Introduction 11
However, it is crucial to understand through a network approach that several
nodes within the given network may share a common material culture, a set of
ideas or ritual technologies, as is visible in Dunhuang, yet these cannot serve as
a direct indicator of foreign control or hegemony per se; individuals and groups
are rather selective in what they choose to borrow from other groups. For more
deeply understanding intercultural contacts it is not the mere fact of borrow-
ing in itself which is important, but the benefit it entails for the borrower’s own
cultural and religious system.18 How is the new (foreign) knowledge etc. used
and what is its symbolic importance in the new social, political and religious
context? How is it reformulated, acted upon or displaced? Local appropria-
tions thus occur as political circumstances change and material culture, ideas
or ritual systems become entangled with local polities. The present research
thus envisions, to quote Nicholas Thomas from his book Entangled Objects,
“a process of local appropriation for local ends.”19 Instead of interpreting this
process as a simple ‘diffusion’ of cultural traits, a term which has little explan-
atory power, the research programme sketched here favours an approach of
actually detecting patterns, processes and motivations.
Two further aspects shall be mentioned at least briefly in these introductory
remarks when addressing interregional Buddhist interactions of complex soci-
eties in premodern Eastern Central Asia, namely ethnicity and human agency.20
Ethnicity is a key dimension of variation in the multiethnic region of concern
here. It is to be understood as culturally constructed rather than primordially
innate and as an aspect of group identity, which is contextually dependent,
subject to change and, in fact, continuously renegotiated. One concrete exam-
ple also discussed in this volume is the development of Uyghur Buddhism.21
As the Uyghurs settled in the Turfan region and established the West Uyghur
Kingdom after the demise of the East Uyghur Empire a shift of royal patronage
form Manichaeism to Buddhism gradually takes place after 840. Progressively
a distinct Uyghur Buddhist identity is formed, yet once Tantric Buddhism is
18 Two case studies provided in this volume for visual transfer processes between Dunhuang
and Tabo in Western Tibet on the one hand side and Zanskar and Kashmir on the other
hand side are by Deborah Klimburg-Salter and her team and by Rob Linrothe respectively.
Both contributions discuss aspects of shared material cultures between regions and/or
nodes and the role of material culture in negotiating cultural identity.
19 Thomas, Nicholas, Entangled Objects (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 184.
For a systematic analysis of a new paradigm of interregional interaction see Stein, Gil J.,
“From Passive Periphery to Active Agents: Emerging Perspectives in the Archaeology of
Interregional Interaction,” American Anthropologist 104.3 (2002): 903–916, particularly
905f.
20 Ibid., 905.
21 See the chapter by Jens Wilkens on Uyghur Buddhism in this volume.