Research Methods (3)

A week or so ago I attended a workshop organized by the recently-established Catapult Center for Digital Humanities & Computational Analysis at IUB. The workshop was on Omeka, a digital publishing platform tailored for librarians, archivists and humanists who want to curate collections and research materials online. I attended because I'm becoming more and more interested in possible ways of being to present aspects of my research online, ways that require more sophisticated storage and hosting options than are available through (admittedly, pretty good) blog platforms like Blogspot or Wordpress.

Omeka is becoming increasingly popular with humanists whose research incorporates strongly visual components: manuscripts, photographs, paintings, illustrations &c. The attractions for someone like me, who is interested in the rich world of  medieval and early-modern Central Asian manuscript traditions, are obvious; moreover, it brings me into synch with developments in online curation that are currently impacting upon my own research: thanks to digitization initiatives such as Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan, Islamic Heritage Project at Harvard University, and Walters Arts Museum Islamic Manuscripts, I've been able to acquire research materials that once would have required sensitive negotiation and not insubstantial travel costs and copying fees to acquire.

In fact, I learned about the latter goldmine as a direct result of the Omeka workshop: the Walters Art Museum has made publicly available the metadata of its Islamic manuscripts, and the workshop convenors used it as an example of how spreadsheets can be imported (with the aid of a plug-in) into your Omeka site and used to generate new metadata fields.

Not previously aware of the Walters Art Museum (ignorant me!), or its precious collection of Islamic manuscripts, I was delighted to find that it has a fine Safavid copy of نوائی's خمسه, attributed to the 16th cent. As I begin to construct my my research agenda and schedule for the dissertation, the easy availability of such a fine work - unthought of 10-15 years ago - drives home to me the transformational nature of the digital humanities and its benefits to the researcher.

Color me amazed ...

Among projects I keep in the slow-lane is an attempted translation of a pair of verse histories that belong to the clutch of Persian and Turkic works collectively referred to as the Kokand Chronicles. Produced in the 19th century, these works offer various perspectives on the history of the Ming dynasty, the Khanate of Kokand, and the Ferghana valley after 1720. Timur K. Beisembiev is at the forefront of current scholarship on these works, and has produced much that is useful (including the now indispensable Annotated Indices to the Kokand Chronicles) but a lot of work remains to be done. (This is the story, alas, for much of Central Asian history between the Mongol and Russian conquests.)

The works in question are the شهنامهٔ دیوانهٔ عندالیب and the شهنامهٔ دیوانهٔ مطریب and exist in two copies at the Beruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent. The copy I am working from is Ms. 696/I-II, and is described in volume five (publ. 1960) of the institute's catalogue of manuscripts (q.v. nos 3532 and 3534, p. 49). Both works are concerned with the reign of Muḥammad 'Alī Khan (r. 1237/1822-1258/1842). Nothing is known of the authors.

A pair of stiches caught my eye in شهنامهٔ دیوانهٔ عندالیب (fol. 5b l.15-fol.6a l.1):

خان نی اوروغیدین ایرمیش اول ایر
حم آتی انینگ ایرور علی شیر

که رنگی اوجوب گحی قیزاردی
که سرغاریبان گحی کوکاردی

My best translation thus far of this quite literally colorful pair of stiches goes something like this:

'There was a man from the khan's kinfolk,
Also called 'Alī Shīr,

Who turned pale and sometimes red;
Who turned yellow and sometimes blue.'

The translation is a bit literal, and maybe the depth of meaning can be more accurately rendered in a metaphorical sense:

'There was a man from the khan's kinfolk,
Also called was 'Alī Shīr.

Sometimes he blanched and sometimes he blushed;
Sometimes he yellowed and sometimes he turned blue in the face.'

I'm still working on it; suggestions welcome.

Write on!

One of the things that inevitably slows down my blog-posting is the fiddly and persnickety process of correctly transliterating non-Latin scripts. Hence, if you look at some of my past posts, you'll see I've transliterated titles of books and whatnot originally published in, say, Russian or Uzbek, into Latin.

