‘Unbiased Scholars’ and ‘Superficial Intellectuals’: Was there a Public Culture between Europe and Inner Asia in the Long 19th Century?

This working paper is derived from a larger research project exploring what I consider to be a tenuous but persistent form of “public culture” extending between Inner Asia and Europe over the course of the 18th and, especially, 19th centuries. This “stranger relationality,” as Michael Warner would have it, was mediated by new forms and routes of Eurasianist textual circulation. In this late imperial period, spread along the frontiers of the Qing, Tsarist, and British empires, Tibetan, Mongolian, and Buryat monks read works by European and East Asian intellectuals on all manner of technical knowledge, and began writing not to fellow scholastics or local readers, but to a global community of “the knowledgeable” (Tib. mkhas pa; Mon. baγsi, nomčin). The social site of what I am exploring as a new form of reading, interpreting, and writing in Asia’s heartland was the dispersed web of monastic colleges (Tib. grwa tshang; Mon. datsang) that connected generations of polyglot and cosmopolitan scholastics across the otherwise diverse and segregated socio-political blocs of late imperial Central and Eastern Tibet, north China, all Mongolian territories, and Siberia. My ongoing research is revealing how the practices of secularity (as defined by the Multiple Secularities framework) enacted by this commonwealth of frontier, synthetic scholastics was repurposed in the early 20th century, in the ruins of the Qing and Tsarist empires, to invent the social imaginaries, national subjects, civil societies, and other products of socialist secularism that produced modern Inner Asia (and continues to legitimize claims by Russia and the PRC on its Inner Asian frontiers). In this working paper, I will briefly introduce the social sites of my sources, the Buddhist monastic colleges that spanned the Sino-Russian frontiers, and provide a few examples of synthetic scholastic products that emerged in this previously unstudied form of Eurasianist public culture (c. 1750–1930s). I will also share some preliminary arguments I have drawn about the ways that practices of secularity amongst the actors my work considers led directly to the creation of the modern public sphere, civil society, and ironically, revolutionary institutional forms and models of history that had violently erased scholastic culture from public life