This book first analyses the material and cultural character of the production and marketing of commodities and payment forms across the Euro-Asian Continuum - the ’second’ or ’unbroken’ landscape - taking up these categories of objects as things communicated and transmitted by producers and merchants. In this the book complements and continues the work collected in the author’s earlier volume. Given received conceptions of culture and society in the social sciences contradicting such an empirical approach, the author then addresses several central methodological and epistemological issues, notably that of empirical complexity. His concern is to establish the existence of a knowledge-world and a world of identities that transcends current emphases upon nation, language and nationalism, and to consider the methodological principles necessary for reconstructing it.
