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Elissimpark posted:Yes, well. Ideally all recipes would use weights, but they often don't. And if someone in Australia decides to make an American recipe that uses cups, they're likely going to be using the wrong cup unit. I mean, the variance in weight of a cup of flour due to differences in how packed down the flour is are probably greater than the 10g difference in cup measures. Like, ancient merchants invented scales pretty quickly.
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Nov 28, 2020 15:21
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I'm aware of the existence of scales, but that doesn't negate the fact that units of measurement can share a name but vary in magnitude, depending on where and when you are. Speaking of units of measurement, I know that the Japanese koku was allegedly the amount of rice that could feed a person for a year. There was, I believe, a Chinese equivalent. Are there other units of measurement that came from the usage of what it measures? (Incidentally, the 180ml cup that comes with Japanese rice cookers is based on the unit that is 1/1000 of a koku. Thanks Wikipedia.)
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Nov 28, 2020 16:51
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Elissimpark posted:I'm aware of the existence of scales, but that doesn't negate the fact that units of measurement can share a name but vary in magnitude, depending on where and when you are. BTW, that's what Son Goku's name is based on. Gohan also means rice. There's a lot of themes following on from that.
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Nov 28, 2020 17:23
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Elissimpark posted:Speaking of units of measurement, I know that the Japanese koku was allegedly the amount of rice that could feed a person for a year. There was, I believe, a Chinese equivalent. Koku (and Korean seom, and likely a Vietnamese variant I don't know) were both originally directly derived from Chinese measures, as were the majority of measurements in premodern East Asia. Not sure how much people care about the specifics of demographic history, but the 1 koku = 1 person/year assumption has had some interesting knock offs on how Japanese history was understood for a while. You had historians in the early 20th century flatly assuming that recorded koku figures map 1:1 with population, which means there would have been like 19 million people in the archipelago by the late 16th century (compared to what was thought to be less than 5 million in 1100), and so there must have been enormous growth and prosperity. Turns out that not only does it not really work for rice (there was huge regional variation for one thing, and people also usually ate a lot more than 1 koku a year), but tax records not only included grains other than rice as koku, but entirely different goods too, like silk and so on, based on their koku values. By the 1970s new population estimates started coming out, of more to like 10-12 million in the 1500s up from 7 million in 1100, meaning that far from a period of incredible prosperity, Japan's middle ages were actually pretty stagnant. Far better than the Heian though, which actually sounds like a pretty dire time to have been alive; from what had actually been the pretty prosperous Nara period, Heian Japan started to get struck by pretty bad plagues every few decades which kept population even if not declining, and this went on for centuries. Koramei fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Nov 28, 2020 |
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Nov 28, 2020 18:04
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Elissimpark posted:Yes, well. Ideally all recipes would use weights, but they often don't. And if someone in Australia decides to make an American recipe that uses cups, they're likely going to be using the wrong cup unit. Australians may notionally have a cup but do they actually use it? When not using US units I would expect them more usually to follow British practice and we habitually measure flour by weight.
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Nov 29, 2020 00:38
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feedmegin posted:Australians may notionally have a cup but do they actually use it? When not using US units I would expect them more usually to follow British practice and we habitually measure flour by weight. I can't speak for Australia but in Canada yes, many many recipes use things like cups. Measuring in grams is relegated to french cookbooks. Also lol "US units" from the country that still has speed signs in mph
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Nov 29, 2020 00:49
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feedmegin posted:Australians may notionally have a cup but do they actually use it? When not using US units I would expect them more usually to follow British practice and we habitually measure flour by weight. Yeah most people in Australia use cup measurements. Our cup is 250ml. I generally use weight measurements when baking but if I am whipping up pikelets or something I will just use cups because I have memorised 1 cup flour 3/4 cup milk etc which is easier to remember than weight measurements (unless you memorise ratios) Big Willy Style fucked around with this message at 01:34 on Nov 29, 2020 |
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Nov 29, 2020 01:05
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Please don't have the dumb measurement argument anywhere but especially not in this thread, thank you and Jupiter bless.
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Nov 29, 2020 01:10
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Grand Fromage posted:Please don't have the dumb measurement argument anywhere but especially not in this thread, thank you and Jupiter bless. Not 28 grams of forgiveness in this man.
