The Materialities of Religious Circulations in Asia, from the Silk Road to the Belt and Road

Abstract

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) draws on the history of the Silk Road to imagine and reinvent an interconnected Asia, even as it ignores the religious circulations that inevitably accompany the development of infrastructures that facilitate mobility. This roundtable will consider how Asian Studies scholarship on material religion and on the history of inter-Asian religious circulations, can point to the entanglements of religion, material circulations and inter-Asian trade routes, opening new questions about the religious implications of intensifying inter-Asian connections in the present and future. The roundtable includes specialists in archaeology, anthropology, art history, Buddhist studies and Islamic studies, who will each briefly present a specific case, and then engage in a discussion on what these cases can tell us about envisioning the past, present and future of trans-Asian religious connections under the BRI and other contemporary geopolitical and economic configurations. Michael Feener will examine pepper as a high-profile commodity in circulation along pathways reflecting religious, as well as commercial networks facilitating the expansion of Islam in the Indian Ocean. Mimi Yiengpruskawan will consider deer motifs on silver platters manufactured for Sasanian, Sogdian, Chinese, Mongolian and Japanese Buddhist patrons from the 5th through 8th centuries, and in the modern vocabulary of earthenware ceramics produced in Greece and Iran. Dorothy Wong will discuss the making of colossal Buddha statues as a major theme in Buddhist art during the first millennium CE, spreading along the Silk Road from northwestern India through Central Asia to other parts of Asia; and again since the 1990s, across China and beyond. Georgios Halkias will discuss the intersection between trade networks and physical and imagined borders in the Himalayas between ethnic groups, Buddhist sects and political states. Finally, David Palmer will consider the circulation of documents between the headquarters of the Theosophical Society in Madras and its Hong Kong and Shanghai branches in the early 20th century, to discuss the transnational administrative infrastructures of religious circulation in colonial modernity. Juxtaposing these cases of circulatory entanglements of religion and material culture will open new insights and questions on the role of religion in Asian inter-connections. This roundtable is sponsored by the Hong Kong RGC Collaborative Research Find project “Infrastructures of Faith: Religious Mobilities on the Belt and Road”.