Dunhuang and Historical Sense in “Modern” Eurasia
Dr. Lewis Mayo
This project examines forms of historical sense associated with Dunhuang, an oasis in the Chinese Central Asian borderlands, and one of the pre-eminent foci for history-related cultural products in modern China and Japan, as well as a key national symbol of historical culture and identity in contemporary China. My research examines how the writings and images associated with the Dunhuang site have been involved with the production of historical sense in Eurasia since the Qing dynasty. I examines how the fate of Dunhuang writings and images has been linked to the changing relations of spatial power that have affected the Dunhuang region, particularly in the transition from imperial to post-imperial political structures. I interperet the production of historical sense not simply within a conventional politics of culture, or solely through the examination of how Dunhuang-related cultural products may be situated in relations of social power. Rather I examine Dunhuang culture within a larger problematic of ceremonial systems and their historical transformation.
This approach might be termed a political anthropology of historical texts, and is meant to question the opposition between “traditional” and “modern” forms of power and knowledge which underpins so much scholarship on historiography and on the political and cultural histories of modern China and Japan, an opposition which is fundamental to much of the discourse on topics like “conservatism”.
