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The Structures o f Everyday Life

(3) One final comment: the small areas of dense population were not all of the same kind. The Indian Archipelago and Indochina really only had a scattering of populated regions, compared with the solidly occupied zones (Western Europe, Japan, Korea, China). India itself was not fully occupied by its mixed civilizations. Islam was a series of coasts - of sahels - on the margins of empty spaces, on the edges of deserts, rivers and seas, hugging the sides of Black Africa, on the coast of Slaves (Zanzibar) and the Niger loop, where it built and rebuilt its quarrelsome empires. Even Europe merged into emptiness towards the east, beyond the wild marches. Wild men and animals It is always very tempting to see only the civilizations. They are the main thing. Besides, they have expended a vast amount of skill on rediscovering their former selves, their tools, costumes, houses, practices, even their traditional songs. Their museums are there to be visited. Every culture has its own distinctive features: Chinese windmills turn horizontally; in Istanbul, the scissors have hollow blades, and the luxury spoons are made of wood from the pepper plant; Japanese and Chinese anvils are different from ours; not one nail was used to build the boats on the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and so on. And each has its own plants, domestic animals (or at any rate its own way of treating them), its characteristic houses, its own foods. The mere smell of cooking can evoke a whole civilization. However, not all the beauty of the world nor all the salt of the earth was contained in the civilizations. Outside them, encircling their frontiers and some times even invading their territory, lurked primitive life, and the empty, echoing wastelands. Here was played out the saga of man and the animals, the golden legend of ancient peasant agriculture, a paradise in the eyes of the civilized who might wish to escape there from the constraints of urban life. The Far East yields the most numerous examples of this wild humanity: the islands of the Indian Archipelago, the mountains of China, the north of the Japanese island of Yeso, Formosa or the heart of India. The European lands were free of these wild tribes who burned up the high-ground forest and grew rice on the dry land they had cleared.94 Europe domesticated its mountain people very early on, tamed them by not treating them as if they were pariahs. In the Far East, by contrast, no such communication or co-operation occurred. The innumerable clashes that took place there were unmercifully brutal. The Chinese waged an unceasing war against their wild mountain population, stock-raisers living in stinking houses. It was the same in India. In 1565, in the peninsula of the Deccan, the Hindu realm of Vijayanagar was annihilated on the battlefield of Talikota by the Muslim cavalry and artillery of the sultans of the north. The conqueror did not occupy the enormous capital immediately. It was left defence less and without carts or beast of burden, which had all departed with the army. The wild people from the surrounding brush and jungle - Brindsharis, Lambadis