Category Archives: scholarship

by | 12 June 2026 · 4:29 am

Herodotus on Ukraine

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 29-30:

THE FIRST HISTORIAN of Ukraine was Herodotus, the father of history himself. This honor is usually reserved for the histories of countries and peoples belonging to the Mediterranean world. Ukraine—a stretch of steppes, mountains, and forests north of the Black Sea, which was known to the Greeks as the Pontos euxeinos (Hospitable Sea, latinized by the Romans as Pontus euxinus)—was an important part of that world. Its importance was of a particular nature. The world of Herodotus was centered on the city-states of ancient Greece, extending to Egypt in the south and the Crimea and the Pontic steppes in the north. If Egypt was a land of ancient culture and philosophy to study and emulate, the territory of today’s Ukraine was a quintessential frontier where Greek civilization encountered its barbaric alter ego. It was the first frontier of a political and cultural sphere that would come to be known as the Western world. That is where the West began to define itself and its other.

Herodotus, known in Greek as Herodotos, came from Halicarnassus, a Greek city in what is now Turkey. In the fifth century BC, when he lived, wrote, and recited his Histories, his birthplace was part of the Persian Empire. Herodotus spent a good part of his life in Athens, lived in southern Italy, and crisscrossed the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds, traveling to Egypt and Babylon among other places. An admirer of Athenian democracy, he wrote in Ionic Greek, but his interests were as global as they could be at the time. His Histories, later divided into nine books, dealt with the origins of the Greco-Persian wars that began in 499 and continued until the mid-fifth century BC. Herodotus lived through a good part of that period and researched the subject for thirty years after the end of the wars in 449. He depicted the conflict as an epic struggle between freedom and slavery—the former represented by the Greeks, the latter by the Persians. Although his own political and ideological sympathies were engaged, he wanted to tell both sides of the story. In his own words, he set out “to preserve the memory of the past by putting on record the astonishing achievements of both the Greeks and the Barbarians.”

Herodotus’s interest in the “barbarian” part of the story turned his attention to the Pontic steppes. In 512 BC, thirteen years before the start of the wars, Darius the Great, by far the most powerful ruler of the Persian Empire, invaded the region to avenge himself on the Scythians, who had played a trick on him. The Scythian kings, nomadic rulers of a vast realm north of the Black Sea, had made Darius march all the way from the Danube to the Don in pursuit of their highly mobile army without giving him a chance to engage it in battle. This was a humiliating defeat for a ruler who would pose a major threat to the Greek world a decade and a half later. In his Histories, Herodotus spared no effort in relating whatever he knew or had ever heard about the mysterious Scythians and their land, customs, and society. It would appear that despite his extensive travels, he never visited the region himself and had to rely on stories told by others. But his detailed description of the Scythians and the lands and peoples they ruled made him not only the first historian but also the first geographer and ethnographer of Ukraine.

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Filed under Egypt, Greece, Iran, philosophy, scholarship, Ukraine

by | 11 June 2026 · 12:09 am

Defining Ukraine and Ukrainian

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 24-27:

Nation is an important—although not dominant—category of analysis and element of the story that, along with the ever changing idea of Europe, defines the nature of this narrative. This book tells the history of Ukraine within the borders defined by the ethnographers and mapmakers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which often (but not always) coincided with the borders of the present-day Ukrainian state. It follows the development of the ideas and identities linking those lands together from the times of the medieval Kyivan state, known in historiography as Kyivan Rus’, to the rise of modern nationalism and explains the origins of the modern Ukrainian state and political nation. In doing so, the book focuses on Ukrainians as the largest demographic group and, in time, the main force behind the creation of the modern nation and state. It pays attention to Ukraine’s minorities, especially Poles, Jews, and Russians, and treats the modern multiethnic and multicultural Ukrainian nation as a work in progress. Ukrainian culture always existed in a space shared with other cultures and early on involved navigating among the “others.” The ability of Ukrainian society to cross inner and outer frontiers and negotiate identities created by them constitutes the main characteristic of the history of Ukraine as presented in this book.

Politics, international and domestic, provide a convenient storyline, but in writing this book, I found geography, ecology, and culture most lasting and thus most influential in the long run. Contemporary Ukraine, as seen from the perspective of longue durée cultural trends, is a product of the interaction of two moving frontiers, one demarcated by the line between the Eurasian steppes and the eastern European parklands, the other defined by the border between Eastern and Western Christianity. The first frontier was also the one between sedentary and nomadic populations and, eventually, between Christianity and Islam. The second goes back to the division of the Roman Empire between Rome and Constantinople and marks differences in political culture between Europe’s east and west that still exist today. The movement of these frontiers over the centuries gave rise to a unique set of cultural features that formed the foundations of present-day Ukrainian identity.

