09-27-2024, 06:00 AM
(This post was last modified: 09-27-2024, 06:08 AM by Megsychan. Edited 1 time in total.)
(09-25-2024, 04:10 AM)Fangorn Wrote: Sorry I have nothing to add but that was very interesting to read particularly about "Singa Pura" and the very clear perspective you have.
Hey, I didn't want to just spam this thread until I had a post to give a more substantive reply to, but I just want to say that I really appreciated hearing this. Thank you.
(09-27-2024, 01:33 AM)DarknessRising Wrote:(09-25-2024, 01:31 AM)Megsychan Wrote: Once again, if people think Jakarta is an Asian city, not an Oceanian city, I would not fight them on that. My main reason for putting them in Oceania is what I said in the article; I just think Oceania needed the help in representation because it'd just be a list of Australian cities otherwise. Oceania is by far the most misunderstood of the seven main continents (the fact that for a while, English would insist on calling it "Australia" when its much more than that is annoying); Perhaps I'm going too far in the other direction, but at least I'm bringing people's attention that it exists.Nothing to really do with the article, but interesting debate around the Oceania V Australia as a continent.
As someone in Australia, we still very much are referring to the continent as Australia. By definition, it has to be one continuous landmass, which obviously Oceania is not. Now, we can see how utterly stupid and backwards that is when you look at Japan for Asia, Madagascar for Africa, Carribean for North America etc. Something like Soccer (football) world cups, Australia would have to qualify under Asia, New Zealand would have a free pass as part of Oceania aka pacific island nations. Then you get into Australasia and other sub regions, it just real murky out here.
Firstly, I don't know if you are or aren't agreeing with me that Oceania is a better frame of reference than Australia. If you are agreeing, then just consider the following a rant in the abstract, and I apologize for the miscommunication in advance. I only realized halfway into writing this that I don't actually know where you stand on this personally, and I really don't want to scrap everything and ask for a clarification.
The problem is "continuous landmass" sounds scientific, until you realize that what we define as a continuous landmass is rather arbitrary and just based completely on vibes. For example, there's really no hard boundary that divides Europe and Asia from a geological sense; the Urals are a pretty small mountain range all things considered geologically, and the Eurasian plate extends far into (but not all of; I wasn't joking when a substantial part of Siberia is counterintuitively in the North American plate) Sibera, past the Urals. Flora and Fauna also pass through the Urals freely with no hard zoological or botanical boundaries between the two. The fact that we divide Europe away from Asia is really just based on cultural reasons, with Europe in particular wanting to define itself as being separate from the rest of Eurasia. Africa is a little bit more "real" in terms of being separate from the rest of the Old World (hence why we call the three combined Afro-Eurasia; there's no real snappy name incorporating all three together) since the Sinai Peninsula is more of a hard boundary due to its remoteness in being a deert, but still, technically, "Afro-Eurasia" is the continuous landmass. Until at least we built the Suez Canal. And to further my point, North and South America share the hardest land border of all continents in the seven continent model that share a land border in the Darien Gap (extremely inhospitable and virtually impossible to travel over land even in 2024. Very hard zoological and botantical hard divide where things just do not cross unless they can find a way to do it over the ocean.), yet its actually the Americas that end up usually combined if you go with the most common six continent model. This is likely because those who use the six continent model value the cultural continuity of Latin America, and wanting to model that in some way, than they do about strict geological or environmental rigor.
Basically, unless you define Afro-Eurasia and America as the only two continents and reject their various subdivisions, you are using more than continuous landmass as a means to define continents. Not only that, but then you'd have to start rejecting certain islands being part of continents too. The vast majority of Iceland is also within the North American plate and has very little to do with Eurasia even when looking at submerged landmass, so should we stop regarding Iceland as being part of Europe? Half of Japan also at least traditionally considered tectonically part of North America (I've seen there's now a proposed Okhotsk plate which, while not universally accepted, would split off Japan and a fragment of Siberia off from North America and into its own thing entirely), should we move that off of Asia and into North America as well, or at the very least not Asia? The Philippines and most of Southeast Asia are two different but related plates separate from Eurasia, should we consider the Philippines and the Malay Archipelago separate continents altogether?
Oceania, meanwhile, does have a coherent meaning, even if loose (since I can admit continents out of a plate tectonic context don't have any meaning other than being social constructs). It's not just the "other" continent, it represents the various island chains of the Pacific that have had extensive cultural, geological, and zoological/botantical connections to each other. Many of these chains are connected together in a vast submerged landmass known as Zealandia, which encompasses some but not all of Oceania. Underwater, Zealandia and Australia's edges are just about close to one another as Siberia and Alaska are with the Bering Strait (indeed, tectonically, Australia and North Island are in the same plate, much like the constantly mentioned portion of Siberia with the rest of North America. South Island is divided in half between Australia and the Pacific Plate). The region is massively dominated by the Austronesian peoples, of which the Polynesian subfamily is perhaps the most well known, but also includes Malays, Melanesians, etc. However, that is also not so say that there isn't non-Austronesians, such as the Australian Aborigines, much like how no other continent is wholly dominant by one family of cultures (Even Europe has more than Indo-Europeans, such as the Finno-Urglics or the Basque). The extent of Oceania is currently loose due to its relatively recent entrance into the classification scheme (only first proposed in the 1800s), but Australia is certainly considered a core part of it to those who abscribe to the idea of there being an Oceania in the first place.
I'm actually aware of Australia's standing in the AFC. Australia was actually a founding member of the OFC in 1966; it actually initially saw itself as being part of this greater Oceania initially. However, Australia eventually left to join the AFC in 2006 because of the way World Cup qualifications happen. The system at the time (it changed recently because in part of how blatantly unfair it was to Oceania) was that the OFC wasn't guaranteed a single slot in the World Cup. You could literally be the best country in Oceania for soccer and not get invited to the tournament because there was a quota for regions based on perceived relative strength and number of members for each region, and Oceania was just given a big fat zero. Instead, the winner of Oceania's qualification tournament would have to play either North America's third place, or South America or Asia's fourth place, to determine which one of the two gets in (they alternated which interconference game they played). This, of course, makes it extremely hard for Oceania teams to move on to the World Cup, since you have zero room for error. Meanwhile, Europe got 13 teams--nearly half of all slots-- that just qualified at the end of their qualification tournament. Didn't even need playoffs against other conferences. Qualifying as an Asian nation is just easier than qualifying as an Oceanian country, so Australia left the OFC to join the AFC.