RECYCLING HISTORY

Abstract

We historians of China talk a lot about the importance of material culture. Bowls, shoes, objects made of iron or porcelain or cloisonné: these increasingly figure in the stories we tell ourselves, our readers, and our students. These objects, either in their own physical reality or in our historical reconstructions, are often whole: plates, bowls, robes, incense burners. As actors in many of our stories, they are (or are reconstructed to be) intact and functional tools. What we do not often narrativize in explicit terms is what makes up the bulk of the material historical record: broken things, fragments, dust. History is mostly made out of garbage. Of course we know this already, and it will not come as a surprise to any readers of this article. But how often do we celebrate it as a scatter of broken things, as garbage, rather than briefly holding it in place while we try to glue it back together and set it in narrative motion? In Silk Road studies, we have a model for charting a path into a new kind of material historiography. Not: Here is a book that sat on that shelf of this scholar’s library. Instead: Here is a rotting, ripped scrap of paper, let us engage with it as scrap, and in doing so embrace the garbage heap as writing surface and storybook, the scatter of broken bits as historical archive, without immediately narrating them back into pristine wholeness. The history of the Silk Road, as Valerie Hansen tells us in her recent The Silk Road: A New History, was ‘‘most commonly written on recycled paper.’’ It is richer and more self-reflexive than many other historical fields because of this, and is well worth a serious look by historians of other regions and periods for its thoughtful and innovative consideration of the historical craft of turning the raw materials of many media into a compelling historical account. There are some consistent approaches to writing histories built on archives of the discarded. A study of recycled objects is a study of objects in motion. It necessarily pays attention to the media through which this movement happens (time, space) and the sort of movement happening (circulation, translation, preservation) at any given point in the object’s life. The main themes and approaches in Silk Road studies tend to coalesce around points of concern with these media and forms of motion. They consequently function as useful landmarks when mapping any kind of a journey