there were some early dissenters from these views, such as Febvre and Lattimore, who championed the idea of culturally complex zonal frontiers, for the most part their perceptive observations were not as influential as they should have been (Febvre 1924, 296–315; Lattimore 1951, 238–251). For example, in 1982 Eric Wolf complained that "[t]he habit of treating named entities such as Iroquois, Greece, Persia, or the United States as fixed entities opposed to one another by stable internal architecture and external boundaries interferes with our ability to understand their mutual encounter and confrontation" (p.7). |
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It was not until the 1980s and especially the 1990s that more dynamic models of frontiers and cultural interaction became generally accepted. According to the revisionists, most frontiers are permeable zones of fluid interaction and exchange. As regions distant from centers of governmental control and ideological orthodoxy, people with different political and social affiliations have greater freedom to come together. These tendencies were even more pronounced in the pre-modern era when communications were primitive and states had lower capacities to control their populations.2 Moreover, anthropological studies of ethnic identity now generally agree that ethnicity is mutable and recognize that when different cultural groups meet in contact zones, they are prone to mutual influence, even in cases where one culture is militarily and politically dominant (Barth 1969; Keyes 1981; G. Bentley 1987; Pratt 1992, 6–7). |
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