Abraham's Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World (Asian Connections)
Cambridge University Press, 10/18/2018
EAN 9781107173880, ISBN10: 1107173884
Hardcover, 316 pages, 23.5 x 15.8 x 1.9 cm
Language: English
From a single merchant's list of baggage begins a history that explores the dynamic world of medieval Indian Ocean exchanges. This fresh and innovative perspective on Jewish merchant activity shows how this list was a component of broader trade connections that developed between the Islamic Mediterranean and South Asia in the Middle Ages. Drawing on a close reading of this unique twelfth-century document, found in the Cairo Genizah and written in India by North African merchant Abraham Ben Yiju, Lambourn focuses on the domestic material culture and foods that structured the daily life of such India traders, on land and at sea. This is an exploration of the motivations and difficulties of maintaining homes away from home, and the compromises that inevitably ensued. Abraham's Luggage demonstrates the potential for writing challenging new histories in the accidental survival of apparently ordinary ephemera.
1. Introduction. A list of luggage from the Indian Ocean world
2. From Ifriqiya to Malibarat – introducing Abraham Ben Yiju
Part I. A Mediterranean Society in Malibarat
3. Making homes and friends
on shopping and Ṣuḥba
4. Making a meal of it
on food cultures
5. A Jewish home
on ritual foods
Part II. A Mediterranean Society at Sea
6. The 'simple' bare necessities
on water and rice
7. 'Things for the cabin'
inhabiting the Ocean
8. The balanced body
on vinegar and other sour foods
9. From Malibarat to Misr and beyond – afterlives
Appendix
Abraham's list of luggage.