Religious Lines
Another week gone by. Friday….feel like I should be doing something to celebrate the end of the week. Mike’s off napping, Frank’s out, my other peeps seem to be incommunicado at the moment. I’d love to go out for a ripping bike ride but with the two hours I put in yesterday and the chance that I’ll be biking into Mountain View tomorrow to meet up with Preston discourages me from pushing myself tonight.
So I’ll blog until I can find better trouble to get in.
Something that I’ve been frustrated about for a while is the geographical division of the globe within Santa Clara’s History Department. The five area that one can study are Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, and Asia. The problem I have with this? Well…as it effects me, the Middle East is part of Asia. So I can take a class on the history of the middle east and it won’t count as part of Asia, but part of “Africa and the Middle East.” This smacks of thinly veiled religious gerrymandering to me; it would be far more accurate to call the five areas: the Protestant World, the Catholic World, the Southern Catholic World, the Islamic World, and the Buddhist World (I know..India is predominantly Hindu, but has got strong Buddhist influence and was its launching pad to the rest of Asia). This system of labeling would also solve the problem of Russia which, despite being mostly in Asia, is traditionally a Catholic country. And then…students like myself who see a class on Middle Eastern history nested between “Asian” history classes won’t naively think it will actually count as an Asian history course.
