Asian Civilization Pdf

[Anais Wachowski]

Theprogram in Pune offers an introduction to Indian history, politics, and aesthetics from the precolonial to the postcolonial period. The program will be based in Pune for most of the quarter, with field trips to Mumbai and other parts of Maharashtra. Materials assigned for the class will range from texts of Indian political thought to graphic novels, from musical recordings to films. The course does not require any prior knowledge of India. It is aimed to provide an understanding of Indian society and culture in the context of the modern world. In addition to the civilization sequence, students take a fourth course in a South Asian language, such as Hindi or Marathi, with a local instructor. For students with no prior experience in South Asian languages, this language course is designed to facilitate their access to local culture and to provide a basis for further study. Advanced sections are held for those students with prior language coursework or experience.

The Pune program is operated in cooperation with the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), an academic organization with an office in Pune and American headquarters at the University of Chicago.

While in Pune, students will be housed in double rooms in a modest hotel. This accommodation includes breakfast and some dinners. During excursions outside of Pune, participants will stay in hotels and similar residences.

It is important to recognize the cultural context of student housing in India and understand that the amenities of the rooms may vary. Although some of these differences may take some getting used to, remember that cultural differences extend to all aspects of your experience abroad. Having realistic expectations for your term in Pune will help you approach the study abroad experience with a positive attitude.

Previous program participants report spending in the range of $50 to $100 per week on meals and incidentals while on the program, though frugal students may spend less, and others could spend much more. Bear in mind that while the cost of living in Pune is relatively low, it is also possible to run short of money if you are unwary. It is therefore essential that you budget your funds prudently, apportioning your resources so that they last for the duration of the program. If you are planning to travel before or after the program or on weekends, you should budget accordingly.

Rice is clearly central to wider East Asian, Southeast Asian and South Asian civilization areas in terms of economy and landscape (Gorou 1984; Bray 1994). Indeed some scholars have pointed to a great and fundamental contrast between the civilization(s) of rice and Mediterranean bread cultures (e.g. Watsuji 1961; Hardricourt 1962; Hosoya et al. 2010). Fuller and Rowlands (2009, 2011) highlight the linked tradition of cooking (boiling and steaming), food textural preference (sticky, as with glutinous rice), and feasting and ritual focused on keeping ancestors close. Whichever definition of civilization is preferred, it is clear that the history of Asian societies, their human populations and the evolutionary history of rice as a crop are inseparable. The importance of rice agriculture as a motor for demographic growth, population expansion and origins of sedentary village life has been stressed by many archaeologists and forms a key component in the farming/language dispersal hypothesis (e.g. Higham 2003; Bellwood 1996, 1997, 2011; Blust 1996; Sagart 2003) This paper assesses our current state of knowledge about the beginnings of rice cultivation and the spread of rice inferred from archaeobotanical evidence, its congruence with genetic inferences and how this might have been linked to major cultural traditions represented by language families.

Rice can be inferred to have entered cultivation on two pathways from wild ecology and human use. The wild progenitors of Asian rice are well-known to include Oryza rufipogon sensu stricto and Oryza nivara, which are native to South and Southeast Asia, extending northwards into Southern China. Modern distribution maps are potentially misleading for a couple of important reasons: first and foremost, there has been climatic change such that areas of suitable tropical and subtropical climate with suitable wetland areas will have shifted dramatically over the past 20,000 years. Such environments would have necessarily peaked in the earlier Holocene when summer insolation in the northern hemisphere was significantly higher (it fell gradually from about 7000 BP to present, Berger 1978) and during the first half of the Holocene (until about 5,000 or 6,000 years ago) monsoon rainfall was much higher (e.g. Burns 2011; see also, Fuller and Qin 2010). The post-Pleistocene expansion of wild rice, from southern tropical refugia of the glacial period northwards to eastern China and the Yangtze basin (Fig. 1), would have entailed at least one if not several population bottlenecks in O. rufipogon. Another reason modern maps are potentially misleading is that the potential habitats for wild rice have been removed through human action over the past few thousand years, especially through the reclamation of wetlands for agriculture. As a result many wild rice populations have presumably been extirpated. Evidence for this comes from Chinese texts from the Song dynasty (just over 1,000 years ago, under essentially modern climatic conditions) which indicate the former presence of wild rice populations in eastern China in the Lower Yangtze and northwards to Shandong (Ho 1977; You 1987).