I've now decided this not a helpful process ... both intellectually dishonest and - what with developments in OCR and the non-Latin script search capabilities of Google - no longer necessary on my part to transliterate or transcribe Cyrillic or Arabic-script titles and sources into Latin. As more and more libraries (mine own, IU, for example) are calibrating search functions for non-Latin scripts, it actually means we now no longer have to worry quite so much about how we transliterate the given title of a Russian or Persian work, since interested parties can now simply type the relevant text in the orginal scripts and let nature - I mean, teh interwebs - work it's magic.

Ongoing Research (1)

I've accumulated a short list of "to do" projects over the summer, which I need to somehow fit in around my Uyghur language programme; these include:

1) MESA conference presentation;
2) CESS conference presentation;
3) Revise and submit paper for publication.

Of these, the first two are green-lighted; the third is more of a shot in the dark, but since I'm working on my advisor's recommendation - and since I like to think that he wouldn't deliberately send me on a fool's errand - it shouldn't be a complete waste of time and, in any case, it might well end up in my dissertation.

For MESA, I'll be presenting a paper on a Naqshbandi shaykh in Herat in the second-half of the fifteenth century, and for CESS I'll be discussing the influnce of Nava'i's work on early nineteenth century poets in Central Asia. The paper I'll be attempting to get published is a discussion of Nawa'i's memoir of Jami, Khamsat al-mutahayyirin.

A busy summer in store, then.

Research Methods (2)

Hmmm. That didn't take long. Still, since no-one actually *blogs* anymore, I don't suppose anyone noticed. Life has been busy, but I've become involved in a Wiki project based out of Harvard, established by my friend Eric (the man behind Who was Du Tong?, which aims to provide an online chrestomathy for Chaghatay Turki (and variants of).

Called nothing more grand than TurkicWiki, it's still in its early (Beta) stages, but we've already started posting texts online and slowly glossing them. For obvious reasons, we're initially focusing on printed texts in the public domain, which restricts our options somewhat, but we do have a sizeable chunk of the Baburnama posted, as well as a link to Ilminski's edition at Google Books.

Nava'i Scholarship (2)

It is Spring Break Break. Let joy be unconfined. Wandering around campus and downtown today I am reminded just how wonderful Bloomington can be when a) the weather is mild, and b) most of the students have left. Lest I be accused of misanthropy or academic snobbery on account of the latter point, I should point out that I happen to think Bloomington fairly lovely - if not outright wonderful - most of the year. It's just that, like a good wine (wah-wah-wah) sometimes you need a little time and space to breathe in order to truly appreciate the, err, and here the metaphor dies .. pfft.

That said, I've been able to return to some projects that have had to go on the back burner while I've been focused on the Conference, work, and regular studying. One of these projects involves gathering older i.e. 19th century scholarship on Nava'i. I've mentioned (I think ...) Monsieur Belin before, who published a two-part survey of Nava'i and his works in the early 1860s.

In the same venue - Journal asiatique - he published his translation of Mahbub al-qulub, Nava'i's treatise on ethics and society. A little earlier, the Russian orientalist Mikhail Nikitskiy, under the aegis of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, also published a survey of the works of Nava'i, as well as descriptions of Mir 'Ali Shir from period sources (Davlatshah Samarqandi, Khondamir, Sam Mirza et al).

These materials I've either been able to download off teh interwebs, or scan to .pdf from the wonderful microfilm and facsimile collection of Central Asian scholarship held at the Sinor Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies - where I happen to work. Most convenient.

Uzbek Scholarship (1)

I've reached that point in my preliminary research where I've exhausted most of the published English-language source material, and I'm moving into the realms of Uzbek and Russian publications, more particularly, academic journals.

The initial phase has been to tootle around the stacks of IU Wells Library, plucking volumes, issues or parts of journals from the shelves, flicking through the tables of content, and recording details of relevant articles.

This - children - is bibliographic research the old-fashioned way. The three journals I've most been concerned with in this phase - Sharq Yulduzi [Star of the East), O'zbek tili va adabiyoti (Uzbek Language and Literature) and O'zbekiston tarixi (History of Uzbekistan) - are not readily available electronically (yet...).

However, even with the incomplete sets in the Wells Library, I've identified several dozen likely looking articles which may be of some use, all to do with Nava'i, in some way or other.

