Indian Ocean: A Unified Cultural Region? Scholarly Debate

We now return to the key question of this essay: To what extent can we regard the Indian Ocean as a unitary region, especially at a time when—as people have put it rather ominously—distance has died and geography has ended? What cultural characteristics are universally shared throughout the Indian Ocean World, but not beyond? Why, to put it more bluntly, should the Indian Ocean be studied as a whole?

There is a certain homogeneity in terms of products, markets, and modes of transportation—as is the case along the Silk Roads, the Indian Ocean’s terrestrial counterpart—but these commonalities are easily explained as the result of environmental and economic factors. That being said, we do observe cross-fertilization in the domains of language, literature, and material culture that go beyond pure pragmatism. For a much-needed long durde perspective on these processes, we must continue to rely on “wild interdisciplinarity” between the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences.

Indian Ocean Studies is occasionally presented as a move away from conventional area studies, even though both rely on artificial geographic constructs. The “Middle East,” “Southeast Asia,” and the “Indian Ocean World” alike reflect mental mapping by scholars rather than self-designation by their actual inhabitants. In that regard, the “Myth of Oceans” is no less perilous than the better-known “Myth of Continents.” Nevertheless, the Indian Ocean World as an episteme provides some analytical benefits. For one, it acknowledges the role of Africa in the development of Asian societies. It also comes with the inherent advantage of favoring translocality, mobility, and what has been termed “process geographies,” while still being sufficiently localized to avoid incorporation into the fold of world history. After all, there is an inverted relationship between making history “bigger” and understanding primary sources and individual agency. Aside from scale, it should also be kept in mind that the degree of organizational skills, support, funding, and publications— typically in that order—often proves more decisive to the institutional viability of a region, program, consortium, or subdiscipline than methodological deliberations such as those considered here.

The future of Indian Ocean Studies nevertheless looks bright, despite several genuine challenges. Political instability in some of the nation-states surrounding the Indian Ocean, for example, is an obvious impediment for durable research collaborations. In addition, Barendse states that “there are hundreds of historians of the Mediterranean to any historian of the Indian Ocean.” Nevertheless, it is possible and necessary to study the ocean on its own terms, without overreliance on methodologies developed in the context of other parts of the world.

This essay has highlighted the potential of interdisciplinarity and “traveling commodities” to enrich our perspectives on the Indian Ocean, its agents, its markets, and its cultures. In doing so, a comparison between East Africa and Southeast Asia is likely to reveal more hitherto unrecognized patterns of local-global relationships, (selective) cultural diffusion, genealogical traditions, north-south exchanges, fluctuating power structures, and ideologically motivated conflicts and problem-solving strategies. These processes manifest themselves in places that are, perhaps, not straightforward. One could look—on an ocean-wide scale—at the ways different communities express their sense of belonging through architecture, art, music, literature, kinship ties, foodways, objects, and other material practices.

These cultural connections have often been forgotten or erased from historiography, as they are counterproductive to the project of the nation-state. Investigating them brings us to the very core of identity formation and interethnic contact beyond economic necessity: the exchange of fashions, styles, and tastes. Such sensory “encounters” are not easy to get at, but they offer groundbreaking research avenues for which the Indian Ocean has proven a fruitful laboratory. Tom Hoogervorst.

FURTHER READING:
Acri, Andrea, ed. 2016. Esoteric Buddhism in Mediaeval Maritime Asia: Networks of Masters, Texts, Icons. Singapore: ISEAS.

Acri, Andrea, Roger Blench and Alexandra Landmann, eds. 2017. Spirits and Ships: Cultural Transfers in Early Monsoon Asia. Singapore: ISEAS / Yusof Ishak Institute.

Adelaar, K. Alexander. 2009. “Towards an Integrated Theory about the Indonesian Migrations to Madagascar.” In Ancient Human Migrations: An Interdisciplinary Approach, edited by Peter N. Peregrine, Ilya Peiros, and Mariam Feldman. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 49-72.

Allen, James de Vere. 1980. “A Proposal for Indian Ocean Studies.” In Historical Relations across the Indian Ocean: Report and Papers of the Meeting of Experts Organized by UNESCO at Port Louis, Mauritius, from 15 to 19 July 1974. Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 137-51.

Allibert, Claude. 1999. “The Archaeology of Knowledge: Austronesian Influences in the Western Indian Ocean.” In Archaeology and Language III: Artefacts, Languages, and Texts, edited by Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs. London and New York: Routledge, 268-76.

Alpers, Edward A. 2002. “Imagining the Indian Ocean World.” Opening Address to the International Conference on Cultural Exchange and Transformation in the Indian Ocean World, UCLA, April 5-6, 2002.

Alpers, Edward A. 2009. East Africa and the Indian Ocean. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener.

Alpers, Edward A. 2014. The Indian Ocean in World History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Andaya, Barbara Watson. 2006. “Oceans Unbounded: Transversing Asia across ‘Area Studies.’ ” The Journal of Asian Studies 65 (4): 669-90.