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Nov 29, 2020 01:12
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Ola posted:Not 28 grams of forgiveness in this man. The only reason I know how many grams are in an ounce is because of drugz
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Nov 29, 2020 01:33
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And the fact that you don’t know its 28.35g to an ounce means your dealers were shorting you.
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Nov 29, 2020 13:28
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Well, to bring this back on topic, are there any good books or resources on ancient systems of measurement? I remember reading somewhere that Ancient Sumerian merchants were using the same set of weights as the contemporaneous Indus Valley civilization.
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Nov 29, 2020 14:58
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Giant site of South American rock art: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/nov/29/sistine-chapel-of-the-ancients-rock-art-discovered-in-remote-amazon-forest
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Nov 29, 2020 19:39
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Grand Fromage posted:Giant site of South American rock art: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/nov/29/sistine-chapel-of-the-ancients-rock-art-discovered-in-remote-amazon-forest That's really cool!
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Nov 30, 2020 00:15
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Relevant https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000mqn7 Imho: if you want a career in academia cave art would be good . We’ve only found like 1% of it or whatever and you can make up whatever hypotheses you want and probably find evidence ! But that podcast I linked was good on this
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Nov 30, 2020 00:24
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euphronius posted:Relevant I mean we have only recorded/discovered something like 10-20%, of the archaeological record period and thats a very rough estimate.
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Nov 30, 2020 00:32
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Well, to bring this back on topic, are there any good books or resources on ancient systems of measurement? I legit would be interested in this as well. Seems like it might be a way to trace commercial connections?
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Nov 30, 2020 01:58
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Not sure if this is the right thread to ask this in but I don't see people talking about this kind of history anywhere else - are there any good books or articles on the process of learning languages after first contact? I'm reading a book about the Opium War that starts talking about how people learned Chinese - they basically tried to find a Chinese person that spoke Latin and learn it using Latin as the third language both people knew. However obviously somebody had to learn Chinese without a common language. And unlike now there was no dictionary or reference to help them. So what did they do? I'll take an answer to this question for any language, Chinese is just on my mind because of the book.
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Nov 30, 2020 02:04
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I'd assume just immersion and picking it up by context over a long period of time, same way a child would
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Nov 30, 2020 02:05
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Badger of Basra posted:However obviously somebody had to learn Chinese without a common language. And unlike now there was no dictionary or reference to help them. So what did they do? I'll take an answer to this question for any language, Chinese is just on my mind because of the book. There are some funny stories in a history of Western encounters with Buddhism about the Jesuits who came to Japan the first time. They did NOT have a very good translator contact, and so they got pranked because someone told them a term for "God" which they incorporated into general proselytizing behavior: "Worship only God! Worship only God!" Except that the term they used was basically a euphemism for dick.
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Nov 30, 2020 02:34
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ThatBasqueGuy posted:I'd assume just immersion and picking it up by context over a long period of time, same way a child would Also lots of pointing and basically going "What is this" though that only gets you so far.
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Nov 30, 2020 04:55
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Nessus posted:I think in most cases you looked for someone who you had a common language with - Latin is kind of a weird example but, for instance, you might know Russian or Turkish, and you could find a guy who knows that and also Chinese, who can get you started. In the case of Japanese missionaries, I believe they found people in Indonesia etc. who were originally from Japan and who were fluent in the local trade language, and worked back from there.
