Re: The Origins of Continents

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://homepage.smc.edu/morris_pete/continents.pdf

The Myth of Continents, or How our Grade-School Teachers Distorted the 
Truth

by Peter S. Morris

How many continents are there? It seems like a simple enough question, 
and most of us who grew up in the United States during the second half 
of the twentieth century come prepared with a pat answer to which we 
give little thought: ?There are seven continents: North America, South 
America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica. Next question, 
please.? The official flag of the Olympic games, however, displays a 
famous symbol of interlocking rings, each ring intended to represent one 
of the five continents of the world, the two Americas treated as one and 
Antarctica simply forgotten. Rather than some sort of geographic 
maverick, this lineup of five continents, not seven, is a standard one 
taught throughout much of Europe. So what is the answer to our question? 
Is it five, or is it seven?

Well, the most thoughtful answer might actually be none of the above, or 
better yet, ?it depends.? There are few terms in geography that are more 
loaded with implied meanings and biased world views than continent. As a 
common-sense concept, the idea is simple enough: pick up a globe and one 
can readily observe a half-dozen distinctive (if barely connected) land 
masses. The exact number is debatable, depending on one?s size threshold 
for when an ?island? becomes a ?continent?. Is Australia large enough to 
be a continent? How about Greenland? Madagascar? Personally, I?m 
inclined to answer these questions Yes, No, and No, giving me a list of 
six: North America, South America, Eurasia, Africa, Australia, and 
Antarctica. To my eyes at least, this half-dozen represents the world?s 
primary distinctive land masses, as opposed to islands.

While this list is debatable, one thing clearly isn?t: Europe is not a 
continent?at least as long as we continue to see ?continent? as more or 
less a synonym for land mass. Without question, Europe is a distinctive 
world region, both in social-cultural terms and as an environmental 
subcontinent of Eurasia. If we insist on calling Europe a continent, 
though, then consistency demands we do so for other, analogous regions 
around the world, such as South Asia (India and its neighbors) and 
Mesoamerica (Mexico and its neighbors). Our original list of five, six, 
or seven continents now expands to a dozen or more.

The bigger lesson, though, is not that there are really six continents, 
rather than the usual list of five or seven. Instead, this whole 
subjective exercise in continental definition teaches us how fruitless 
the idea of dividing the world into continents really is. As a type of 
region, continents are intended to provide a classification scheme by 
which we make some sense of the world. But closer inspection reveals 
that continents provide us with, at best, only a limited and rather 
distorted sense of world geography.

There are two primary problems with the concept. First, the history of 
the continental idea is closely tied to ideas of European superiority. 
As geographers Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen discuss in their wonderful 
book, "The Myth of Continents," Europeans defined Asia as a catch-all 
concept to hold the various non-Christian, non-?Western? peoples who 
didn?t live up to their notions of what modern civilization should be. 
Not only did the idea of Asia, or ?Orientalism,? hide from view the 
great diversity of places, peoples, environments, landscapes, and 
cultures that occupy the eastern three-quarters of Eurasia, but it 
served to simplify Europe?s conception of itself. The idea of a 
continental divide between Europe and Asia became a tool for those 
seeking to excise Islam, Communism, Judaism, and any other ideologies 
and cultures that conflicted with their personal visions of what Europe 
was and should be.

The second problem with using continents, or even a more innocent notion 
of land masses free of the eurocentrism described above, as an 
organizational framework for understanding the world, is its implied 
environmental determinism. A major theme of geography is how physical 
environments help shape the cultures and societies that inhabit them?how 
climate and soil and topography and natural avenues of transportation 
influence agricultural and other economic activity and the location of 
cities and other human settlements. But one of the biggest geographic 
fallacies is to take such thinking to the extreme, to say that 
environmental conditions are the single, dominant determinant of human 
activity?the ultimate explanation for all the cultures, landscapes, and 
geographies of wealth and poverty that we see today. Such simplistic 
thinking geographers reject as ?environmental determinism?. What does 
this have to do with continents? It is all well and good to recognize 
that land and water on earth is grouped into a pattern we might identify 
as a geography of oceans and land masses. Even better, we might relate 
that geography both to the geologic process of continental drift which 
created it, as well as to its influence on the global-scale circulation 
of currents of hot and cold air and water in our oceans and skies. But 
that is about as far as the continental or land-mass idea can take us. 
There is no good reason why our attempts to understand world geography 
in general, particularly in its human dimensions, should be based on a 
framework of continents. Thus, it is no accident that college textbooks 
use an alternative, ?world regions? scheme, identifying three or more 
Asias, two or more Europes, two or more Africas, and two or more Americas.

Even more importantly, the best world geography recognizes that world 
regions can be more than simply subcontinental units of a single land 
mass. Defining a mostly-Islamic realm that covers parts of both Africa 
and Eurasia is common practice. Somewhat less common, but just as 
instructive, are regions that bridge major bodies of water; the North 
Atlantic World, the Pacific Rim, and the greater Mediterranean are all 
concepts that make sense, even though they overlap with alternative 
classification schemes for regionalizing the world. The bottom line: No 
scheme is perfect, and there is no single best way to broadly group the 
peoples and places of the world into geographic units. We therefore need 
to recognize multiple ways to group the world. Continents do make some 
sense as land masses, providing a visually-obvious physical ordering of 
land and water on earth which helps us understand processes of 
geomorphology and climate. Otherwise, dividing the world into continents 
is a meaningless and potentially distorting exercise.

Further Reading

??Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique 
of Metageography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California 
Press, 1997)

??Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978)




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