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From: low@unc.cs.unc.edu (Kah-Chan Low)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: Call For Discussion about creating soc.culture.asean
Message-ID: <9895@thorin.cs.unc.edu>
Date: 9 Oct 89 20:02:09 GMT
References: <31779@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <12947@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU> <31785@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Sender: news@thorin.cs.unc.edu
Reply-To: low@unc.cs.unc.edu (Kah-Chan Low)
Organization: University Of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Lines: 43

In article <31785@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> timlee@ernie.Berkeley.EDU (Timothy J. Lee) writes:
>In article <12947@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU> harish@guille.ECE.ORST.EDU (Harish Pillay) writes:
> 
>|There are now groups such as soc.culture.china, .indian, .hongkong, .taiwan,
>|.japan, .korea, .sri-lanka, .greece, .turkish.  Pray tell me what these
>|mean?  Aren't these political entities?  Isn't a nation a political entity?
>
>Yes, BUT these also describe cultural groupings(*).  How do the cultures
>of the ASEAN nations have more in common with each other than they do
>with Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar?
>
Definitely.  Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar (and to a certain extent
Thailand) are known collectively as Indochina, while malaysia, singapore,
phillipines, brunei, and indonesia are collectively known as the insular
part of south-east asia.

Traditionally, Indochina had been subject heavily to cultural influences
from India and China, while the insular south-east asia cultures reflect
a lot of Arabic/Islamic influence on top of the earlier Indian Influence.

The native languages spoken there belong to the family of Malayo-Polynesian
languages while those spoken in Indochina are definitely not Malayo-
Polynesian languages.

Because of different colonial experience and subsequent economic policies,
the insular south-east asia is now culturally much more westernized than
in Indochina, not to mention the fact that the legal, financial, and 
other systems which affect life in both big and small ways are modelled
along western european/american lines.  That is not the case in
Indochina.

The result is, presently, there are vast cultural and socio-economic 
differences between the ASEAN countries and Indochina countries.

Most importantly, we (the people from the 6 countries) do not perceive
the Indochina countries as "on the same boat" as ours.

If there's no justification for creating a newsgroup for the six countries
apart from one that covers the whole of south-east asia because "those
countries are all the same", then there is even less justification for
creating soc.culture.[japan china hongkong taiwan korea] as separate newsgroups.

kcl