One cannot tell the history of Ukraine without telling the story of its regions. The cultural and social space created by the movement of frontiers has not been homogenous. As state and imperial borders moved across the territory defined by Ukrainian ethnic boundaries, they created distinct cultural spaces that served as foundations of Ukraine’s regions—the former Hungarian-ruled Transcarpathia, historically Austrian Galicia, Polish-held Podolia and Volhynia, the Cossack Left Bank of the Dnieper with the lower reaches of that river, Sloboda Ukraine, and finally the Black Sea coast and the Donets basin, colonized in imperial Russian times. Unlike most of my predecessors, I try to avoid treating the history of various regions (such as the Russian- and Austrian-ruled parts of Ukraine) in separate sections of the book but rather look at them together, providing a comparative perspective on their development within a given period.

In conclusion, a few words about terminology. The ancestors of modern Ukrainians lived in dozens of premodern and modern principalities, kingdoms, and empires, and in the course of time they took on various names and identities. The two key terms that they used to define their land were “Rus’” and “Ukraine.” (In the Cyrillic alphabet, Rus’ is spelled Pycь: the last character is a soft sign indicating palatalized pronunciation of the preceding consonant.) The term “Rus’,” brought to the region by the Vikings in the ninth and tenth centuries, was adopted by the inhabitants of Kyivan Rus’, who took the Viking princes and warriors into their fold and Slavicized them. The ancestors of today’s Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusians adopted the name “Rus’” in forms that varied from the Scandinavian/Slavic “Rus’” to the Hellenized “Rossiia.” In the eighteenth century, Muscovy adopted the latter form as the official name of its state and empire.

The Ukrainians had different appellations depending on the period and region in which they lived: Rusyns in Poland, Ruthenians in the Habsburg Empire, and Little Russians in the Russian Empire. In the course of the nineteenth century, Ukrainian nation builders decided to end the confusion by renouncing the name “Rus’” and clearly distinguishing themselves from the rest of the East Slavic world, especially from the Russians, by adopting “Ukraine” and “Ukrainian” to define their land and ethnic group, both in the Russian Empire and in Austria-Hungary. The name “Ukraine” had medieval origins and in the early modern era denoted the Cossack state in Dnieper Ukraine. In the collective mind of the nineteenth-century activists, the Cossacks, most of whom were of local origin, were the quintessential Ukrainians. To link the Rus’ past and the Ukrainian future, Mykhailo Hrushevsky called his ten-volume magnum opus History of Ukraine-Rus’. Indeed, anyone writing about the Ukrainian past today must use two or even more terms to define the ancestors of modern Ukrainians.

In this book, I use “Rus’” predominantly but not exclusively with reference to the medieval period. “Ruthenians” to denote Ukrainians of the early modern era, and “Ukrainians” when I write about modern times. Since the independent Ukrainian state’s creation in 1991, its citizens have all come to be known as “Ukrainians,” whatever their ethnic background. This usage reflects the current conventions of academic historiography, and although it makes for some complexity, I hope that it does not lead to confusion.

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Filed under Hungary, language, migration, nationalism, Poland, religion, Russia, Scandinavia, scholarship, Ukraine

by | 14 January 2026 · 9:24 am

Polish Insect Terms: Ants, Ladybugs

A recent compilation from Culture.pl contains a long article on entomological etymology. Here are some excerpts on ants and ladybugs:

Mrówka (ant) is a word from the 15th century, the Polish name for an insect known to entomologists as Formica. It comes from the Proto-Slavic *morvь / *morvьjь, related to names in other Indo-European languages. Both the Polish mrówka, the Greek mýrmēks and the Spanish hormiga derive from the Proto-Indo-European root *morṷo- / *morṷĭ-. Etymologists explain the meaning of the word mrówka as ‘a biting bug’.

In the 16th century, the word mrowie (a large cluster of ants) was derived from mrówka and today means ‘a multitude, a group’ (e.g. of people), as well as ‘shivers, goosebumps’. Ants are associated with the fact that they build large anthills and can carry large objects that are much heavier than they are. These insects, like bees, are a symbol of industriousness – someone can be said to be pracowity jak mrówka (as industrious as an ant). Another important feature is their size. You can say that something is małe jak mrówka (as small as an ant). There is also a saying, włożyć kij w mrowisko (poke a stick into an anthill), that is, ‘to stir up trouble, to irritate’.

