Navigating a Sea of Knowledge

This review article emphasizes the importance of using the idea of material culture as a tool for writing global histories of the maritime world. Taking the Indian Ocean as a case study, the article contends that the multiple, diverse avenues of communication reaching across its waters profoundly affected religions, cultures, and languages by way of texts and music, and through various types of imaginings like myths and invocations of sacred landscapes and seascapes. Investigations into these ideas and things not only direct our attention away from trade histories in the seas, they also counteract the maritime blindness that prevails in the academy, because the histories that result from these investigations are much more nuanced in their understanding of space/place. Material culture, through flows that are considered to be pluricultural in nature, can therefore provide a useful lens for studying the relationship between the local and the global.