The Big Picture: Major Influences - Dragons and Tigers: A Geography of South, East and Southeast Asia - page 5

MONGOLIA

NORTH
KOREA
SOUTH
KOREA

Sea of
Japan

CHINA

JAPAN

BHUTAN

EAST ASIA

East
China Sea

INDIA

TAIWAN

MYANMAR

LAOS

South
China Sea

SOUTH
ASIA

BANGLADESH

THAILAND

Bay of
Bengal

PHILIPPINES

Arabian Sea

SOUTHEAST ASIA

SRI
LANKA BRUNEI

MALAYSIA

Indian Ocean

SINGAPORE

0
0

500 1000 mi

I NDONES I A

500 1000 km

Figure 1-4
These three realms are based on similarities of functional interrelationships between people
and their natural environments.

continental meaning. Throughout this evolutionary
process, comparisons and contrasts were drawn between
east and west.
Centuries later, Karl Marx (1818-1883) drew distinc-
tions between Asia and Western Europe. He subscribed to
the concept of “An Asiatic Mode of Production.” In this
exploitative, economic system, the urban rich and power-
ful sucked all profits from an undifferentiated rural peas-
antry laboring in virtual enslavement.
Meanwhile, Asia' s colonizers had developed their own
frameworks of thought. Y ou will learn more details in later
chapters. A general model is provided by geographer
James L. Blaut (1994), who refers to a colonizer' s model
of the world: civilization and progress diffuse from the
European center to the “culturally barren” periphery .
This is an interesting perception considering that Asian

civilizations were much older and more advanced and
complex than those of the colonizers.
T Two things are important here. First, since classical
times, Western writers have commonly contrasted their
own civilizations with those of Asia. Asia has been per-
ceived as a single entity , its internal diversity homoge-
nized in false unity , its characteristics and institutions
portrayed as alien and inferior to those in Occidental
realms. The term “inscrutable” was often used to de-
scribe the frustrated Western perception of Asia. Recent
research on the brain indicates that Asians and Euro-
peans may be “wired” to see the world differently . As
the British writer Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) said in
the first line of his poem “The Ballad of East and West”:
“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain
shall meet.”