One of the most numerous families among bugs are beetles. The bug Coccinella septempunctata has been known as biedronka, the ladybug, since the 19th century. Earlier, in the 17th century, the name was biedrunka and had a number of dialectal variants, e.g. biedruszka / biedrawka / biedrzonka / biedrzynka and others. The ladybug’s characteristic appearance, regular dots on its chitinous cover, which according to a naive view of the world indicate their age, allows us to explain the connection of the Polish name biedronka with the dialectal word biedrona, the term for a spotted cow. Therefore, the derivative biedronka with the suffix –ka would mean ‘small cow’. This etymology is supported by other words, including: bierawa,the name of a cow with spots around its hips, back or belly; biedrawy, the name of an ox with patches around its hips; biedrzysty, meaning spotted. According to Wiesław Boryś, the basis was the adjective *bedrъ ‘having spots on its hips’ or ‘spotted, mottled, piebald’, from the Proto-Slavic *bedro-, Polish biodro, the hip.

The etymology of biedronka as a small cow would also find an explanation in another name for this animal, boża krówka, God’s cow, or formerly, krówka Maryi Panny, Virgin Mary’s cow. The ladybug was considered a gift sent from God and was supposed to bring people happiness, hence the children’s rhyme ‘biedroneczko, leć do nieba, przynieś mi kawałek chleba’ (ladybug, fly to heaven, bring me a piece of bread). The perception of the ladybug as a mediator between the human world and the divine world has also been established in other languages: English (ladybird, Virgin Mary’s bird), American (ladybug, Virgin Mary’s bug), German der Marienkäfer, Virgin Mary’s beetle), French la bete a bon Dieu, God’s little animal, or even in the name used in Argentina, vaquita de San Antonio, St Anthony’s cow) and in another Slavic language, Russian, божья коровка (bozh’ya korovka, God’s cow). These are just a few examples demonstrating that the dialectal names of the ladybug in many languages, which later became common terms, consist of an element related to the divine world, as well as an element naming another animal – analogously to the Polish compound boża krówka.

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by | 12 January 2026 · 7:36 pm

Polish Insect Terms: Flies, Mosquitoes

A recent compilation from Culture.pl contains a long article on entomological etymology. Here are some excerpts on flies and mosquitoes.

Remaining in the circle of bugs from the family of flies, let’s discuss one of their most popular representatives, the housefly (Latin name, Musca domestica). The word mucha has been present in Polish since the 15th century and is a general Slavic word. It comes from the Proto-Slavic *mucha, *mous-ā, ‘fly’.

Andrzej Bańkowski describes the meaning of the word mucha as ‘unclear’. For this word, he seeks the etymology in the Sanskrit root of the verb muṣ-, ‘to steal, to rob’. Wiesław Boryś, on the other hand, believes that it is a word with an onomatopoeic root, from the sound made by flying insects, based on *mū- / *mus-. This root was expanded by the suffix -sā, which then became the regular suffix -cha. Similarly, the same transformation occurred in the suffix of the word pchła (flea).

The word mucha is also used to name other bugs, e.g. a szkląca mucha (glazed [lantern] fly) is another expression for a firefly. The diminutive of the word fly (muszka) is very popular and is the source of, among other things, the common name for the diminutive fruit fly: muszka wocówka. Mucha also creates many word compounds: for example, muchomór, a toadstool is a fungus that poisons and kills flies, and a muchołówka, flytrap, is a carnivorous plant that eats flies.

For humans, a fly is not a useful animal but rather a nuisance. You can say about someone that they are as pesky as a fly: natrętny jak mucha. Flies are associated with dirt and stench, so when something is described as mucha nie siada, ‘a fly won’t land on it’, it means that it is ‘successful, perfect, impeccable’, so clean that a fly does not want to be there. When someone is lured by something, strives to achieve something, it is said that they fly to something / someone like a fly to glue / to honey: jak mucha na lep / do miodu. On the other hand, ruszać się jak mucha w mazi / smole / miodzie, to move like a fly in goo, tar, honey, means ‘to do something slowly, sluggishly, to be lazy’. Ginąć / padać jak muchy, to die / to fall like flies, means ‘en masse’. One can also have muchy w nosie, flies up your nose, ‘to be in a bad mood’.

Another useless insect that makes people’s lives miserable is komar (the mosquito). The earlier form of the name for this insect is komor; Franciszek Sławski provides the variant forms kumar, kumor. This term functioned in many local and personal names (e.g. the towns of Komorowice, Komorowo, Komorów). It was not until the 19th century that the name with the suffix -ar became popular: the mosquito, popularized by, among others, writers from the Borderlands – Adam Mickiewicz devoted a poem to this bug. In the poem ‘Komar, niewielkie licho’ (The mosquito, little devil), he described a situation that is also probably familiar to everyone today: …

All the forms mentioned above come from the Proto-Slavic word *komarъ (or *komarь with a soft yer), which in turn comes from the Proto-Indo-European onomatopoeic root *kem- / *kom-, ‘to buzz’. Wiesław Boryś explains the original meaning of komar as ‘(persistently) buzzing bug’.

