Listening to an Iranian official describe his region as “West Asia” got me wondering if the word “Middle East” is on the outs and why. I suspect Middle East is eurocentric for some reason, but West Asia also preserves Europe as a continent, which is Eurocentric in its own way because Europe is not a continent and never was. If we’re calling anything West Asia, it should be Spain and Portugal.
The definition of a continent is geological. Geology is a science. By all rights, Europe is part of the Asian landmass. And that should be the end of the story. Culture and history shouldn’t play a part.
It would be like if biologists said, “We know dogs aren’t really human, but we love them so much we’re going to classify them as Homo fidelis anyway.”
It doesn’t make any sense.
Continents are social conventions, not strictly scientific. If it was purely scientific you’d either end up with 4 (if going by “big contiguous land mass”), 7 (if going by “major tectonic plates” thereby putting Hawaii and bits of California on one continent), or almost 20 (if going by “any tectonic plates”) (or 6 or 5 depending on how else you want to slice the pie).
There are scientific interpretations of “continent,” but with everything in science there’s ongoing refinement to determine reality and thus a consensus on the exact classification of a landmass as a continent is not uniformly shared.
The existence of a scientific term does not preclude the existence of colloquial or political usage with a different definition, and to prescribe a single definition (and a minority one at that) as the single source of truth is myopic.
Generally, I like colloquial terms to stay colloquial and scientific terms to stay scientific. I am not going to correct someone for calling a mountain goat a goat–looks like a goat, acts like a goat, close enough, but don’t say it’s in Capra.
For me, I’m perfectly happy defining landmasses by conjoined areas on a map, with the only real sticking point being how small a landmass is small enough to discount as conjoining (North and South America). That’s based on objective physical fact; how those facts are interpreted would be a matter of consensus, of course, but the problem set is much more simplified.
This is kind of related to the whole Pluto debate. “Planet” is a word that has popular meaning, but we all kind of agree that astronomy gets to be the ultimate arbiter. “Continent” has no such committee.
The concept of “continent” doesn’t really have clear consensus.
I’d argue that this is closer to “don’t put tomatoes in a fruit salad” rather than the Pluto thing.
There’s no colloquial definition of planet that would include Pluto and exclude the potentially hundreds of things like Pluto in our solar system save for “what I learned in school.” Pluto got planetary status because humanity saw it. It lost it because we found out more about it, it’s neighbors, and planets in general. Because no other definition really makes sense the scientific one prevails.
There are multiple colloquial definitions of continents and fruits/vegetables that make sense that are at odds with any scientific understanding therefore the scientific one doesn’t prevail.
That’s all well and good for terms that originate from and remain in science–there’s probably never going to be a conflicting term for “adenosine triphosphate” for instance, but for terms that originated elsewhere first and science had to adopt that’s not gonna happen. My previous comment was to your assertion that continent is a scientific term, when in reality it’s use predates the establishment of geology as a formal discipline by hundreds of years. To claim therefore that it is a scientific term and that you want it to stay that way is predicated on an untrue foundation.
There’s really no way to stop the masses from picking up and misusing scientific jargon, and whereas science is the means through which humanity learns more about the world, continued scientific progress will inevitably lead to more new terms that leak from science into a common parlance. When talking to scientists you just gotta mean the scientific thing; when talking to others you just gotta mean the other thing.
It’s also not just science, BTW. Every field has specialty language that conflicts. If you’re not a programmer you may not know what a string is. If you’re not in IT, you may not know the difference between a CPU and a monitor. That’s fine. That’s just how language works, and that’s what let’s us communicate with each other.
That was an enjoyable and elucidating read! Thank you!
ah ok, so you aren’t asking a question, you and your fuckboy @cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com are just there to push an agenda.
Meh. More like I don’t think I’m supposed to be calling it the Middle East without seeming like an imperialist and I don’t want to call it West Asia because I don’t like Europe being a continent, so I’m kinda stuck.
I’m also wondering how people interpret “Middle East”, because I’m sensitive to that shit, especially on a global website. Like I don’t want to be calling placed “third world” if that’s offensive to people in the developing world / global south / ???.
“Middle East” is what I’ve always known the region as, and it’s just a historical-cultural accident that, in my defense, makes just as much sense as separating Europe from Asia. So either we keep both ME and Europe, or we get rid of both, is my logic.
So do I have agenda? Sort of. But also just wondering what people’s thoughts are on the subject.
One of my recent posts here was, “What’s a very specific opinion you have phrased as a question?” in homage to that evergreen and annoying problem of push polling on question forums.
Then call it what people in the region call it themselves.
Not stuck at all. A unified continent wouldn’t be called “Asia.” The region called “Asia” (which itself is ambiguously defined) would still be called “Asia” (and still be ambiguously defined) and thus “West Asia” would be the region on the west side of “Asia” which would decidedly not be Europe.
The fact of the matter is that what we call ourselves and others is all political and a great deal of it is imperialism. We need terms to refer to areas and groups so people know what we’re talking about. If those groups aren’t like us there’s a great many terms we can use which just end up being dog whistles.
Is there any big difference in referring to “The Middle East and North Africa” vs “The Arab speaking world?” No, not really. Would people understand what you’re talking about either way? Yeah, probably. Would people understand what you mean by “West Asia?” So long as they aren’t being imperialist pedants, yes.
As an aside, it’s not the ‘Arab speaking world’. You could try ‘Arab World’ or ‘Arabic Speaking World’. Neither of which is technically correct, since Iranians, for example, neither speak Arabic nor consider themselves to be Arabs. ‘Muslim World’ might be better, if half-Christian Lebanon doesn’t object …
Where would this sub be without pedantry?
I like your answer the best–call it what people there want to be called.
But your solution raises a problem if there’s a disagreement in that region. Turkey can decide to call itself Türkiye, but a region with separate countries might have a disagreement on what to call their shared region. I bet Turkey would love to be in the region called, “The Former Ottoman Empire”, but Greece might not care for it.