Research Methods (1)

In one of the December issues of the London Review of Books last year, the historian Sheila Fitzpatrick recalled her experiences as one of the lucky few foreign researchers allowed into the Soviet archives in the 1960s ('A Spy in the Archives').

It's a wonderful account of the dualities and binaries that seem to have underlain her encounters. On the one hand, there was official suspicion, both from British and Soviet bureaucrats charged with overseeing her visit; at the same time, her host family and acquaintances were seemingly quick to dispense with the formalities and provide her with the proverbial 'home from home.'

Based not on my own experiences, but from what I've heard and read about the experiences of researchers in the current post-Soviet space, it seems that some things haven't changed. For example, it is de rigeur in the acknowledgements section of any monograph written by a European or American scholar on, say, Central Asia (and when this thought first popped into my head, I was able to check immediately agains several such volumes in my bookshelves), to note the wonderful hospitality of librarians and archivists, usually in the form of endless cups of tea and local delicacies (dumplings, bread, pastries, kebabs etc.).

All well and good, you might think ... but I wonder if such a habit is a hangover from Soviet days. Fitzpatrick writes:

We weren’t allowed to go to the snackbar or cafeteria because that would have meant wandering unsupervised around the building; instead, kind-hearted supervisors (dezhurnye, always women) made tea for us and allowed us to eat sandwiches at our desks, dropping crumbs on the state secrets.

Diversions (3)

The New York Times Sunday Book review recently elicited responses from six writer/critics to the question, 'Why criticism matters.' One of the writers canvassed was Elif Batuman, an American writer from a Turkish family, whose wonderful book on the the study of Russian literature and the ups and downs of graduate student life, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2010), was one of the best books I read last year ... ::rewind:: one of the best books I read last year not written by 'Ali Shir Nawa'i.

As her response unfolds, you realise she is championing not the positive review, but the negative review. She writes:

Negative criticism is particularly exciting, not only because of schadenfreude, but because once limitations are identified, we glimpse how to transcend them. Learning the shortcomings of today’s neuronovel, we catch sight of the psychological novel of the future: a novel expressive of the problems we have now, including the encroachment of cognitive science into the concept of the self. When this novel appears, it will be because some people wrote neuronovels and books like “Proust Was a Neuroscientist” and others identified the ways in which these works captivated us but failed to describe human existence.

Such an interpretation can be applied not just to literary criticism, but to any form of criticism where the aim is to help an author revise and improve their writing. Unfortunately, the truly negative book-review is rarely seen in the scholarly journals: in the last couple of years I've seen one particularly dreadful book-length survey of central Eurasian history receive some unfeasibly (and unwarranted) polite reviews.

Diversions (2)

'What role for theory in historiography?' is a question historians constantly ruminate on. When I was at school in the UK, there were generally reckoned to to be four "schools" of historiography through which historians interpreted British history, namely Whig/Liberal, Marxist, Revisionist, Post-Revisionist.

For the uninitiated Whig/Liberal (as I understand it ...) meant the teleological interpretation of the passage of British history which viewed all events in the socio-political sphere after the Norman Conquest (1066) as constituting a progressive march towards multi-party democracy, the rule of law, and individual liberties.

It was initially interpreted as a slow reaction/revolution against the so-called "Norman Yoke", the imposition of which had traduced Anglo-Saxon monarchical traditions and the concept of Common Law. Consequently, the Magna Carta was viewed as the first step in the restitution of private property and the reigning in of extra-judicial Royal powers; the English Civil Wars of the 1640s, the overthrow of the monarchy, and the establishment of the Republic and later Commonwealth affirmed the right of Parliament to raise taxes and levies independently of the monarch; the Bill of Rights of 1689 defined basic rights for Englishmen; and the Reform Act of 1832 revolutionized parliamentary representation, empowered the newly-industrialized areas at the expense of the landowning classes, and swept away the old system of "rotten boroughs." Or something like that ... you catch my drift.

For many, many years, this was *the* widely accepted narrative for the teaching and understand of British history, and was associated with the platforms of the Whig and Liberal parties, until it was skewered by Herbert Butterfield in his tidy polemic, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931). By which time, political and intellectual trends had begun to challenge traditional notions of historiography.