A mosquito is primarily associated with annoyance, intrusiveness – hence you can przekomarzać się z kimś (trade barbs with someone), which Brückner translates as ‘to irritate someone like a mosquito’. You can also say about someone that they ucięli komara (lit., cut a mosquito), meaning to take a short nap, usually without getting enough sleep.

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by | 12 January 2026 · 1:40 am

Polish Insect Terms: Bees, Wasps

A recent compilation from Culture.pl contains a long article on entomological etymology. Here are some excerpts on bees and wasps.

In a survey conducted by linguist Marcin Maciołek for his doctoral thesis Kształtowanie się nazw owadów w języku polskim. Procesy nominacyjne a językowy obraz świata (The Formation of Names of Bugs in Polish: Nominative Processes and the Linguistic Image of the World) in 2012, some respondents indicated the bee as an example of a typical owad (bug). Although the astonishing diversity of this group of animals does not allow for the identification of a single, prototypical member, the bee is certainly one of its more charming representatives. Due to their usefulness, bees evoke a rather positive attitude in humans, evidenced, among other things, by the frequently used diminutive pszczółka (little bee). For centuries, they have been a symbol of industriousness, as evidenced, among other things, by citations from the Bible. The bee was also considered a divine, a sacred animal, which is why in Polish the word used for their dying is umrzeć (used for humans), not zdechnąć (used for animals). The designation of a bee was sometimes associated with a taboo: it could not be spoken of after dusk lest the evil powers of the night harm it, hence the interchangeable terms boży robak (God’s worm) / święty robak (holy worm).

The word pszczoła has Proto-Slavic origins, probably even Proto-Indo-European – if we go back that far in the language, we will discover that the Polish pszczoła and the English bee most probably come from the same Proto-Indo-European form *bhiquelā! In Proto-Slavic, the proto-word was *bьčela or *bъčela (they differ in the quality of the yer – a Proto-Slavic vowel). If we wanted to discover the etymology of Polish pszczoła (bee), we’d discover that it is an onomatopoeic word: probably the Proto-Slavic root was an onomatopoeic *bъk-, *bъč-, related to the Proto-Slavic verb *bučati, brzęczeć – to buzz (about bugs). The suffix *-ela would indicate the meaning of *bъčela as ‘that which buzzes’.

The name of this bug was initially pczoła in Poland, with the consonant š (sz) eventually inserted. Language strives for economy, also in terms of articulation, hence the consonant group pč- (pcz-) was expanded to pšč- due to the desire to avoid excessive articulatory energy input. This also explains why the spelling of the word pszczoła is an orthographic exception, since there was never any ‘r’ in this word that could become a ‘rz’.

Wasps do not enjoy as good a reputation as their ‘cousins’, the bees. They are not useful from the point of view of humans – they are considered negative, dangerous, unpleasant bugs, in contrast to the hard-working, holy bees. An important feature of wasps, one with which they are usually most associated, is their painful sting. You can also say about someone that they are as evil as a wasp or as sharp as a wasp (zły jak osa and cięty jak osa, respectively]. Due to the gender of this noun in Polish, this term is usually used in relation to women. Only a woman can have a wasp waist – this expression is associated with the characteristic narrowing of the body structure of this bug. Unlike other phraseologisms related to wasps, however, it does not have a negative connotation but is rather a compliment.

The etymology of osa is not related to its ‘character traits’, however. It has Proto-Indo-European roots, and the names of this family in other languages ​​indicate a common origin reconstructed by researchers to Proto-Indo-European *ṷobhsā, osa. Baltic, Romance and Germanic languages ​​have preserved the initial v-, so for example, in Lithuanian, osa is vapsvà; in Latin it is vespa; and in English it is ‘wasp’. As Maciołek writes, in accordance with the law of the open syllable in the Proto-Slavic languages [all syllables had to end in a vowel, ed.], the intra-word consonant group *-bs- was simplified into -s-, hence the Proto-Indo-European *ṷobhsā became the Proto-Slavic *(v)osa, and today in Polish it has the form osa.

Andrzej Bańkowski sees the meaning of the name osa in the verb *webh-, ‘to weave’, which is related to the fact that wasps weave their nests from plant fibres. Wasp nests are a very important place for them, and they defend it fiercely. Maciej Rak cites a regional saying: włożyć kij w gniazdo os (‘to put a stick in a wasps’ nest’, meaning ‘to irritate, to provoke a bad situation’; in general language, this saying is related to ants: włożyć kij w mrowisko, ‘to put a stick in an anthill’).

