The “Maritime Silk Road” — Redux
There was some discussion on Facebook about my post on the phrase ‘Maritime Silk Road’ and why I don’t think it should be used. It wasn’t a particularly productive conversation, in large part because very few actual counter-arguments emerged, but there is one thing I do want to touch on here.
In my first point against the ‘Maritime Silk Road’ I said that it is a marked term in contrast to the unmarked ‘Silk Road’. It has an additional adjective that makes it more specific and less encompassing than ‘Silk Road’, which suggests that it is a lesser version of the real, normal, overland Silk Road. This seems rather common sense to me, but one scholar, apparently reluctant to give up the term, criticised the argument as ‘sophistic’. I will spend most of this post explaining why that isn’t so. Unfortunately this requires some discussion of the rather arcane subject of binary opposition — and more specifically of hierarchical opposition — but this happens to be a topic I rather like, and I really do think terminology is just that important. So here you are: more much-ado-about-nothinging.
Binary Opposition
Anthropologists (1) have long noted that, cross-culturally, people often oppose ideas to one another in binaries — light and dark, good and evil, etc. The history of anthropology is full of theories as to why this is so and, more importantly, how it works — and, indeed, the idea of binary oppositions forms the entire basis of what is often called ‘structural anthropology’. It turns out that these oppositions often reflect the values of the societies that produce them, and that there are several different possible kinds, including symmetrical oppositions (Figure 1), and asymmetrical (or hierarchical) ones (Figure 2 below).

A symmetrical opposition is one in which neither term is more encompassing or important than the other. It’s hard to come up with a real example of this because humans always seem to value one option over another no matter the situation, but one could think of Augustine’s rather false image of Manichaeism, in which god and the devil are merely two entities opposed to one another but with more or less equal power. One can oppose any two things this way at a certain level, I suppose.
However, such oppositions often encode hierarchies of values and normalcy. This has been the subject of some controversy — see Robert Parkin’s book (2009 [2002]) on Dumontian hierarchical opposition for an excellent summary (2) — and there are different approaches to it, but it is generally agreed that one term in most pairs of binary oppositions will be favoured in some way. One term may be more general than the other and may even encompass it. A term is less marked than the term(s) it encompasses and can stand in for, and is usually considered more common or normal.
Figure 2 shows one way of diagramming this kind of encompassment (cf. Parkin 2009:63–66). Here, x is a more general term than y and can stand in for y in most circumstances. y is more specific, and it would be unusual and noticeable if y were used where x would normally be seen. As the French anthropologist Louis Dumont (1911–1998) put it (1979:811, cited in Parkin [2009:530]):
By definition, a symmetrical opposition may be reversed at will: its reversal produces nothing. [On the other hand], the reversal of an asymmetrical [sc. hierarchical] opposition is significant, for the reversed opposition is not the same as the initial opposition.

‘Mankind’
This is some rather arcane and potentially rather dull stuff, but let’s apply it to some words and see what happens (Figure 3):

The example here is a bit more charged than ‘fries’ vs ‘sweet potato fries’. It seems reasonably clear that a simple symmetrical opposition between ‘mankind’ and ‘womankind’ isn’t accurate. ‘Man(kind)’ has often been used as an all-encompassing term for Homo sapiens; this has never been the case with ‘woman(kind)’ (Figure 4). One can oppose them directly — as Laura Dern does in Jurassic Park — but ‘woman’ never seems to have the same all-encompassing sense that ‘man’ has (or had). ‘Woman’ is more marked than ‘man’ and has/had a more restricted sense, and this is because of fundamentally sexist values encoded in this outmoded language.

You can use ‘man’ to stand in for [men + women] and ‘fries’ to stand in for [[potato + sweet potato + yam + manioc] fries], but you cannot use ‘woman’ and ‘sweet potato fries’ this way. Reversing this is significant; people will notice, and they may not like it.
The ‘Maritime Silk Road’
Let us now apply this to the problem at hand.
If you work on this stuff a lot you start to believe that these are two terms, ‘Silk Road’ and ‘Maritime Silk Road’, are simple alternatives, neither one more important than the other. There is the Silk Road, and that’s mostly about stuff happening on the Eurasian mainland, and then there’s the Maritime Silk Road, which is all about ships and ports (Figure 5). Both are fine.

But that’s not really the truth of it. The relationship between the two terms is one of hierarchical opposition, in which ‘Silk Road’ can encompass ‘Maritime Silk Road’ but never vice versa (Figure 6). ‘Maritime Silk Road’ is more marked — it has an extra adjective making it more specific and less usual than ‘Silk Road’ — and it cannot on its own refer to the totality of overland and maritime exchanges in the way that ‘Silk Road’ can.

If you wrote a book with ‘Silk Road’ in the title, the subject would probably be overland trade and cultural exchange in the ancient world and early Middle Ages. Something like that, anyway. You could include a chapter on trading ships and the Indian Ocean, and perhaps you would be praised for broadening the scope of Silk Road studies. But if you wrote a book called The Silk Road and it was mostly about Indian Ocean trade, and then you tacked on something about caravanserai and Sogdians — well, I expect you’d see some angry reviews on Amazon.
The term ‘Maritime Silk Road’ inherently implies a lesser and more specific version of the ‘Silk Road’. That’s not good at all: It isn’t true, for a start, because maritime exchanges and contacts were at least as important as those happening across Central Asia, but it also implies that the lives of people on the temperate parts of the Eurasian mainland are/were more important than those of islanders and mariners in the tropics. ‘Silk Road’ is itself problematic — as generations of scholars have acknowledged — but it seems like a good idea to simply let ‘Maritime Silk Road’ go and deal with other terms later on.
Congratulations on making it this far through this monumentally boring post. I’m going to tell you now why it is that I really oppose the ‘Maritime Silk Road’. It’s a misleading, inaccurate term that falsely implies that overland exchanges were more common and consequential than those on the Indian Ocean, but it is also, more importantly, a term endorsed and promoted by an authoritarian dictatorship in an attempt to justify expansionist policies overseas. The People’s Republic of China has created a system of concentration camps in Xinjiang in which upward of a million people have been imprisoned for the ‘crime’ of being Uyghur Muslims, and it is as I write attempting to destroy democracy and the rule of law in Hong Kong. We should be looking for reasons not to use terms the PRC likes, and ‘Maritime Silk Road’ is a term new enough and wonky enough that we can just get rid of it and move on.
NOTES
(1) And, you know, Aristotle. But most of the theorising here went on in the twentieth century.
(2) I’m a little biased here: Parkin was one of the lecturers during my anthropology MSc about a decade ago. But it is a good book and goes over all the history of and problems with studies on hierarchical (and other kinds of) opposition.
REFERENCES
Dumont, Louis. 1979. The anthropological community and ideology. Social science information. 18:785–817.
Parkin, Robert. 2009 [2002]. Louis Dumont and hierarchical opposition. Oxford: Berghahn.
