Welcome to the Sinor Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies (SRIFIAS)
The mission of the SRIFIAS is to encourage and support scholarly research in all aspects of Inner Asian Studies. One of the central tasks of the SRIFIAS is to maintain and develop scholarly and technical resources necessary for research in Inner Asian studies. To this end the SRIFIAS has built up an invaluable library collection of reference works, monographs, and microfilms of print and manuscript materials on Inner Asian subjects. The SRIFIAS also reaches the research and educational community through its extensive and growing list of publications.
Established in 1967 as the Asian Studies Research Institute (ASRI), and renamed the Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies (RIFIAS) in 1979, the Sinor Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies assumed its current name in 2007. It is an independent, non-profit institution accountable to the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences of the Bloomington campus of Indiana University. The RIFIAS has had five directors: Prof. Denis Sinor (1967-81), Dr. Stephen Halkovic (1982-85), Prof. Yuri Bregel (1986-97), Prof. Devin DeWeese (1997-2007), and Prof. Edward Lazzerini (2007-present).
What is Inner Asia?
Inner Asia, or the interior of the Eurasian landmass, comprises in historical terms the civilizations of Central Asia, Mongolia, and Tibet, together with neighboring areas and peoples that in certain periods formed cultural, political, or ethnolinguistic unities with these regions. In the past the Inner Asian world was dominated by pastoral nomadic communities of the great Eurasian steppe, and its history was shaped by the interaction of these societies with neighboring sedentary civilizations. In the 20th century, the Inner Asian peoples were located within the borders or sphere of influence of either the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China. The breakup of the USSR brought statehood and social transformation to much of the region. Today Inner Asia comprises the five independent Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan; the republic of Mongolia; the Xinjiang Uygur, Inner Mongolia, and Tibet Autonomous Regions of the People's Republic of China; and adjacent parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, China, and Siberia in the Russian Federation. Areas pertinent to the study of Inner Asia for ethnolinguistic and historical reasons include the Tatar, Bashkir, and Kalmyk Republics in Russia and the Manchu homeland in northeast China.
History of Inner Asian Studies
The history of the study of Inner Asia in the West begins in Central Europe. Starting in the early nineteenth century, Hungarian explorers and scholars ventured into Inner Asia in search of clues to their own national origins. The first, Alexander Csoma de Kőrös, began his travels in 1820 and eventually became the founder of Tibetology. The term "Inner Asian studies" (Hungarian belsőázsiai kutatások; German innerasiatische Studien) first appeared in the masthead of the journal Turán (Bulletin of the Hungarian Center for Oriental Culture, published 1913-1944), brainchild of the Hungarian Count Béla Széchenyi, who had led a scientific expedition to the region in 1877-80. In the first three decades of the 20th century, discoveries of Inner Asian antiquities by the Hungarian-born British explorer Marc Aurel Stein made signal contributions to knowledge of Inner Asian civilizations, culminating in Stein's multi-volume report on “Innermost Asia” (1928). In 1940, Louis Ligeti founded and became the first occupant of the Inner Asian Chair at the University of Budapest, the first chair of its kind.
Owen Lattimore, an American, began using “Inner Asian Frontiers of China” as his research rubric in the late 1930s. A decade later, one of Lattimore’s followers, George Taylor, built Asian studies at the University of Washington into a set of programs staffed in part by Orientalists who had recently fled the upheavals and war in Europe. In 1948, two of these scholars, the German Sinologists Hellmut Wilhelm and Franz Michael (a student of Lattimore’s from Johns Hopkins), founded the Inner Asia Project for research and teaching, the first of its kind in the United States. They were soon joined in Seattle by the Russian linguist Nicholas Poppe, who brought expertise in Altaic languages, particularly Mongolian.
Bringing Ligeti's teachings to Indiana in the 1960s, Denis Sinor made similar use of the surge of interest in area studies at American universities to promote awareness and appreciation of Inner Asia as a distinct world area defined by more than its location "beyond" well-known civilizations such as China and Russia. Sinor nurtured a number of lasting programs and institutions that helped to formalize Inner Asian studies in America, including three at Indiana University: the RIFIAS, the Department of Uralic and Altaic Studies (now the Department of Central Eurasian Studies), and the Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center.
Terminology
"Inner Asia" has a range of meanings among different researchers and in different countries. The definition the RIFIAS uses is a product of evolution. Denis Sinor defined Inner Asia broadly (synonymous with Central Eurasia) as the homelands of the Altaic peoples (Mongolian, Turkic, and Manchu-Tungus) and the Uralic peoples (Finno-Ugrian and Samoyed). (He also noted that the Indo-European peoples share the same region of origin and ought to be included as early Inner Asians, strictly speaking.) The RIFIAS, like other institutions, has traditionally held a less broad working definition of Inner Asia. The first paragraph on this page and the titles in the RIFIAS series Papers on Inner Asia give a general idea of our present range of inquiry in Inner Asian studies.
In Russian, "Sredniaia Aziia" (Central, literally "Middle," Asia) means the Central Asian republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kirghizia, and Tajikistan, sometimes including Eastern Turkistan (Xinjiang) as well; Kazakhstan is named separately because of geographical scruples (part of it lies in Europe). Russian "Sredniaia Aziia i Kazakhstan" corresponds to the region commonly called "Central Asia" in English. Russian "Tsentral'naia Aziia" (Inner, literally "Central," Asia) denotes Mongolia and Tibet. Thus, our term "Inner Asia" corresponds to Russian "Sredniaia i Tsentral'naia Aziia" (however, under the influence of Western languages since 1991, Russian "Tsentral'niaia Aziia" is now sometimes used to mean "Central Asia" or "Inner Asia" in general). German makes a distinction between "Zentralasien," meaning Mongolia, Tibet, Eastern Turkistan, and Manchu lands, and "Mittelasien," meaning the republics of Central Asia. The less common term "Innerasien" corresponds to our sense of "Inner Asia." In French, "Asie Centrale" can mean both "Central Asia" and "Inner Asia"; Mongolia and Tibet by themselves are termed "Haute Asie" (High Asia).
The terms meaning "Inner Asia" in the languages of Inner Asian peoples are all modern loan translations of European, mostly Russian, terms.
"Central Asia" normally denotes the western, Islamic part of Inner Asia, but it is sometimes used as a synonym for Inner Asia. The Library of Congress subject classification system is organized in this way, so that readers in academic libraries who are looking for materials on both Inner Asia and Central Asia should search under the subject heading "Asia, Central." One of the leading periodicals in Inner Asian studies is Central Asiatic Journal. Also, books on Inner Asia published in the series Handbook of Oriental Studies/Handbuch der Orientalistik (Leiden: Brill) appear in the section entitled "Uralic and Central Asian Studies."