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by | 31 December 2025 · 11:13 pm

Some Early Polish Ethnographers

My latest newsletter from Culture.pl contains a link to profiles of early Polish ethnographers, More Than Malinowski, by cultural anthropologist Patryk Zakrzewski. Here are some excerpts:

The beginnings of ethnology are intertwined with those of colonialism, as they developed simultaneously. In a Poland under occupation, however, this was primarily an internal colonialism – a nobleman examining the culture of its own servants. In places where the European imperialism was growing, the need for the ethnographer, arose, one who would study the ‘indigenes’.

Before the expeditions of Malinowski, ‘desk’ anthropology was the most popular method of study. Those working in it did no field research at all; instead, they analysed information supplied by merchants, seamen or missionaries….

Malinowski was destined to become a hero for students of the social sciences worldwide, as he developed a code of conduct for fieldwork – one which, in principle, has remained unchanged to our times. Long story short, it was based on ‘participant observation’, i.e. a long and intensive stay among the studied community (‘a tent put up in the middle of a village’). A researcher was also to avoid thinking in categories and stereotypes originating from one’s own culture, instead tasked with capturing another’s way of looking at things.

Ethnology in Exile

It’s possible that two eminent Polish researchers – Wacław Sieroszewski and Bronisław Piłsudski – would never have become ethnographers had they not been political prisoners….

Wacław Sieroszewski (1858-1945) didn’t have the easiest life: His mother died early, and his father received a long prison sentence after the January Uprising. Sieroszewski himself was expelled from high school – for participating in clandestine patriotic meetings and for brazenly speaking the Polish language, which was banned. He also joined a socialist movement, for which, as a 20-year-old, he was sentenced to serve time at the infamous 10th Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel. Not for long, however. After participating in a riot, during which he attacked an imperial general, and for circulating a prison bulletin, Sieroszewski was expelled to Siberia.

In 1880, he arrived at Verkhoyansk, where he married a young Yakut woman named Arina Czełba-Kysa. Twice, Sieroszewski tried to escape with other fellow prisoners, aided by his wife. But he was caught and sentenced for life as the leader of these deserters. This time, he was sentenced to a settlement ‘a hundred viorsts away from a trade road, river and town’.

Sieroszewski’s life among the autochthonous people resulted in his fundamental work Dwanaście Lat w Kraju Jakutów (Twelve Years in the Country of the Yakuts). A friendship with a Yakut shaman enabled Sieroszewski to describe local beliefs in detail….

As a law student in St. Petersburg, Bronisław Piłsudski (1866 – 1918), the Marshal’s elder brother, became acquainted with the circle of revolutionists gathered around an organisation called Narodnaja Wola (Nation’s Will). Piłsudski participated in a plot to assassinate emperor Alexander II. The traitors were discovered, and some of them were hanged (i.e. Alexander Ulyanov, Lenin’s elder brother), while the rest were sentenced to penal servitude in Siberia.

Sentenced to 15 years of hard labour, Piłsudski was sent to Sakhalin Island. First, he worked in the woods logging trees, then as a carpenter on a church construction project. There were few educated people in Sakhalin, so in time, Piłsudski was assigned various other tasks. He worked as a teacher and at an office, and was tasked with establishing a meteorological station.

Leo Sternberg, a well-known ethnographer also emprisoned in Siberia, inspired Piłsudski to study the culture of the Ainu people, who inhabited Sakhalin and the islands of Northern Japan. In 1902, Piłsudski married their leader’s wife, bearing two children and ultimately staying with the Ainus. This story, however, came to a sad end: In 1906, Piłsudski left the island illegally, but the tribe’s leader forbid his wife from joining the Pole….

Piłsudski was a pioneer in using multimedia methods in ethnography. He kept photographic documentation and recorded Ainu songs and rites on Edison’s discs, or prototypes of the vinyl record. (Today, these are housed at the Museum of Japanese Art and Technology ‘Manggha’ in Krakow.) In the 20th century, the Ainus were forcefully assimilated by the Japanese. After many years, they managed to reconstruct their ethnic difference, thanks to the research material collected by the ethnographer.

In 1903, Piłsudski and Sieroszewski traveled to the Japanese island of Hokkaido together, in order to continue their studies on the Ainus’ culture. Their contribution into the research of the Russian Far East and Japan cannot be overestimated, and they ultimately received numerous awards and invitations to prestigious associations. Today, their works are canonical for specialists in the cultures of this part of the world….