There has long been a case to be made for the separate origins of domesticated indica and japonica rice subspecies, from various modern genetic markers, from old-fashioned crossing to re-sequenced genomes (e.g. Garris et al. 2005; Londo et al. 2006; Kawakami et al. 2007; He et al. 2011). Recent versions of this scenario highlight the necessity of hybridization between a fully domesticated japonica and semi-domesticated or wild proto-indica (Figs. 2 and 3), whereby japonica became the donor of many domestication syndrome genes in indica (Sang and Ge 2007; Sweeney and McCouch 2007; Fuller et al. 2010a). It is worth noting that there are still emerging complications in the story of early domestication genes, since experiments by Ishikawa et al. (2010) indicate that plants homozygous for the sh4 non-shattering mutation still show wild-type shattering in the context of mainly wild-type genetic background, i.e. there are other interacting alleles yet to be identified. Because of incomplete compatibility between japonica and indica rices, first-generation hybrids would have had low fertility requiring back-crossing to one or the other parent (Sato 1996); in the context of India, this is likely to have been the widespread, and climatically adapted, proto-indica. A model of this process is provided by the development of Oryza glaberimma Oryza sativa hybrids in West Africa, which has been well described ethnographically and genetically (Nuijten et al. 2009). There does persist some debate on this issue, but even those who favour a single origin (e.g. Vaughan et al. 2008; Molina et al. 2011a) allow for significant introgression with wild rices elsewhere (in India and perhaps Southeast Asia).

Maps of the proto-indica hybridization hypothesis in space and time. The base map shows a geographical interpolation of the spread of rice (from Fuller et al. 2011b). In green is the focus of an early selection regime of japonica domestication and its initial dispersal zone, including northwards into the temperate zone. Blue indicates the potential spread of proto-indica exploitation and non-intensive cultivation, without major selection for domestication traits. Most of the spread in South Asia took place after hybridization.

This represents the first northward dispersal of rice from the Yangtze (and/or Huai) region. This is an important expansion event in which rice reached north of the Qinling Mountains quite separated from the wild rices of the Yangtze watershed. This happened from about 6,000 years ago, and much more extensively by 5,000 years ago, and judging by grain size (Qin and Fuller 2009) is likely to have involved evolution of an early form of short-grained temperate japonica. This probably implies a genetic bottleneck in rice, secondary to a bottleneck of initial cultivation and any bottlenecks involved with post-Pleistocene expansion.

Some general hypotheses linking the distribution of subsistence cultures and language affiliation for ca. 4000 BC. The basemap is from Fuller et al. (2011b) and shows in grey a reconstruction of land area under wet rice cultivation as a percentage of modern wet rice land area (the percentage scale is indicated in the shaded bar at the right). It is presumed that wet rice supported denser and expanding human populations. Language family abbreviations: AN Austronesian, Hm-M Hmong-Mien, STAN Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian (of Sagart 2008).

Blench (2005) and Blench and Post (2010) suggested it is difficult to derive all of Sino-Tibetan from shared agricultural origins, and posit hunter-gatherer origins along the eastern Himalaya. However, ruling out that hunter-gatherers substrates were not later incorporated into Sino-Tibetan seems difficult. Therefore in Fig. 5, I have indicated some early foragers around the eastern front of the Himalayas, which might have been either pre-agricultural Sino-Tibetan relatives (as per Blench and Post 2010) or later absorbed by Sino-Tibetan farmers. Sagart reports shared vocabulary for rice between (some) Sino-Tibetan (focused on Sinitic) and Austronesian, but rather than seeing these as deriving from the domestication of rice by the same group who started millet cultivation, the archaeology is more in keeping with an introduction of rice into millet farming.

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