In this Book
- The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean
- Book
- 2006
- Published by: University of California Press
- Series: California World History Library
summary
The Graves of Tarim narrates the movement of an old diaspora across the Indian Ocean over the past five hundred years. Ranging from Arabia to India and Southeast Asia, Engseng Ho explores the transcultural exchanges—in kinship and writing—that enabled Hadrami Yemeni descendants of the Muslim prophet Muhammad to become locals in each of the three regions yet remain cosmopolitans with vital connections across the ocean. At home throughout the Indian Ocean, diasporic Hadramis engaged European empires in surprising ways across its breadth, beyond the usual territorial confines of colonizer and colonized. A work of both anthropology and history, this book brilliantly demonstrates how the emerging fields of world history and transcultural studies are coming together to provide groundbreaking ways of studying religion, diaspora, and empire.
Ho interprets biographies, family histories, chronicles, pilgrimage manuals and religious law as the unified literary output of a diaspora that hybridizes both texts and persons within a genealogy of Prophetic descent. By using anthropological concepts to read Islamic texts in Arabic and Malay, he demonstrates the existence of a hitherto unidentified canon of diasporic literature. His supple conceptual framework and innovative use of documentary and field evidence are elegantly combined to present a vision of this vital world region beyond the histories of trade and European empire.
Ho interprets biographies, family histories, chronicles, pilgrimage manuals and religious law as the unified literary output of a diaspora that hybridizes both texts and persons within a genealogy of Prophetic descent. By using anthropological concepts to read Islamic texts in Arabic and Malay, he demonstrates the existence of a hitherto unidentified canon of diasporic literature. His supple conceptual framework and innovative use of documentary and field evidence are elegantly combined to present a vision of this vital world region beyond the histories of trade and European empire.
Table of Contents
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- Title Page, Copyright, Dedication
- pp. iii-v
- Illustrations
- pp. ix-x
- Acknowledgments
- pp. xi-xiii
- Preface: Hadrami Society, an Old Diaspora
- pp. xix-xxvi
- Part I. Burial
- 1. The Society of the Absent
- pp. 3-26
- 3. A Resolute Localism
- pp. 63-91
- Part II. Genealogical Travel
- 4. Ecumenical Islam in an Oceanic World
- pp. 97-115
- 6. Creole Kinship: Genealogy as Gift
- pp. 152-187
- Conclusion to Part II: Local Cosmopolitans
- pp. 188-191
- Part III. Returns
- 7. Return as Pilgrimage
- pp. 195-222
- 8. Repatriation
- pp. 223-243
- 9. The View from the Verandah
- pp. 245-293
- 10. Evictions
- pp. 294-320
- Concluding Remarks: Names beyond Nations
- pp. 321-328
- Bibliography
- pp. 329-357
- Production Notes
- p. 380
Additional Information
ISBN
9780520938694
Related ISBN(s)
9780520244542
MARC Record
OCLC
123768411
Pages
406
Launched on MUSE
2014-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No