Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-19T06:07:07.110Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Surviving in a “Society”-centric World: Comments on Engseng Ho's “Inter-Asian Concepts for Mobile Societies”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2017

Rian Thum
Rian Thum*
Affiliation:
Rian Thum ([email protected]) is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University New Orleans.
Get access

Extract

While this essay will speak primarily from a historian's perspective, I want first to acknowledge that the idea of “societies” has had a peculiarly interdisciplinary hold on scholarship, bridging the humanities and social sciences. For sociologists it is a disciplinary foundation, for anthropologists it is often an escape hatch from the problematic notion of “cultures,” and for historians it is an organizational scheme that has stealthily metamorphosed into an unconsidered worldview. While some disciplines, especially sociology, have invested more effort than others in critically examining the idea of societies, each has produced critiques that perhaps should have killed off “societies” altogether. And yet enormous numbers of new works continue to take “societies” as their objects of study (e.g., Thum 2014), with even transnational and global studies framed as the interaction of supposedly distinct societies.

Type
Article Commentary
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 76 , Issue 4 , November 2017 , pp. 929 - 933
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

List of References

Attaqwa Mosque. 1988. Taiguo Qingmai Yisilan Jingzhen Qingzhensi ershi'er xuexiao shiwu zhounian jinian kan [Commemorative publication for the twenty-second anniversary of the Islamic “Venerating the Real” Mosque of Chiang Mai, Thailand, and the fifteenth anniversary of its school]. Chiang Mai.Google Scholar
Balci, Bayram. 2007. “Central Asian Refugees in Saudi Arabia: Religious Evolution and Contributing to the Reislamization of Their Motherland.” Refugee Survey Quarterly 26(2):12–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dabistān-i Maẕāhib . 1877. Lucknow: Munshi Newal Kishore.Google Scholar
Forbes, Andrew D. W. 1986. “The ‘Panthay’ (Yunnanese Chinese) Muslims of Burma.” Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs. Journal 7(2):384–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frankel, James D. 2011. Rectifying God's Name: Liu Zhi's Confucian Translation of Monotheism and Islamic Law. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ma, Jianxiong and Ma, Cunzhao. 2014. “The Mule Caravans of Western Yunnan: An Oral History of the Muleteers of Zhaozhou.” Transfers 4(3):24–42.Google Scholar
Murata, Sachiko. 2000. Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light: Wang Tai-yü’s Great Learning of the Pure and Real and Liu Chih's Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Papas, Alexandre, and Wei, Ma. 2015. “Sufi Lineages among the Salar.” In Muslims in Amdo Tibetan Society: Multidisciplinary Approaches, eds. Hille, Marie-Paule, Horlemann, Bianca, and Nietupski, Paul K., 109–34. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books.Google Scholar
Thum, Rian. 2014. The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thum, Rian. 2016. “Exiled to the Center of the World: The Turkistanis of Mecca.” Paper presented at the China–Arabia Encounters and Engagements Conference, National University of Singapore, December.Google Scholar
Thum, Rian. Forthcoming. “Moghul Relations with the Mughals—Economic, Political, and Cultural.” In Xinjiang in the Context of Central Eurasian Transformations, eds. Takehiro, Onuma, Brophy, David, and Yasushi, Shinmen, 3–24. Tokyo: Toyo bunko.Google Scholar