Bhavani Raman
THIS VOLUME OF ESSAYS is a collective effort to write peripatetic histories. Its contributors attend to itinerancy rather than place, and journeys rather than destinations. The journey is the story and the trajectory of things, practices, and concepts; it is the very object of scholarly attention. The idea of motion in these essays is not dissimilar to Aristotle’s notion of kinêsis. To Aristotle kinêsis was potentiality actualized. In his conception, potentiality was distinct from outcomes, something that he explained in the Metaphysics as the difference between house building and the result, the house. Both house building and the finished object are different actualizations of the same potentiality of a set of materials—bricks and mortar—that is buildable into a house.1
The essays of this volume attend to motion in this sense of house building, and in that spirit, they take the conceptual vocabulary that is often associated with intercultural encounter and fashion from it analytical frames that emphasize the contingent quality and multiple trajectories of exchange. The agility of concepts revealed in motion helps our contributors break from imprisoning dualisms of local and universal. Rather than look for resolution or synthesis in a point of convergence or in radical incommensurability, these essays retain the spaces in between, the moment of transit or suspension, as the spaces where things happen and meanings matter.
Centering itinerancy as concept and method enables a reconsideration of scale in the historian’s craft. The essays all follow itinerant matter and practices (music and musicians, body movements, pidgin, gifting, aluminum), and in their own narrative journeys scale up and scale out, traversing vast spaces—oceans, regions—or centuries, or both at the same time. The volume does not seek to redefine or demarcate region or space; it does not echo the longue durée temporality of Fernand Braudel’s celebrated study of the Mediterranean. Attending to motion, instead, opens up a field of perspectives that reveals how inconsequential quotidian acts like taking the pulse bear the imprint of past collisions, a deep history. Very little of this traffic has left a material trace in writing, anecdote, or memory. However, when carefully recuperated through the lens of itinerancy, this traffic is reconstituted in the historian’s eye and promises to reconceive afresh the fractured pasts of our globalized present. Itinerancy thus opens up other paths, other histories of possibility. As many of the essays demonstrate, it allows the historian to recuperate ways of life and transactions occluded by contemporary discourses of self, racial, and national ascription.
These gains of contingency and scale notwithstanding, itinerant histories produce their own hazards. Attending to cultures in motion always runs the risk of treating cultures as “things” that travel, as opposed to a set of claims about collective or shared sensibility. Furthermore, peripatetic history can be haunted by the exercise of power that its own lens finds difficult to address.2 In emphasizing the importance of reciprocal exchange in the production of new forms and practices, peripatetic history runs the risk of underplaying the starker and more violent conditions that underwrote those transactions. Histories of early modern science that stress the anonymous, reciprocal processes of blending by which knowledge, meaning, and practice grow have not always taken adequate account of less benign themes: the inextricable linkages between European interest in New World nature and its commercial exploitation. European observation took the form of “asset stripping,” disembedding natural objects from their contexts and histories, and incorporating them into European natural history and commerce. In a similar vein, the element of reciprocal exchange between historical actors as radically different in power as Black and Irish challenge dancers in early-nineteenth-century New York should not mask the role of racial subordination and political conquest in creating the conditions that made those processes possible.
The point at issue is not the intentions of the agents. The issue is that such transfers rendered matter, techniques, and objects into a commodity, a substance of exchange value, and thereby, a different entity. Flows and exchange are freighted acts; they are not naturally or essentially cosmopolitan. Itinerant histories, in other words, are burdened by the contradiction between the ecumenical and transcendental hope held out by the making of new entities and the violence of displacement that inevitably underwrote it. So it is that these histories allow us to appreciate contingency. But they also force a careful consideration of the limits of a reciprocity-dominated approach to knowledge and practice.
A critical eye to itinerancy can lead to new ways of understanding the constitution of practices and ideas. Nira Wickramasinghe’s essay on the sewing machine, for example, narrates Sri Lankan modernity through the rise of consumers and consumption. As she demonstrates, the mere act of consumption under the weight of colonial rule required a great amount of discursive labor to produce the modernity that was also decidedly Lankan. Wickramasinghe’s essay is thus not a syncretic account of the sewing machine where the consumption of goods represents the triumphant participation of the colonial consumer in some happy equalizing global market society. Market modernity in Lanka was simultaneously a project of entering a global or universal time and a project burdened with producing Lankan, culturally marked, consumers who were further differentiated by class and gender. In a similar way, Peter Brown, in his essay on the gift in late antiquity, identifies the history of gifting not as a journey from the world of civic reciprocity to Christian philanthropy, but as the emergence of a new set of dispositions to wealth that owe a simultaneous debt to both sets of norms. The practice of gifting is not a stable concept moving through historical periods. Rather the changing notion of gifting allows the historian to reflect on the nature of historical transition in new ways.
If the older vocabulary of contact zones and hybridity took as its foundation the problem of describing intercultural encounters, then itinerant history holds out the possibility of taking potentiality seriously. Rather than use the market, a silent analogy to rework the colonial genealogies of certain concepts, attending to kinêsis, can allow us to think more critically about how the protocols of market exchange have shaped scholarly perspectives on knowledge and power. The stakes are serious. For as these essays, in their limitations and in their possibilities, suggest, an exchange-driven orientation to historical narrative does not dissolve the violence of displacement. We need critical approaches to the ready cosmopolitanism underlying the aspirations of new global histories. The itinerant histories in this volume offer a beginning.