Review: Silk, Slaves, and Stupas: Material Culture of the Silk Road, by Susan Whitfield

Abstract

Susan Whitfield, Silk, Slaves, and Stupas: Material Culture of the Silk Road . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. 376 pp., 8 color photos, 10 color maps. ISBN 9780520281783. $85.00. Susan Whitfield's book offers a history of cultural exchange in premodern Afro-Eurasia through ten key objects, beginning with earrings and ending with slaves. It is less a continuous narrative than a collection of cross-referenced essays on materials, technologies, styles, beliefs, and ideas that embody or concrete, in one way or another, pivotal moments of cultural encounter. Spanning East Asia to Western Europe over more than a millennium and engaging nine separate media with as many distinct contexts of use and patterns of circulation, this study vastly exceeds current disciplinary and field categories. Inevitably, it relies significantly on secondary studies in English and specialist interlocutors acknowledged by Whitfield throughout the text. The major exception is the sections involving Chinese history, Whitfield's (and the present reviewer's) primary field of specialization. The wager in venturing so far beyond standard field boundaries is nothing short of fundamentally reappraising Afro-Eurasian cultural history and, moreover, challenging the idea that at the root of modern categories for human belonging such as ethnicity and nationality are self-contained cultures with discrete histories by which we should or can carve up the globe. To effect such a reappraisal, Whitfield, like proponents of the material turn across the humanities, explicitly seeks to challenge the authority of texts. Whitfield's investment in broad, heterogeneous representation emerges in her careful selection of the book's ten key objects. The first chapter addresses a pair of earrings made of gold, jade, and other semiprecious stones from a ca. second-century BCE tomb. This first, catalyzing object already evinces, Whitfield demonstrates, mature forms of exchange between two rival empires, the Xiongnu and the Han. Taken seriously as historical documents, the earrings sharply counter the bias in textual records toward conflict and ecological division between imperial China and its steppes neighbors, the latter of whom in this case did …