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Nov 30, 2020 14:27
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Has anybody read Gimbutas' work on the neolithic Danube culture? I had been lead to believe she proposed a matriarchal society but today read that "based on the roughly egalitarian graves and other material evidence, she concluded that Neolithic societies of Europe and Anatolia had “a balanced, nonpatriarchal and nonmatriarchal social system.” " I don't particularly trust the source though, it's explicitly an attempt to push back against Gimbutas' detractors. http://www.archaeomythology.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Spretnak-Journal-7.pdf
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Dec 1, 2020 23:47
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Weka posted:Has anybody read Gimbutas' work on the neolithic Danube culture? I had been lead to believe she proposed a matriarchal society but today read that "based on the roughly egalitarian graves and other material evidence, she concluded that Neolithic societies of Europe and Anatolia had “a balanced, nonpatriarchal and nonmatriarchal social system.” "
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Dec 2, 2020 00:48
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Weka posted:Has anybody read Gimbutas' work on the neolithic Danube culture? I had been lead to believe she proposed a matriarchal society but today read that "based on the roughly egalitarian graves and other material evidence, she concluded that Neolithic societies of Europe and Anatolia had “a balanced, nonpatriarchal and nonmatriarchal social system.” " Whether she proposed a matriarchal society depends on your definition of matriarchy, I guess; as the article itself acknowledges, some people define a matriarchal society as one that's matrilineal, matrilocal, and doesn't systematically oppress women (which would describe some societies that still exist today), while others take it to mean a society that systematically oppresses men in much the same way that patriarchal societies systematically oppress women (which I'm not sure has ever existed; at the very least it's very unusual).
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Dec 2, 2020 02:27
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Weka posted:Has anybody read Gimbutas' work on the neolithic Danube culture? I had been lead to believe she proposed a matriarchal society but today read that "based on the roughly egalitarian graves and other material evidence, she concluded that Neolithic societies of Europe and Anatolia had “a balanced, nonpatriarchal and nonmatriarchal social system.” " I was just listening to Tides of History episodes on old Europe, Patrick Wyman started that no modern scholars really think Gimbutas' conclusions are correct anymore.
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Dec 2, 2020 02:48
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:I was just listening to Tides of History episodes on old Europe, Patrick Wyman started that no modern scholars really think Gimbutas' conclusions are correct anymore. What did he say her conclusions where? That article I posted is just a giant screed about how she's been completely misinterpreted. Silver2195 posted:Whether she proposed a matriarchal society depends on your definition of matriarchy, I guess; as the article itself acknowledges, some people define a matriarchal society as one that's matrilineal, matrilocal, and doesn't systematically oppress women (which would describe some societies that still exist today), while others take it to mean a society that systematically oppresses men in much the same way that patriarchal societies systematically oppress women (which I'm not sure has ever existed; at the very least it's very unusual). Which did she suggest existed is my question.
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Dec 2, 2020 10:07
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Weka posted:What did he say her conclusions where? That article I posted is just a giant screed about how she's been completely misinterpreted. Gimbuntas pretty clearly denied the existence of matriarchy in the latter sense anywhere in Eurasia. quote:We do not find in Old Europe, nor in all of the Old World, a system of autocratic rule by women with an equivalent suppression of men. Rather, we find a structure in which the sexes are more or less on equal footing.
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Dec 2, 2020 16:07
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Weka posted:Which did she suggest existed is my question. And no, evolutionary biology wasn't heavily interdisciplinary with ancient world studies at this time. So in retrospect, it is a bizarre conclusion. A fertility cult makes sense in her Old Europe since increased numbers of people is what agrarianism is all about. But it does not suggest that women are valued, only that wombs are valued. For all we know, statues of ancient fertility goddesses were straight up porn and dudes jacked off in front of them, which I consider much more likely than those statues reflecting a 4,000 year old spiritual and political commitment to gender equality which happens to mirror the anti-war/-patriarchy positions of her time.
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Dec 2, 2020 17:29
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Thank you all.
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Dec 2, 2020 21:13
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The habit some circles have of declaring every newly discovered ancient culture egalitarian/pacifist/matriarchal has always seemed to me like some kind of weird outgrowth of the "Noble Savage" fallacy. Such claims seem to almost always be paired with some kind of romanticist rejection of modern life.
