In the World Cultural Map, I would extend "the West" to all or part of Latin America. Certainly Argentina, Chile, southern Brazil, and the like, as they're similar to Spain, Portugal, and Italy culturally speaking.
Excellent, stimulating, and persuasive. I knew about Henrich, but not Rubin and Sheidel.
In his fascinating autobiography, "Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History" (2023), Peter Brown says this about his "The World of Late Antiquity" (1971):
It "would not be a story of decline and fall, followed by catastrophic barbarian invasion ... Rather, it would be a study of change and continuity in a deeply rooted and sophisticated society."
He can say this, over 50 years after he wrote "World," because that brilliant book focuses on the south and east of the ancient Mediterranean world, where, as you point out, civilizational collapse is less evident. (Although it is very evident, for example, in Asia Minor and Cyprus, where urban civilization seems to have ceased completely by the mid-seventh century. Brown is not an archaeologist).
In his more recent "The Rise of Western Christendom" (2nd ed. 2003), which, as the title shows, focuses on the West, Brown acknowledges the evidence of collapse, but tends to temper those acknowledgments with insistent claims such as that "a long and opulent Roman past still had a place in the present." Again, he is not an archaeologist.
In an illuminating passage, he remarks that his own deep interest in the ancient Near East stems from his Irish Protestant background, because "the Church of Ireland maintained an intensely biblical version of Protestantism" centered on reading the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New in Greek.
Placing Sicily outside of the west in 700 and 1400 is incorrect. 4 Popes in the 9th century were from Sicily and it was at the height of western civilization around 1150. It continued to be western after this and it slowly declined. It only wasn't western from 827 to 1061
That's a marvelous essay, Razib. You brought us many interesting sources to go deeper if we want to, while stating your synthetic understanding of them, building a synoptic picture of how the West came to be.
I'm not that sure Russia is that different, albeit it's clearly diverse from "true Westerners", they're not only an old, big portion of Christemdom, but they've tried to modernize and westernize themselves several times. They were much more far appart from the West prior to the great Peter and Catherine, and they also tried to copy western industrialization on later 19th century.
I think Russia sphere is some sort of atavic "old Western ways" surface over a deeper core of eastern, non-western worldview. Some sort of not western, but close enough.
And I also think much of Latin America, undoublty under western Christemdom strong influence, adopting the descended languages coming from the Romans, are much like the pré-Enlightenined West once was. We are like what the West once was, as if we are a divergent evolution of 16th century Mediterranean portion of the West. Not alien to today's West core, but antiquated and not quite the same. Some sort of West periphery.
I've been very unhappy with the term "cultural appropriation," because it's been expanded beyond its original (debatable) point about wearing traditional dress of other cultures as a costume being insulting to the idea that all cultural borrowings are somehow wrong. A lot of this is because the foundation of Western identity is (almost) entirely cultural appropriation. Rome heavily pillaged the cultural legacy of Hellenism, and then converted to a Semitic religion. The legacy of Rome then bounded together the West, expanding even to areas like Scandinavia, Ireland, and much of Germany, which never even had direct Roman rule in the time of the empire. Indeed, the weaving together of the West was to a large extent beating down the individual cultural mythologies of the Norse, the Irish, and many others, replacing them first with bible stories, and then later with the renaissance, the "rediscovery" of classic Greco-Roman mythos, binding nations together rather than rooting each in the particular. All of it based on "appropriating" stories (and practices, etc.) which were not endemic to the area.
Of course, all cultures borrow from one another and change over time. But I think pointing out how the West, itself, is founded on cultural borrowings from the "non-west" tends to shut a lot of annoying people up on both sides.
In the World Cultural Map, I would extend "the West" to all or part of Latin America. Certainly Argentina, Chile, southern Brazil, and the like, as they're similar to Spain, Portugal, and Italy culturally speaking.
Excellent, stimulating, and persuasive. I knew about Henrich, but not Rubin and Sheidel.
In his fascinating autobiography, "Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History" (2023), Peter Brown says this about his "The World of Late Antiquity" (1971):
It "would not be a story of decline and fall, followed by catastrophic barbarian invasion ... Rather, it would be a study of change and continuity in a deeply rooted and sophisticated society."
He can say this, over 50 years after he wrote "World," because that brilliant book focuses on the south and east of the ancient Mediterranean world, where, as you point out, civilizational collapse is less evident. (Although it is very evident, for example, in Asia Minor and Cyprus, where urban civilization seems to have ceased completely by the mid-seventh century. Brown is not an archaeologist).
In his more recent "The Rise of Western Christendom" (2nd ed. 2003), which, as the title shows, focuses on the West, Brown acknowledges the evidence of collapse, but tends to temper those acknowledgments with insistent claims such as that "a long and opulent Roman past still had a place in the present." Again, he is not an archaeologist.
In an illuminating passage, he remarks that his own deep interest in the ancient Near East stems from his Irish Protestant background, because "the Church of Ireland maintained an intensely biblical version of Protestantism" centered on reading the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New in Greek.
Placing Sicily outside of the west in 700 and 1400 is incorrect. 4 Popes in the 9th century were from Sicily and it was at the height of western civilization around 1150. It continued to be western after this and it slowly declined. It only wasn't western from 827 to 1061
That's a marvelous essay, Razib. You brought us many interesting sources to go deeper if we want to, while stating your synthetic understanding of them, building a synoptic picture of how the West came to be.
I'm not that sure Russia is that different, albeit it's clearly diverse from "true Westerners", they're not only an old, big portion of Christemdom, but they've tried to modernize and westernize themselves several times. They were much more far appart from the West prior to the great Peter and Catherine, and they also tried to copy western industrialization on later 19th century.
I think Russia sphere is some sort of atavic "old Western ways" surface over a deeper core of eastern, non-western worldview. Some sort of not western, but close enough.
And I also think much of Latin America, undoublty under western Christemdom strong influence, adopting the descended languages coming from the Romans, are much like the pré-Enlightenined West once was. We are like what the West once was, as if we are a divergent evolution of 16th century Mediterranean portion of the West. Not alien to today's West core, but antiquated and not quite the same. Some sort of West periphery.
I've been very unhappy with the term "cultural appropriation," because it's been expanded beyond its original (debatable) point about wearing traditional dress of other cultures as a costume being insulting to the idea that all cultural borrowings are somehow wrong. A lot of this is because the foundation of Western identity is (almost) entirely cultural appropriation. Rome heavily pillaged the cultural legacy of Hellenism, and then converted to a Semitic religion. The legacy of Rome then bounded together the West, expanding even to areas like Scandinavia, Ireland, and much of Germany, which never even had direct Roman rule in the time of the empire. Indeed, the weaving together of the West was to a large extent beating down the individual cultural mythologies of the Norse, the Irish, and many others, replacing them first with bible stories, and then later with the renaissance, the "rediscovery" of classic Greco-Roman mythos, binding nations together rather than rooting each in the particular. All of it based on "appropriating" stories (and practices, etc.) which were not endemic to the area.
Of course, all cultures borrow from one another and change over time. But I think pointing out how the West, itself, is founded on cultural borrowings from the "non-west" tends to shut a lot of annoying people up on both sides.