Changing boundary settings and unequal stabilities: geographic and environmental impacts on linguistic, religious and political dominance in Inner Asia
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | This paper started with own experiences with travels across Taklamakan Desert and reports about daily floodings in mountain rivers from Central Asian mountain glaciers. These experiences, geographic, and other related data show that population density in remote Inner Asia is often related to changing vulnerability of ancient human populations living in the deserts, in the Gobi and in high mountains. It especially depends on changing interplays between harder environmental shifts and related ethnic lifestyles (pastoral, sedentary, mixed), particular expansions of ethnic groups, clan competitions and interacting ways of religious justification. These complex interactions are essentially based on changing and unequal stabilities of particular cultures, which comprise interplay of more factors and drivers. Here the natural boundary is not always decisive factor of successful or unsuccessful expansion or on the contrary defense for any particular community. On the other side some ancient states were not only „imagining“ their own natural boundaries, but they were also strengthening their protective forces (by building walls, establishing armed units and conducting preventive attacks usually from the side of sedentary groups), while other nations just used their patterns of socio-political dominance to periodically take the highest power. After explaining complexity of these processes in Inner Asia, this paper was focused on the patterns of interplay between natural geographic borders and comparative macro-history of Inner Asian neighboring populations divided by natural boundaries on one side but still interacting across them on the other side. |
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