I forward the following because it will interest, for different
reasons, several WSN members. Jack Owens
------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
Date: Mon, 10 Nov 1997 07:11:13 -0500
From: "Lawrence E. Marceau" <lmarceau@UDel.Edu>
To: emjnet@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
(Early Modern Japan Network)
Subject: Wigen/Lewis book featured in NY Times Book Review
To EMJNetters:
This is the first book I am aware of by a member of the Early Modern
Japan Network to be reviewed in the NYTBR. Also, make note of the
various Edo/Tokugawa-related panels and papers to be presented at AAS
next March in Washington, DC.
Lawrence Marceau
Ever Since Gondwanaland
Date: November 2, 1997, Late Edition - Final
Byline: By Michael Lind
Lead:
THE MYTH OF CONTINENTS
A Critique of Metageography.
By Martin W. Lewis
and Karen E. Wigen.
Illustrated. 344 pp. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Cloth, $55. Paper, $19.95.
Text:
The most famous American map of the 20th century may be Saul
Steinberg's drawing of the world as seen from Manhattan. New Jersey
looms large; beyond is the rest of the continental United States,
foreshortened, with Asia peeping over California. According to Martin
W. Lewis and Karen E. Wigen, professors of geography and history,
respectively, at Duke University, almost all conceptual maps of world
geography are distorted by the kind of parochialism that Steinberg
satirized. The title of their book, *The Myth of Continents: A
Critique of Metageography*, is somewhat misleading. In a survey of
the geographer's art from the days of Aristotle to the present, the
authors use the conventional definition of ''continent'' as only one
of many examples of how our maps of the world map our own biases.
Lewis and Wigen argue that Europeans have inflated their own
importance by making their peninsula an independent continent while
downgrading China and India to mere subcontinents. ''In physical,
cultural and historical diversity, China and India are comparable to
the entire European landmass, not to a single European country,''
they write. ''A better (if still imperfect) analogy would compare
France, not to India as a whole, but to a single Indian state, such
as Uttar Pradesh.''
Europeans and Americans have also often divided the world into
West and East. Not only definitions but the characteristics assigned
to the East or the Orient have changed drastically over time (in the
maps the authors helpfully provide, the reader can watch these
elastic zones wobble like blobs of mercury across Eurasia). Lewis and
Wigen observe that ''what Voltaire and his cohorts found in East Asia
were precisely the values that we now habitually associate with the
West: rationality, moderation, and 'mystical, undogmatic rule.' In
our own day, by contrast, those who find Western civilization wanting
have usually combined the philosophes' contempt for Western violence
and greed with a denigration of precisely these values, so that
rationality becomes not an Eastern virtue but a Western vice.'' Now
that Singapore symbolizes technocratic rationality and Islam is
identified with puritanical ethics while America (the westernmost
West) is viewed by much of mankind as the home of Christian
fundamentalism, New Age cults, rock music, drugs and sexual
libertinism, the Enlightenment attitude may have a new currency.
Although they are relentless in exposing Euro-American
prejudices, the authors make it clear that ethnocentrism is not a
Euro-American monopoly. Everyone knows that China always considered
itself the Middle Kingdom, but how many know that one Korean
nationalist viewed the Korean peninsula ''as the core of one of the
world's three great culture regions (the other two being China and
the 'Indo-European realm')''? According to Lewis and Wigen, ''as late
as the early modern period, Indian world maps typically showed South
Asia as forming the great bulk of the planet's landmass, with one
Indian cartographer depicting Europe in a few marginal circles
labeled 'England, France . . . other hat-wearing islands.'"
During the cold war, two conceptual maps of the world became
familiar. One, based on geopolitical alignments, divided the earth,
like Caesar's Gaul, among the first, second and third worlds. An
alternate map, favored by the left, drew a border between North and
South, requiring, Lewis and Wigen note, ''some stretch of the
imagination.'' They consider but reject the fashionable post-
modernist idea that all attempts at mapping and labeling are
worthless. Recognizing that humanity has usually been divided into
regional civilizations is indispensable, they say. This conviction
leads them to view the efforts of Arnold Toynbee and Samuel
Huntington to map the borders of world civilizations with respect,
though they disagree with the results.
In their own attempt to diagram discrete cultures, Lewis and
Wigen prefer the idea of ''world regions'' to that of continents.
Their application of this approach to global history is generally
convincing. In their view, ''Europe'' is best understood as ''western
Eurasia,'' which in turn is simply a component of ''the
supercontinent of Afro-Eurasia.'' For much of the past millennium and
a half a citied swath, the ''Afro-Asian ecumene'' -- the temperate
band between the Sahara and the steppes -- was divided among three
broadly defined civilizations: East Asian, Indic (Hindu) and
''the lands of the Abrahamic tradition'' (that is, Judaism,
Christianity and Islam). Americans, accustomed to the idea of the
Judeo-Christian tradition (an artifact of ecumenical politics), may
find it mind-bending to think of the three Peoples of the Book as
belonging to a single ''rigidly monotheistic Judeo-Christian-Islamic
Megareligion'' (to use a phrase from Jim Mason, an environmental
theorist cited by Lewis and Wigen). The notion may seem common-
sensical to Hindus and Confucians.
Having criticized many others for their conceptual maps of the
contemporary world, the authors are to be commended for their courage
in setting forth their own ''refined world regional scheme.'' Their
treatment of region as a surrogate for religion and culture works
pretty well in Old World -- oops, I mean Afro-Eurasian regions like
South Asia and East Asia. They are less convincing when they divide
the Western Hemisphere into three regions, according to different and
incompatible principles. North America and Ibero-America are defined
by language and European colonial heritage, whereas ''African
America,'' including the Caribbean islands and coastal Brazil (but
not the American South) is defined by race. If language and culture
are the criteria, shouldn't Britain be united with North America,
Australia and New Zealand -- and Spain and Portugal with Ibero-
America? In the map that Lewis and Wigen offer, Britain and Spain are
assumed to have more in common with each other -- and with
Scandinavia and Italy -- than either has with its former colonies.
But these are quibbles. Debating these matters is not just
important; it is fun. The very fact that their work stimulates such
questions is a tribute to the authors. In *The Myth of Continents*,
Lewis and Wigen have written an entertaining and informative account
of the way our maps show us the world that we want to see.
********************************************************
J. B. "Jack" Owens, Professor of History
Project Coordinator, Computer-Mediated Distance Learning
Idaho State University, Pocatello, ID 83209 USA
e-mail: owenjack@isu.edu
www: http://www.isu.edu/~owenjack
********************************************************