Living in the Material World: Cosmopolitanism and trade in early twentieth century Ladakh

Abstract

The historical trading communities of early twentieth century Ladakh, in northern India, interacted with multiple cultures through both travel and the flow of trade goods. Using a neo-pragmatic philosophical framework, I will argue that this community-largely rural and commonly thought of as isolated-was, in fact, cosmopolitan. The traders' interactions with specific commodities prompted them to traverse cultural boundaries and engage with new ideas. This view of cosmopolitanism suggests that, while particular economic, political or social contexts may be part of the settings in which both individuals and communities are engaged in cosmopolitan processes, contexts do not define the cosmopolitan.

Rural cosmopolitanism at the frontier? Chinese farmers and community relations in northern Queensland,c.1890–1920

“…The emergent, partial and contested rural cosmopolitanism of late colonial Queensland was far from the ideal of cosmopolitan theory, but so is the 'actually-existing cosmopolitanism' of twenty-first-century rural and urban societies (Robbins 1998;Ley 2004;Woods 2017). In common with the proto-cosmopolitanism identified in eighteenth-century Jamaica by Robertson (2014) or in early twentieth-century Ladakh by Fewkes (2012), the cosmopolitanism of late colonial Cairns was a cosmopolitanism of its time: partial, imperfect, constrained by cultural norms, and precarious. Indeed, it is its partiality and precarity that makes the case especially pertinent to contemporary debates around immigration and rural communities.…”

“…Yet this assumption has been increasingly challenged both by research aimed at uncovering minority ethnic histories in rural societies (Bressey 2009) and by studies that have documented evidence of historical cosmopolitanism in essentially rural peripheral or borderland locations. Fewkes (2012), for instance, has argued that cosmopolitan communities existed in the rural Ladakh region in northern India in the early twentieth century, as involvement in the global trade of commodities such as cotton, synthetic dyes and opiates created cross-cultural interactions and required traders in the region to understand and negotiate global markets and cultural differences. Robertson (2014), meanwhile, describes the 'ambivalent cosmopolitanism' of eighteenthcentury Jamaica, as ideas and cultural fashions from Europe were circulated through the institutions and networks of colonial towns and to rural plantations.…”

State of groundwater resource: relationship between its depth and sewage contamination in Leh town of Union Territory of Ladakh

“…After closing off of the two borders with China and Pakistan, Leh town was transformed into a remote cut-off place in popular Indian psyche. With the closing of centuries' famous trade route known popularly as the Silk Route, Leh town took a U-turn from a cosmopolitan outlook towards one of the remotest places in India (Fewkes 2012).…”

Taiwan's Intersectional Cosmopolitanism: Local Women in Their Communities

“…Engagement requires treating others with civility and taking them seriously as social actors-what we might consider respect. Thus, communitarian approaches examine the networked quotidian social interactions of all the people who actually live in a place, and these approaches consider a place cosmopolitan because a significant proportion of people living there have regular social interactions that engage across differences (e.g., Lewis 2009;Fewkes 2014).…”