Marxist historians, as befitting their background in the socio-economic theories of their hirsute and whiskery fountainhead, viewed many of the events in British history - and here I use "British" as opposed to simply "English" - as products of struggle between the classes following revolutions in modes of production. R. H. Tawney wasn't explicitly a Marxist (he was by all accounts a Christian socialist), but he was inspired by Max Weber - who most definitely was a Marxist - and his works such as The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912) and 'The Rise of the Gentry, 1558-1640', Economic History Review, vol. 11, no. 1 (1941) opened up new avenues for like-minded historians to explore major events in British history through the prism of economics. Christopher Hill and Lawrence Stone explored similar themes

This segues into Revisionist historiography, which some people take to mean "Contrarian" or "Counterfactual", but is a shade more complex than that. At its best, it adopted the theories and methodologies pioneered by the Marxist historians, took side-swipes at the sacred cows of the Whig/Liberals, but - as the name suggests - looked for new interpretations of accepted narratives.

The classic example was the reinterpretation of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919. As it was largely taught to me, the Treaty was too harsh in its punitive measures against Germany, and played nursemaid to the economic and social conditions that resulted in the rise of Nazism. Such views were widespread early on, not least in John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919).

However, more recent revisionist interpetations have argued that the Treaty was in fact highly lenient - see Corelli Barnett, The Collapse of British Power (2002). In a similar vein, revisionist historians argued that the policy of Appeasement and Munich Agreement were far from the acts of political cowardice and weakness portrayed by Churchill and others, but rather policies of expediency and acts minor political genius.

Eventually, the Post-Revisionists appeared on the scene, positing themselves somewhere in between all three of the above mentioned groups, generally eschewing political or methodological biases, and preferring instead measured conclusions based on judicious interpretation of the source material ... and shouldn't that be the preferred methodology of all historians?

Finally, I reach the point of this post. I am a product of my education, and as a would-be historian my formative teenage years were spent in fields (17th Century Britain and Europe) very different to the ones I now frolic in (15th Century Central Asia). Moreover, my current region and period of focus has been largely untouched by the major theoretical and methodological developments in Asian history of the past 30 years of so, to wit Post-Colonialism, 'Orientalism', Subaltern Studies, 'the Cambridge School', and Micro-history, to name the most prominent. On top of that, Central Asian studies in America and Europe has benefited immensely from the opening up of libraries, archives and sites of historical interest in the Post-Soviet space which were previously inaccessible.

In the past few years, historians of Central Asia - and not least those who focus on the periods of Tsarist (1865-1917) and early Soviet (1917-41) rule - have begun to discuss the study of the region in terms commonly used in, say, the study of British-ruled India or French colonial Algeria. Debates about the applicability of Post-colonial theory to the study of Central Asian history, or the usefulness of Saidian (i.e. inspired by Edward Said, Orientalism) memes e.g. Tsarist geographical expeditions as tools of imperial rule, have appeared in the journals.

Such debates are impassioned and inspiring but, like the trends outlined above, they can lead to ossification, stagnation and a certain kind of groupthink in the halls of acadme. Historians grounded in the study of Russia, Russians, and the Russian language (for example ...), need to learn to engage with Central Asia for Central Asia's sake. Theories explaing the rise and consolidation of, say, the Manghits in Bukhara should be grounded in close analysis and interpretation of the sources for that period and place.

Similarly, an understanding of early Russian attempts to impose Imperial systems of taxation and law in the Steppe or Ferghana valley need to based on a solid understanding of pre-Imperial norms (if such things even existed). Foucault - much beloved Foucault - remarked words to the effect that the solution to the problem of global and hegemonic discourses was to found in the "Local".

Nawa'i Scholarship (1)

Part of the process of researching Nawa'i includes, of course, engaging with previous scholarship. It is an onerous task: major monographs and articles have appeared in Russian, Uzbek, Turkish, Persian, German, French, Tajik ... and so on. Curiously, little is available in English - it's a similar situation that alluded to in an earlier post, when I was bemoaning the paucity of English-language translations of Mir 'Ali Shir.

