The ordos bronze crosses as performative assemblages : understanding the materialization of silk road material cultures

Abstract

Thinking about things has shifted from an epistemological to an ontological stance, resulting from an updated understanding which now sees things as actants, rather than merely containers of meaning, and as both events and effects in the field of material culture studies. However, in Asian contexts, studies in the field, especially Silk Road material culture studies, have been less developed, if not under-developed, until very recently. Some signs of the discipline moving forward appeared in 2018 when Susan Whitfield published her pioneering and much appraised book that approaches Silk Road material cultures through narratives of objects. Nevertheless, the degree to which Whitfield can defend the alignment of her theoretical ground with material culture studies remains debatable. To fill this research lacuna, the present project provides an interdisciplinary Silk Road material culture study in a critically ontological approach that incorporates insights from art history, archaeology, anthropology, and broader theoretical frameworks. Through micro as well as macro examinations of the performative Ordos Bronze Crosses assemblages (known also as the Nestorian Crosses), this study focuses on various aspects of the processes of materialization (and also dematerialization) of them amidst the Silk Road networks. That is to say, processes during which artefacts constantly enter into new assemblages of the Ordos Bronze Crosses by stabilizing the networks. The study sets out to answer three major research questions: 1) Can an “incomplete” collection, such as the Ordos Bronze Crosses, advance understanding of the Silk Road material culture studies? 2) What are the updated understandings? 3) What is the significance of the present study to Silk Road material culture studies? Adopting synthetic and symmetrical approaches that break the material-immaterial dualism, the study applies critical ontological theories, such as assemblage theory, agential realism, Actor Network Theory, and the notion of propinquity, to the exploration of Silk Road material cultures with a focus on the Ordos Bronze Crosses assemblages. It does so by attending to three main aspects of the processes of (de)materialization of these assemblages: palimpsest nature of assemblages, the alterity and the practice of archaization revealed by the processes, and the residuality that they endured. The investigation and analysis are undertaken in the paradigm of a new historicity. By challenging, and suggesting alternative solutions to several underlying assumptions, namely the problematic interpretive structures and mind-material dualism embedded in previous studies, and by situating the objects back in their relational networks, this study reveals that Silk Road material cultures, enacted by the Ordos Bronze Crosses assemblages, are never passive, inert, static, unambiguous, or deterministic. On the contrary, they appear to be performative and hence unpredictable and contingent. Moreover, they are actively entangled in the intra-activity of the networks and in creating their own narratives, which not only makes sense of the past but also folds the past into the present.