An ‘Outcast’ in Oceania

Imperial prison was also a part of life for Jan Kubary (1846-1896). At 17 years old, he participated in the January Uprising. When the rebellion was suppressed, he left for Dresden, where he agreed to collaborate with the police in exchange for the chance to return home. Kubary didn’t make the best spy, however – for warning young revolutionaries of their impending arrests, he was arrested himself and sentenced to exile. The sentence was annulled when he agreed once more to work with the police.

Such a life wasn’t for him, however, so Kubary escaped on foot from Warsaw to Berlin. In Germany, he worked as a collector of items for a natural history museum to be established in Hamburg. According to the prevailing trend, the museum offered German visitors the opportunity to view various marvels from exotic lands. Of Kubary, the newspapers wrote: ‘He travels across far seas and collects all the ethnographic and zoological peculiarities for one of the German tycoons.‘…

Living in the Pacific, he still had troubles in his private life. His employer went bankrupt, which left Kubary with no means. When he settled on the island of Ponape and established a plantation, it was destroyed during a riot by the local people, and post-revolutionary authorities expropriated him. ‘I am a poor outcast’, Kubary wrote in a letter to his mother.

Today, Kubary remains somewhat forgotten, if unjustly so. His research in Oceania was unprecedented, although he was self-taught, having left Europe equipped with no background in ethnography whatsoever. In his 28 years among the Papuan people, he integrated with local communities gained competence in their languages. Apart from ethnographic works, Kubary left behind many geographical and natural reports, as well as an impressive collection of items, which are now housed in European museums.

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Filed under education, Germany, Japan, language, migration, nationalism, Pacific, Poland, Russia, scholarship

by | 8 June 2025 · 9:23 am

Ryukyu Historiography Sources

From Maritime Ryukyu, 1050–1650, by Gregory Smits (University of Hawaii Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 13-15:

This book is an interdisciplinary, revisionist history of the Ryukyu islands between approximately 1050 and 1650 with occasional excursions into later years. The year 1050 marks the approximate beginning of the “Gusuku [castle walls] Period” in the Ryukyu islands, a time when power centers emerged. In 1650, Shō Shōken (1617–1675) published Reflections on Chūzan (Chūzan seikan), Ryukyu’s first official history. For reasons that will become clear, this event is a fitting end point for this study….

During most of the period covered in this book, Ryukyuans produced few domestic written documents. Chinese residing near the port of Naha handled the documentation connected with tribute trade, and Buddhist priests from Japan were available to assist with diplomatic correspondence. However, there is no evidence of the use of written documents to conduct government administration before the sixteenth century. Even as late as 1606, Xià Zǐyáng, a Chinese investiture envoy residing in Ryukyu, concluded that “literary culture is not widespread” even among the priests of the royal temple of Enkakuji, who were deeply respected as Ryukyu’s learned elite. Shō Shōken was among the first generation of Ryukyuan officials who could engage Chinese or Japanese literate society in a sophisticated manner.

What, therefore, were the sources Shō Shōken and later writers of official histories used? According to the introduction in Reflections, he interviewed elderly officials. Chinese records and written accounts by Japanese or Korean visitors provided some information, but for the most part, the details of early Ryukyu in the official histories are based on lore of unverifiable provenance. To some extent for sixteenth-century material, and more so from the seventeenth century onward, it is possible to corroborate accounts in the official histories using other sources. For material before the sixteenth century, however, such corroboration is rarely possible.

Ryukyu’s official histories share an ideological perspective. Steeped in Confucian historiography, they assume that a morally attuned universe guides the trajectory of human societies. Morally upright rulers bring tranquility, prosperity, dynastic longevity, and other desirable social characteristics. Strife, disorder, succession disputes, and dynastic turnover, by contrast, are evidence of rulers’ moral shortcomings. Founders of a ruling line were always virtuous. Conversely, the last ruler of a line could only have been morally deficient, not a victim of forces beyond his control. In addition, the official histories functioned to project an image of Ryukyu for outside consumption. In this context, they exaggerated the antiquity of a unified Okinawan state, positing its origins around 1200, approximately three centuries too early.

The official histories have created the dominant framework for early Ryukyuan history to this day. This book is an attempt to write a history of early Ryukyu from outside that framework. Instead of assuming that the official histories are probably accurate unless proven otherwise, I took the working hypothesis that material in the official histories before the sixteenth century is likely to be unreliable unless corroborated by other sources or evidence. Implicit in distancing myself from the official histories is the argument that it is possible to write a more nuanced and accurate history of early Ryukyu by looking elsewhere.

