Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval 'Hindu-Muslim' Encounter.

• Author: Losensky, Paul
• Position: Book review

Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval "Hindu-Muslim" Encounter. By FINBARR B. FLOOD. Princeton: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2009. Pp. xv + 366. $45.

The title of this book is vague about its subject matter. "Material culture" may be the only term to encompass the range of evidence the book examines--coins, textiles, painting, and, most prominently, architecture. But "medieval" is too broad to delimit the precise historical scope of the book, from the ninth to the mid-thirteenth centuries C.E. "Hindu-Muslim" only hints at the geographical range covered--the eastern Iranian world, Sind, and northern India. The title does, however, reveal much about how this subject matter is presented and interpreted. The hesitation quotes around "Hindu-Muslim" point strategically to one of the principal themes of the author's analysis: terms like these, Flood argues, are anachronistic and set up essentialist categories of identity. impeding our understanding the cultural interchange and permeable boundaries that characterize the world under study. "Objects" is invested with a post-modern double entendre; it refers both to the material artifacts and to the purposes and goals of their forms and movements. But the key to the interpretative argument of the book lies in the word "translation." The author draws on a wide array of contemporary critical theory, from anthropology to post-colonial studies, but translation is the master metaphor for the processes of intercultural exchange that are the real focus of his analysis.

The complexity of the title and its demands on the reader are indicative of the book as a whole. Besides setting out the subject matter more precisely, the introduction (pp. 1-14) lays out many of the terms and themes that will be developed throughout the book. These are perhaps expressed most clearly as a series of dialectical relationships between "alterity and identity, continuity and change, confrontation and co-option" (p. 4), and the local and the cosmopolitan. To analyze the ways in which these conflicting forces are negotiated, Flood turns to translation theory. Since the introduction of polysystems theory in the 1970s and the "cultural turn" of the 1980s, translation studies have emerged as one of the most dynamic and fruitful fields of humanistic inquiry. The author situates his work as part of a complementary "translation turn" in the social sciences in which translation serves as "both an explanatory metaphor and a dynamic practice through which the circulation, mediation, reception, and transformation of distinct cultural forms is effected" (p. 8). Although the author emphasizes that he is dealing with "things not texts" (p. 9), material objects are here treated very much as texts in the sense that they are elements in complex systems of signification. Translation serves as a metaphor even for the method of the book itself, which appropriates concepts from many fields and deploys them in new contexts, enacting in this way the very processes of co-option, active reception, and transformation exhibited by the objects themselves.

Chapter one, "The Mercantile Cosmopolis" (pp. 15-59), focuses on the Saffarids of Sistan and the Arab amirs of Sind, who ruled over the polyglot emporiums of the eastern Islamic world. During this period, at the height of the 'Abbasid empire in the ninth...