This working paper explores what I consider to be a tenuous but persistent form of “public culture” extending between Inner Asia and Europe over the course of the eighteenth and, especially, nineteenth centuries. This “stranger...
moreThis working paper explores what I consider to be a tenuous but persistent form of “public culture” extending between Inner Asia and Europe over the course of the eighteenth and, especially, nineteenth 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). This paper introduces the social sites of my sources, the Buddhist monastic colleges that spanned the Sino-Russian frontiers, and provides 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 about the ways that practices of secularity amongst the actors 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.
