Di Cosmo Finds His Niche Delving Into Inner Asia

Studying nomads comes naturally to Nicola Di Cosmo, associate professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History, who has held bit parts in Chinese movies, carried oxygen tanks for the Venetian health department and rebuffed wrestling challenges by drunken Mongolians in the middle of Gobi desert.

"It's been a meandering path," Di Cosmo says, his words marked by a broad Italian accent, with a constant, slightly self-conscious smile hovering on his lips as he speaks. "Some people know what they're going to do from the onset. I've been the opposite."

On the walls of his office, pictures of plaster figures of dinosaurs found in Mongolia, a reproduction portrait of a Manchu by a Jesuit and a scroll written in Jurchen calligraphy, an extinct language from northern China. Then there are his bookshelves, where books about everything from Dharma art to Bronze Age transportation are written in languages including French, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic.

Clearly, this is the office of a man interested in many cultures--so how did he end up studying Inner Asia, the central Asian region once crossed by people as diverse as Alexander the Great, Buddhist monks and Marco Polo?

"I guess you can characterize my move towards China as a passion that started after I had already made the decision that I wanted to study a foreign culture and language, but had not made a decision until I really got into it," Di Cosmo says. "Same thing for Inner Asia, by the way; as I tasted it, I became hungry for more! Isn't it how it usually happens?"

Di Cosmo, a native of Italy, became fascinated by ancient cultures and texts in high school, where he studied ancient Greek and philosophy, among other subjects. At the University of Venice, he chose to major in Oriental Studies.

"I started studying Arabic, Russian and Chinese," recalls Di Cosmo, who now teaches Manchu, the language of the last imperial Chinese dynasty, along with his Inner Asian history classes. "But then I realized I couldn't study both Arabic and Chinese, so I dropped Arabic. I studied Chinese literature, language and history."

To do research for his final dissertation on the Qing dynasty, Di Cosmo spent one year at the University of Nanjing in China, where his interest in Inner Asia and the nomadic groups that inhabited it grew.

However, no one would accuse Di Cosmo of locking himself in the library.

"While I was writing my thesis, I also worked as a freelance journalist." Di Cosmo says. "One day, a Chinese director I interviewed drafted me to be in his film, Xi-An Incident, where Chiang Kaishek is kidnapped. I played an American military officer who was invited to a ball. I had to learn how to waltz for the scene, but then again, I got to dance with a very attractive actress."

After his brief foray in Chinese cinema, Di Cosmo came back to Venice in 1982 to finish his thesis.

"Then, I was unemployed," he says ruefully. "I did lots of jobs--part-time librarian, courier, translator..."

Di Cosmo's luck changed in 1984 when he won a scholarship from the Italian Ministry of Education to study abroad at a graduate program.

"I was just about to take a job interpreting at that year's Venice film festival," Di Cosmo recalls. "But two days after I was notified, I was on a plane to the U.S."

Di Cosmo's destination was a university in Bloomington, Indiana, where, ironically, he went through "incredible" culture shock--much more than when he was in China.

"On the plane a stewardess gave me a bottle of champagne, which on arrival I began drinking immediately," he says. "That made the change much easier."

In 1989, Di Cosmo left Bloomington to go to Cambridge University in the U.K. as a research fellow at Clare College, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the description of nomads written in the second century BC.

"The three years I was there were very productive, not just in terms of my dissertation, but with myself. I became very interested in archaeology, and the pre-imperial period of China [before 221 BC]," he says. "I also came across new trends such as social and cultural anthropology, which I now incorporate in my research."

After England, Di Cosmo came back to the U.S., and ended up at Harvard, where he feels at home.

"The other jobs I got were really China jobs. This one was perfect for me, China and Inner Asia, my field from my undergraduate days," he says.

Here, Di Cosmo is on a mission to increase interest in Inner Asia at a time when many universities have focused in other areas.

"We have archival sources open to us not available 15 years ago. But who is going to read, say, the new Manchu documents if no one can read them?" he asks. "We are falling behind the Japanese, the Germans...we are not giving American students full history."

Di Cosmo, who also runs the East Asian Studies sophomore tutorial, says he is trying to reach out to a broader population of undergraduates, perhaps with a Foreign Cultures Core course on the history of the "Silk Road."

Di Cosmo says his research into the Inner Asian nomadic tribes have given him glimpses of a past rare in this age of transatlantic supersonic travel. He recalls a trip he made two years ago to visit Kazakh nomads in Xinjiang, the northwestern province of China.

"I was accompanied by a local high official, a very well-respected Kazakh. Once late at night, we were squatting in a circle in a yurt with the rest of the men. It was a place where there were no roads, just people moving in their yearly cycle with their camels and horses. Then the official started reciting the oral history of the Kazakhs," he says.

"For the first time, I truly understood how history was transmitted before the written word. And for that moment, time seemed to stand still."