Matthew W. King, PhD

The rise of civil society and a rationalized public sphere in Asia is usually told in a diffusionist mode: as the unilineal effects of contact with Western power, arts, and sciences. The expectation is that modernization in Asia was provoked as a function of outside forces like colonial and imperial dominance, capitalist markets, military incursion, and technical mastery. As ‘impact’ or ‘cultural contact,’ the study of modernity’s arrival to Asia is recoverable using a rather flat methodology that, as Bernard Cohn once wryly put it, “seeks to sort what is introduced from what is indigenous.” In the binary discourses of colonial regimes and emergent nation states alike, the “modern”—progress, self-mastery, social emancipation, science, technology, capitalism/socialism, academic institutions, democracy, Europe—hastened the retreat of the “traditional”—stasis, superstition, other-mastery, suppression, folk tradition, religion, Asia. This movement of the modern and tradition is at the heart of the moral myths of modernity, yet what configuration of power does it authorize? What lays beyond this ideological-and desire-saturated representation? These are hardly new questions, but they are ones that have too rarely been asked in relation to the study of the late-and post-imperial history of Eurasia’s crossroads: the Mongolian, Siberian, and Tibetan societies of Inner Asia.

My current project adopts an Inter-Asian perspective on the long circulatory histories of naturalist representations of the world in a tenuous public culture (discourses shared between a community of scholar-strangers) that formed between the European academy and the late imperial Inner Asian Buddhist monastery. Adopting the gaze of polyglot Buddhist scholastics from the Inner Asian frontiers of the British Raj, the Qing Empire, and Tsarist Russia of the 18^th-early 20^th centuries, I explore ways that a variety of scientific and monastic technical knowledges and rationales about the natural world became legible to one another in a shared discursive space that had an open-ended public audience. Questioning why public culture is often assumed to reside exclusively in modern Western society when the staging of modernity happened so formatively upon the colonial and imperial stage, this project tries to highlight formative intellectual exchanges between Buddhist monks and a generalized “knowledgeable people” (Tib. mkhas pa) that gave birth simultaneously to notions of the modern and tradition, to science and religion, and to the professional scholar and erudite monk in the immediate background of the nationalist formation of Asia’s heartland.