[Japanese World History] #30 The Trap of Cultural Spheres: Is 'Africa' Included in World History?

The Absence of the Periphery

Looking at magazines about social studies education in the 1970s, one often finds laments that 'students' interests are directed only toward Europe,' based on surveys asking for their 'favorite countries' or having them draw maps from memory.

It might seem sufficient if they could draw at least this much of a map, but even when having students at vocational high schools do the same thing, they cannot draw it at all.
It is difficult even just to get them to look up during world history class.
Such laments also began to be heard.

If one looked abroad, proxy wars and ethnic conflicts were still occurring here and there around the world. Although the United States withdrew from Vietnam in 1973, the flames of war spread to Cambodia and Laos, and the Vietnamese 'boat people' who fled abroad also became a major issue.

Nevertheless, students' social interest appears to be low.

Frustration began to mount among those who became the bearers of the 'World History' subject.
The idea that Japan, having heightened its 'great power' consciousness, was still reinforcing a worldview and historical perception that lacked Asia and Africa, might be leading to a lack of understanding regarding wars and conflicts.
People with such awareness of the issue also began to emerge.

The 1970s, when Japanese society changed significantly, was an era when high school students were stereotyped as being 'lethargic, indifferent, and uninspired,' and thegap between teachers and studentsbecame a problem ( 'Complete Book of High School Subject Guidance,' Gakuji Shuppan, 1975).
At that time, teachers who had been deeply influenced by the cultivation-oriented atmosphere from before the war through the 1950s were still actively teaching. 'Children who don't know war,' 'children who don't know student movements,' and teachers who were not like that. The gap between the two may have also been a cause of misunderstandings.

However, it was not as if there were no problems on the teaching side.

World history during this period remainedgreat-power-centric and great-civilization-centric.

The ' cultural sphere learning ' introduced in the 1970 Course of Study could be said to have simply reorganized the two divisions of Western history and Eastern history into three: Western history = Europe, and Eastern history = Islam + China, and in fact, many teachers in the field interpreted it that way.
When that happens, world history ends up being depicted centering on the 'West,' 'Middle East,' and 'China,' which are the cores of the three civilizations, and after the modern era, it is ultimately recovered into the old-fashioned story where the West invades other regions.

In other words, Eastern Europe relative to the West, Africa and South Asia relative to the Middle East, Korea and Southeast Asia relative to China, or Central Eurasia relative to all three,tended to inevitably be positioned as a 'periphery' to the center.
If so, the teachers' desire for students to also know about oppressed countries and peoples would increasingly fail to reach them.
Behind that, it can be said that there was a limit to world history that leans toward great powers.

Growing Attention to Africa

Nevertheless, the treatment of Asia was still better than before, against the backdrop of the rise of ethnic movements in the Third World in the late 1950s.

On the other hand,what remained neglected was Africa.

That is to be expected; in the 1960s, there were almost no systematic documents dealing with African history, except for UNESCO's attempts, and even if there were, most were Japanese translations of Western researchers. There was an overwhelming lack of information.

However, in the 1970s, changes could be seen in the situation.
As introduced before, the research ofJunzo Kawada(1934–), who argued that Africa's non-literate societies also had a succession of history through oral tradition, and anthropologistMasao Yamaguchi(1931–2013) began to attract attention.
And the most groundbreaking thing was that in 1978, in Yamakawa Shuppansha's World Modern History series,'African History' was added for the first time in Japan.
Out of 37 volumes in total, a whopping 5 volumes were devoted to Africa.


The preface of volume 1 states the following.

The reason the African continent was in the spotlight in the 1970s was that Japanese companies' expansion progressed during this period. For example, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) in central Africa, many Japanese people were working for mine development.

However, many companies withdrew afterward. This was 'because it became difficult to continue business due to local political instability, and in addition, a shift to the Asian market became prominent during the same period' (JETRO Regional/Analysis Report).

The existence of the children left behind at this time is vividly depicted in Hideyuki Miura's 'Children of the Sun.' It is a forgotten underside history of Japan's high economic growth.

World History Before Civilization and State

Anyway, the attention to Africa in the 1970s revealedhow much world history until now had been established without Africa.


We had been criticizing world history until now as 'Eurocentric!', butwasn't our own Japanese view of world history just too 'Eurasia-centric'?.
It led to such self-reflection.

For example, in Africa, there are no horses, which are taken for granted on the Eurasian continent. The main grain is pearl millet, and there are no empires that rule over wide areas as seen in Eurasia.

Also, questions arise such as: are definitions like ' civilization is born on the banks of great rivers ' and ' civilization is that which has walled cities, ironware, and writing '—are these definitions really correct?