One important alternative source is Omoro sōshi, a collection of songs composed between approximately the twelfth and early seventeenth centuries. Other than diplomatic and trade documents and a few monument inscriptions, it contains the only native Ryukyuan source material predating the sixteenth century. Using Omoro sōshi as a historical source is not new. Iha Fuyū (1876–1947) did so, and in 1987 Mitsugu Sakihara published A Brief History of Early Okinawa Based on the Omoro Sōshi. Sakihara sought to combine “the traditional official records and histories” with the Omoro songs to create “a more accurate and vivid reconstruction.” In 2006 Yoshinari Naoki and Fuku Hiromi published a revisionist history of early Ryukyu based on a close reading of Omoro sōshi songs. They have expanded this initial effort in subsequent single- and dual-authored books.

To use Omoro sōshi effectively it is necessary to map the cultural geography reflected in its songs. While later chapters of this book rely on a mix of sources more typical of historical research, the early chapters are interdisciplinary. In them, I rely on published research in the fields of cultural anthropology and archaeology and supplement this material with conventional historical sources such as official Chinese and Korean records. Throughout the analysis, I engage Ryukyu’s official histories when appropriate, but I rarely rely on them. Moreover, I often arrive at different conclusions.

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Filed under China, Japan, Korea, nationalism, Pacific, scholarship

by | 15 January 2025 · 5:51 am

Transpacific Animal Dispersals

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 25-27:

Dispersals across the Pacific are more daunting still. Some species do exist on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, as we have seen. Marsupials live in the Americas (opossums and shrews) and in Australasia (kangaroos, koalas, Tasmanian devils, etc.). Intriguingly, a tiny arboreal marsupial from South America known as the monito del monte is more closely related to Australian marsupials than to its American cousins. Could this be the first terrestrial mammal to cross the Pacific? Recent research shows that marsupials originated in South America and migrated to Australia tens of millions of years ago, when there was a land connection via Antarctica or at least great proximity among these three landmasses. The same holds true for other lineages distributed on both sides of the Pacific, including birds, frogs, and turtles.

…

The only terrestrial vertebrate that seems to have survived a transpacific passage of six thousand miles is an iguana. The vast majority of iguanas are indigenous to the New World. Yet one genus called Brachylophus lives in the South Pacific islands of Fiji and Tonga. How did it get there? A passage from Central or South America would have taken a minimum of six months and more likely a year or more. Like geckos, iguanas are well suited for oceanic dispersals. They are able to obtain water from the plants they eat and possess nasal salt glands and thick skins that protect them from dehydration. Their presence not only on the American continent but also on many surrounding islands demonstrates their ability to travel across stretches of ocean. The Galápagos Islands, for instance, lie about six hundred miles away from the coast of Ecuador and are home to no fewer than three species of land iguanas as well as one marine iguana that lives on land but dives into the ocean to procure food, foraging on seaweed and reaching exposed rocks completely surrounded by water.

Still, it is one thing to drift on logs for a couple of weeks and quite another to endure a six-thousand-mile passage. After several months adrift and no food left, any voyaging iguana would have perished. Nonetheless, some biologists have proposed a possible solution. The stowaways may have spent much of this journey as eggs. Brachylophus has an unusually long incubation period of seven, eight, or even nine months, one of the longest of any iguana. It is possible then that thirty or forty million years ago an unsuspecting group of iguanas, some in the form of eggs, may have dispersed by means of an epic rafting passage in which everything went right. Yet even if Brachylophus was somehow able to cross much of the Pacific, few other terrestrial vertebrates ever did until humans began making inroads in far more recent times.

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Filed under Australia, Latin America, migration, Pacific, scholarship

by | 14 January 2025 · 6:35 am

Transatlantic Animal Dispersals

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 23-25:

Oceanic dispersals are extremely instructive because they reveal what is biologically possible, showing what oceans could be crossed and in what direction and which ones constituted insurmountable barriers. The Atlantic, for instance, has been breached several times. One hundred million years ago, South America became something of an island unto itself, having broken off from Africa and decoupled from North America (until about three and a half million years ago, when the Isthmus of Panama finally connected the two halves of the hemisphere). South America therefore existed in “splendid isolation” for tens of millions of years, as one scholar has put it. Yet several dispersals from Africa occurred during this time. South America was originally rodent-free, but a type of rodent called caviomorphs—related to guinea pigs, chinchillas, and capybaras but different from mice and rats—irrupted into it between fifty-five and forty-one million years ago. The closest relatives to the South American caviomorph rodents live in Africa, clearly indicating the source population. Primates followed suit. Again, South America possessed no primates at first. Yet a monkey that scientists call Chilecebus carrascoensis somehow got across the Atlantic Ocean thirty-five to twenty million years ago. To succeed, any primate had to be small and extremely resilient. To judge by the extant fossils, Chilecebus carrascoensis weighed less than two pounds and had a skull barely two inches long. This intrepid voyager would give rise to all New World monkeys, including spider monkeys, capuchins, and marmosets.