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Dec 3, 2020 11:36
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There are some senses in which prehistoric communities were probably by necessity more "egalitarian". For example, before we had pack animals human capacity for transport and physical labour was so limited that agricultural communities had to live next to each other, and share the workload of many tasks which a family can do on their own with the aid of oxen or horses. That doesn't necessarily imply any kind of gender equality, but it's always worth considering material factors in shaping cultural ideas. Domesticating the horse for example changed so many things, from mundane farmyard work to international warfare, that it can be hard for us to wrap our brains around the idea of human culture before horses
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Dec 3, 2020 12:32
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Ras Het posted:There are some senses in which prehistoric communities were probably by necessity more "egalitarian". For example, before we had pack animals human capacity for transport and physical labour was so limited that agricultural communities had to live next to each other, and share the workload of many tasks which a family can do on their own with the aid of oxen or horses. That doesn't necessarily imply any kind of gender equality, but it's always worth considering material factors in shaping cultural ideas. Domesticating the horse for example changed so many things, from mundane farmyard work to international warfare, that it can be hard for us to wrap our brains around the idea of human culture before horses Not really. Horses were domesticated for their meat, and it took ages before they were useful for warfare. And it took until the invention of the horse collar before they were useful for farmyard work.
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Dec 3, 2020 14:44
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ChubbyChecker posted:Not really. Horses were domesticated for their meat, and it took ages before they were useful for warfare. And it took until the invention of the horse collar before they were useful for farmyard work. That's not the point and why I mentioned oxen
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Dec 3, 2020 15:01
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galagazombie posted:The habit some circles have of declaring every newly discovered ancient culture egalitarian/pacifist/matriarchal has always seemed to me like some kind of weird outgrowth of the "Noble Savage" fallacy. Such claims seem to almost always be paired with some kind of romanticist rejection of modern life. I think there’s a value in emphasizing it to show history isn’t just monolithically 100% awful to women, especially to a non-historically interested audience who are probably the ones reading most of those headlines. e.g. The impression you might get from Korea/Japan’s most recent (and culturally most prominent) premodern history is that since women were horrifically downtrodden then, it must have always been that way; it’s valuable to emphasize—especially to about 50% of the population—that for a very long time it wasn’t.
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Dec 3, 2020 15:11
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Ras Het posted:There are some senses in which prehistoric communities were probably by necessity more "egalitarian". Yeah. Also, if you measure "degree of egalitarianism" by looking at, say, the range of objects within one material culture, it's likely that a materially "poor" culture will appear more egalitarian than one which buries its king bedecked in gold and jewels. The materially richer one probably is less egalitarian in material standards, but the leaders of each culture might be equally elitist and oppressive, relatively speaking.
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Dec 3, 2020 15:33
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There's studies from cultures around today where we know they aren't, though. I guess there's always a danger in extrapolating that to prehistoric/early historic cultures, but I think some of this is needlessly cynical. Like: physeter posted:For all we know, statues of ancient fertility goddesses were straight up porn and dudes jacked off in front of them, which I consider much more likely than those statues reflecting a 4,000 year old spiritual and political commitment to gender equality which happens to mirror the anti-war/-patriarchy positions of her time. I don't know about it in the case of European venus figures and such; who knows, you might be right. But in ancient Manchuria/Korea/Japan (and this continues in some traditions to this day), there's plenty of evidence to suggest that women had high status spiritually, and in some cultures, in some respects, possibly actually higher than men (as much as it's possible to know from 1500 year old evidence).
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Dec 3, 2020 15:53
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I do feel like people tend to forget about a lot of the labor that women did throughout history. Especially when they're focusing on wars and ignoring the bulk of the work of running society. Like fighting is important, especially when you're governed by a monarchy that won't respect "soft" political power as much, but they're usually just a fraction of people's lives.
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Dec 3, 2020 16:20
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Oh yeah, there was a talk a few weeks ago on representations of ancient history in games* where that got brought up a bit; like you'd get a board game about making the wonders of the world where you have to direct your economy towards it but every single role shown would be e.g. men mining in a quarry, men making tools, men doing construction etc, kind of implying women had no part in them getting built. Ancient queens get glamorized a fair bit, but more mundane roles are often forgotten. *("Re-Rolling the Past," it probably has VODs and I expect it'd appeal to some people itt)
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Dec 3, 2020 16:36
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galagazombie posted:The habit some circles have of declaring every newly discovered ancient culture egalitarian/pacifist/matriarchal has always seemed to me like some kind of weird outgrowth of the "Noble Savage" fallacy. Such claims seem to almost always be paired with some kind of romanticist rejection of modern life. And who knows, maybe Gimbutas was right. I look at something like Gobekle Tepe and my brain just melts, and I'm open to just about anything from that period.
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Dec 3, 2020 16:46
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