The fertile plains of the Mekong Delta, coupled with predictable monsoon rains in the wet season (June–October) create the perfect environment for wet rice cultivation (Figure 7.4a–7.4b). Vietnam is the second largest exporter of rice globally, after Thailand.
The Mekong Delta is basically a giant rice machine. It’s super fertile and floods predictably, which is why Vietnam is one of the top rice exporters in the world. So cool!!
Water is a dominant theme in the physical geography of Southeast Asia. Mainland Southeast Asia has hundreds of miles of coastland. Even in the expansive interior, river systems, including the Mekong, direct life in Southeast Asia toward water. The thousands of islands of Southeast Asia are volcanic arcs formed along plate boundaries with highlands in the interior surrounded by miles of coastlines.
This really shows how Southeast Asia is built around water—rivers, coasts, islands, all of it. It explains why so much of life, culture, and even jobs revolve around rivers and the ocean.
The growth in IT and business process management (BPM) has brought higher wages and greater wealth to the 3.86 million Indians working in these sectors. At the same time India has more poor people than any other country in the world, with 21.2 percent of its 1.29 billion people living on less than $1.90 a day. Understanding the complexities of South Asia today requires looking beyond the call centers of India and seeing the vast diversity of experiences and everyday existences throughout the region.
Even though India’s tech economy is taking off and making billions, the wealth doesn’t reach everyone. It’s wild how you can have luxury tech campuses and extreme poverty existing side-by-side in the same country.
Café Coffee Day caters to the upwardly mobile young professionals who work in India's information technology industry and related consulting firms. With more than 1,500 locations in India, V.G. Siddhartha, founder of Café Coffee Day, also owns the plantations in India where the coffee beans are grown and produces the espresso machines used in the cafes.
This shows how India’s tech boom didn’t just change jobs—it changed the whole vibe of cities like Bangalore. Coffee shops, night shifts, and busy streets at 8 PM all reflect how the IT industry is shaping everyday life for young people.
Said calls on us to reconsider many issues, including Southwest Asia's common name: the Middle East and Near East, terms, applied by western Europeans who saw the region as midway between Europe and East Asia (which they called the Far East). Since regional geographic names based on directions imply a perspective, they do not work for people with different points of view. In this case, “the East” meant areas east of Europe. The names Southwest Asia and North Africa are more accurate, since these terms use the center of continents as a reference point rather than naming the region relative to Europe.
Said basically says naming regions from a European point of view is biased. Calling it Southwest Asia/North Africa is way more accurate and not centered around Europe.
He was part of a group of painters known as Orientalists, derived from the Latin oriens, which means “east.” The Middle East fascinated this group of nineteenth-century artists, hailing from Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Spain, who traveled east to paint local, archaeological and biblical scenes.
These artists weren’t documenting reality—they were painting what Europeans wanted the “East” to look like. It helped build a really stereotypical, exotic vibe around the region.
The equator cuts the continent in half, and the rainforest is along the equator. Tropical climates occur around the equator because this area receives direct or relatively direct insolation (incoming solar radiation) for the entire year (Figure 4.4b&4.4c).
Geography is way more complicated than I thought! Africa has such a variety of climates—not just deserts but rainforests, savannas, and even snow-capped mountains like Kilimanjaro. Climate, wind patterns, and ocean currents all affect how people live and farm. It’s really cool how people adapt to these conditions with so much traditional knowledge.
Some of us might see a downtrodden, impoverished woman forced simultaneously to care for her child and to farm with simple tools. Others might interpret the tree-filled field in the background as a sign of backwardness, of potential farmland unused, or the fallen wood behind her as evidence of deforestation.
This makes me rethink how I’ve been taught to view Africa. I realize now that stereotypes can hide the skill, knowledge, and resilience of the people who live there.
In Africa South of the Sahara, women produce roughly 70 percent of the food. The woman photographed here is farming peanuts that she will use in her family's meals or sell at the market. Why the simple farming implement? She uses a short-handled hoe because these are heavy clay soils, making long-handled hoes less effective. A motorized plow would destroy the soils in this area after only a few years of use.
Wow, I had no idea women were doing so much of the food production! It’s really impressive how much responsibility falls on women like the mother in Mali, balancing childcare and farming. It makes me think about gender roles back home and how women’s work is often undervalued.
San had more time for leisure, slept more, ate a more balanced diet, and worked less than their “more developed” farming neighbors. The San and other hunter-gatherers around the world know where they can find different resources, including food, shelter, and water, during the course of the year, and they migrate seasonally and purposely to find resources necessary for survival
It’s honestly so eye-opening to see that the San work way fewer hours but still have everything they need, while people in “developed” countries are constantly stressed and overworked. It really makes me think that modern life isn’t necessarily better — it’s just different.
The San people of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa are one remaining such group. What thoughts come to mind when you see a picture of hunter-gatherers? Most Westerners see such groups as primitive, backward, or underdeveloped. We may think of hunter-gatherers as “less developed” than city dwellers in New York or London. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we likely place people on a continuum of development, a scale typically linked to indicators of material well-being. What criteria do we use to measure development in our mind, and why do we use these criteria? Development implies progress, but progress in what? Does development mean amassing wealth? Does development mean access to clean water and a steady food supply? Can people be poor and developed at the same time? While we may perceive hunter-gatherers as primitive or underdeveloped, hunter-gatherers necessarily worse off than we are? Studies suggest that one group of San spent 12 to 19 hours per week working to obtain food as compared to the 40-some-hour workweek of most people in the so-called developed world.
The discussion about the San people really challenges the idea of them being “underdeveloped.” Honestly, I feel like they actually use their time really well and live in a sustainable way that works for them. In some ways, that makes them more economically balanced than people might assume when they call them “underdeveloped.”