I've recently been loaned by my advisor a volume written by the Soviet orientalist E. E. Bertel's, simply titled Navoi: opit tvorcheskoy biografii [Navoi: An experiment in creative biography] (Moscow/Leningrad: Academy of Sciences, 1948). Bertel's was one of the leading Russian orientalists of the 20th century, despite the obvious political and philosophical constraints placed upon him by the Soviet system, which often required scholars to bend their conclusions to match the prevailing ideological trends.

Bertel's has made an attempt here at a scholarly biography, but with (on the face of it) a populist slant. However, I should refrain from making judgment until I've actually, well, read it.

Bertel's also wrote a similar work on Jami, and it's the relationship between Jami and Nawa'i that is the focus of the latest phase of my research. I'm also holding onto a volume edited by the late Uzbek scholar Asom Urunbaev, entitled Pis'ma-avtografi Abdarrahmana Djami iz "Al'boma Navoi" [Signed letters of Abdurrahman Jami from the "Navoi Album"] (Tashkent: Fan, 1982).

It consists of (Russian) translations from the Persian of letters written by Jami, taken from the so-called Nava'i Album' of collected letters (Ms. of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences, no. 2178). Some of these letters were quoted from in Nawa'i's composition Khamsat al-Mutahayyirin, his memoir of his friendship with Jami.

Nawa'i in Historical Context (1)

Maria Subtelny at University of Toronto is supreme among English-language scholars who focus on this period. Her most recent work, Timurids in Transition: Turko-Persian Politics and Acculturation in Medieval Iran (Leiden: Brill, 2007), is effectively a summation of her life's work, combining both new and previously published scholarship on the latter years of the Timurid dynasty, with particular focus on the reign of Sultan Husayn Mirza and the socio-economic condition of Herat.

However, while it does a fine job detailing complex political machinations and interpreting the economic record - notably waqf (religious foundation) charters - it isn't overly concerned with Mir 'Ali Shir, at least not from the cultural perspective.

On a similar note, The Garden of the Eight Paradises: Babur and the Culture of Empire in Central Asia, Afghanistan and India (1483-1530) (Leiden: Brill, 2004), by Stephen F. Dale of Ohio State University, while ostensibly pre-occupied with the founder of the Mughal dynasty, has important points to make about the cultural significance of Herat and the flowering of Turkic literature under the benevolent gaze of Mir 'Ali Shir.

Maria Szuppe does a fine job analyzing political relationships, change and continuity at the beginning of the 15th Century in Entre Timourides, Uzbeks et Safavides: questions d'histoire politique et sociale de Hérat dans la première moitié du XVIe siècle (Paris: Association pour l'avancement des études iraniennes, 1992). Ultimately, her survey falls slightly - but only just - outside the period of interest, but her short survey on the main chroniclers of the period (Khwandamir, Vasifi et al) is invaluable.

Soviet and Uzbek scholarship on Nawa'i is voluminous, but for starters A. K. Borovkov's edited volume from 1946 - originally timed to coincide with the 500th anniversary of Mir 'Ali Shir's birth, but postponed due to a little unpleasantness involving Hitler on the USSR's western borders - contains several valuable articles, not least A. K. Yakubovsky's essay on the political, cultural and social milieu of 15th century Khurasan.

References

A. Yu. Yakubovskiy, 'Cherti obshestvennoy i kulturnoy jizni epokhi Alishera Navoi [some lines on the cultural life of the age of Alisher Navoi]', in A. K. Borovkov, ed., Alisher Navoi, (Moscow/Leningrad: USSR Academy of Sciences, 1946), pp3-30.

Stephen F. Dale, The Garden of the Eight Paradises: Babur and the Culture of Empire in Central Asia, Afghanistan and India (1483-1530), (Leiden: Brill, 2004).

Maria Subtelny, Timurids in Transition: Turko-Persian Politics and Acculturation in Medieval Iran, (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

Maria Szuppe, Entre Timourides, Uzbeks et Safavides: questions d'histoire politique et sociale de Hérat dans la première moitié du XVIe siècle, (Paris: Association pour l'avancement des études iraniennes, 1992).