As far as we know, about a dozen species have made it across the Atlantic Ocean, including rodents, primates, bats, tortoises, a blind snake, and even a weak-flying bird called the hoatzin. Of all these creatures, geckos and skinks were particularly capable of surviving long oceanic passages, as they hid underneath branches and laid eggs resistant to desiccation and even short-term immersion in seawater. Yet, irrespective of individual capabilities, two main factors explain these successful crossings. First, the closest two points across the Atlantic (Kabrousse, Senegal, and Touros, Brazil) now lie about 1,740 miles apart and, thirty or forty million years ago, perhaps half that distance. Nine hundred miles is far but not overwhelmingly so. Second, the rivers of western Africa constitute excellent launching pads to catch western-moving Atlantic currents leading to the Americas. Although crossing the Atlantic has never been easy, the biological record shows that it has occurred from time to time, and what is true for geckos and rodents applies no less to humans. When Christopher Columbus set out to cross the Ocean Sea in 1492, he and his crew were embarking on a voyage that other species had already made successfully.

Other oceanic paths have been less common. The reverse Atlantic passage from South America to Africa, for instance, has played a much smaller role in the dispersal of species. Negative evidence cannot settle the matter definitively. South American organisms may well have crossed but been attacked on arrival, or perhaps they survived in Africa but without leaving much of a trace. Still, it is striking that no terrestrial vertebrates are known to have made the eastward passage across the Atlantic.

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Filed under Africa, Latin America, migration, scholarship

by | 8 May 2024 · 4:50 am

Studies of Chinese in Vietnam

From The Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam, by Tran Khanh (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1993), pp. 1-7.

Close to twenty years have passed since South Vietnam was liberated in 1975. The economy of a re-unified Vietnam, however, is still poverty-ridden. One of the reasons for this is the lack of effectiveness in the use of private domestic resources. particularly that of the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam. Before 1975, Chinese capital, entrepreneurship, and skilled manpower in South Vietnam played an important role in the development of domestic markets and international trade. After 1975, however, Chinese participation in the Vietnamese economy underwent a decline brought about by the socialist transformation of the South and an exodus of capital. However, the residual economic potential of the Chinese who have remained in Vietnam is still considerable.

Under doi moi, which is the programme of economic and political reforms in Vietnam, there is evidence that the Chinese are once again contributing significantly to the expansion of internal markets and capital accumulation for small-scale industrial development. Accordingly, the role which the Chinese have played in the past and are beginning to play again seems eminently worthy of study.

…

A survey of the literature on the role of the Chinese in Vietnam’ economy indicates that between 1964 and 1975, the Chinese community in South Vietnam flourished and prospered. Furthermore, during this period the Chinese community underwent important changes, both qualitatively and quantitatively: Chinese businesses, for instance, grew and became more diversified as reflected in the growth of Chinese-owned capital and in terms of the occupational structure of the community. After 1975, however, political changes in the South following the fall of Saigon resulted in a change in the fortunes of the ethnic Chinese and the part that they played in the economy of a unified Vietnam.

The situation of the Chinese in Vietnam after 1975 and the economic ups and downs which they faced have been little researched. Nevertheless, the Chinese community has undoubtedly experienced considerable changes as a result of the political and economic changes that have taken place in Vietnam since 1975. There are no readily available Vietnamese documents, reference books, and research papers in libraries or even specific research centres inside and outside the country covering this period in any great detail, although this is, to some extent, now slowly changing with new governmental policies on access to hitherto restricted official sources of information. Where information exists, the data are not always comparable in the post-1975 period, and comparisons with data from the pre-1975 period are even more problematic because of gaps in the data, different methods of data gathering, and so on. Despite such difficulties, a study of the economic position of the Chinese in Vietnam especially after 1975 is much needed, precisely because so little is known about it.

The topic is large and complex, and it would not be possible, in a single study, to deal with all aspects of the Chinese in Vietnam after 1975. Thus, the present study attempts to focus specifically on changing patterns of Chinese involvement in the economy of Vietnam as well as the impact of changes in the overall Vietnamese economy on the Chinese business system in the country. In dealing with this in the post-1975 period, it is necessary, however, to review the situation of the Chinese before 1975 so that the changes experienced by the Chinese in more recent times may be better understood.

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Filed under China, economics, migration, scholarship, Vietnam, war