Nowadays, various proposals are being made among non-European researchers to use the term "civilization" in a value-neutral way. For example, archaeologist Rintaro Ono, who specializes in Oceania, defines civilization as "an accumulation of information related to human knowledge and technology" (Rintaro Ono, Human History of the Sea (Yuzankaku, 2017, p. 198)), and Mesoamerican archaeologists Tatsuya Murakami and Shigeru Kabata define it as "a cultural sphere where complex societies created vast networks" (Nobuyuki Ito (ed.), Mesoamerican Civilization Seminar (Benseisha, 2021, p. 55)).

However, the mainstream understanding at the time was the story that civilization began with agriculture and animal husbandry after hunter-gatherers became sedentary. From "migration" to "sedentism." It is what is called the "Agricultural Revolution." The idea was that sedentary people who started farming were the ones who organized complex social systems and carried high-level civilization.

As long as one takes such a perspective, is it not impossible to position people outside of the "great civilization regions" of Eurasia within world history?

***

During this period, practical examples of rethinking "Eurasian centrism" through Africa also emerged.

For example, let's look at the practice by high school teacher Ryo Suzuki called "Agriculture began with bananas." This is a case that effectively used the theory of non-regional origins of cultivated plants by agricultural scientist Sasuke Nakao (1916–93) (Ryo Suzuki, *Methods of World History Learning*, Iwasaki Shoten, 1977, p. 155).
While Suzuki considered Nakao's then-popular *Cultivated Plants and the Origins of Agriculture* to be "truly a 'world history' book," he noted that the following passages still could not escape the thinking that looks down on Africa.

Nevertheless, he evaluated the fact that it stated that there were splendid "production" activities in Africa, not just the four great civilizations of the Eurasian continent, and had students read it in the first class.
He admits that for the students, nothing but the "interesting topics" remained in their memory later on, but that is likely related to the fact that it was still difficult to treat Africa within the flow of world history at that time.

Focusing on the "white parts" of the world map

Among the historical maps that had been used in world history education for a long time, there is the Yoshikawa Kobunkan World Map.
It is the map that serves as the base for the reference materials used today.

Looking at this, it is immediately clear which country controlled which region.

However, if you look at regions "outside" Eurasia from the perspective mentioned earlier, you can see that there are no states in those regions, and they are not colored in.
So, does "no color" equal "no one was there"?
Does white equal "an area where people lived primitive lives"?

For example, Yasuo Togawa, a researcher of maritime peoples in Madagascar, raised the following issue in the preface of a book published in 1980.

"Official" world history is a truly sharp criticism of.

Constructing the past based on materials is the basis of historical methodology.
Therefore, the activities of people in regions where written historical materials are scarce are inevitably difficult to see.
It can be said that the work of anthropologists, archaeologists, and agricultural scientists in the 1970s made a major contribution by incorporating a "gaze toward prehistory" and a "gaze toward non-Eurasian regions" into world history.

The Trap of Learning Cultural Spheres

There was a chronicler named José de Acosta (1540–1600) who wrote "The Natural and Moral History of the Indies" (1590) in Mexico, where he had once lived under colonial rule, and attempted to position the history of the New World within "world history."

He classified all the world's peoples and nations into the following three types (Yoshio Masuda, "Conditions of Pure Culture," Kodansha Gendai Shinsho, 1967, pp. 196-197).

1. People who are "human and political," possessing solid state organizations, public law, and bureaucratic systems, who know how to write, and who can express their thoughts and knowledge in books.

2. People who do not use writing, but who have countries, administrators, cities, and armies, live under a certain order, and have some form of religious worship.

3. People who live barbaric lives without laws, kings, countries, or administrators.

This was a concept that could be called a kind of "developmental stage theory on a global scale" (Yoshio Masuda, "Revised New Edition: World Encyclopedia"), and Acosta, who was a Jesuit, classified the world's people in this way for the purpose of missionary work (note that Japan and China are classified as 1).

While learning world history by dividing it into cultural spheres is easy to organize in terms of learning efficiency, the very act of dividing it into cultural spheres involves a conscious "selection" of which cultural spheres should be covered and which should not.

Yoshio Masuda, who wrote this, was a researcher of Latin American history who was promoting the publication of the "Age of Discovery Series" at the time, and to him, world history up to that point was something that had left out not only Africa but also Latin America and the Pacific.

To view the world from a "bird's-eye view" based on specific value criteria.
The dangers that this brings have been clearly proven by the subsequent trends of the world.
So, what kind of perspective have we come to think we should use to re-examine world history?
Next time, let's focus on a certain debate that emerged in the 1970s.

(To be continued)