Lecture Slides on Cannabis Legalization

Dear Readers,
The slides from my final lecture of the academic year are available at the link below. The lecture examined the impending legalization of cannabis in California, as well as its status elsewhere in the world.
Cannabis Legalization
 

Caste Controversies Slides

Dear Readers,
The slides from my recent lecture on caste controversies in India and on a related controversy about teaching Indian/South Asian history in California are available at the link below:
Caste Controversies in India
 
 
 

Lecture Slides on Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Nagorno-Karabakh

The slides from my lecture this week on the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region are available at the link below, in pdf format.
Armenia, Azerbaijan & Nagorno Karabakh
 
 

Lecture Slides on Kurdistan

Dear Readers,
My lecture this week for my course on the history and geography of current global events examined the Kurds and the idea of Kurdistan. The slides from this lecture are available at the link below.
Lecture on the Kurds and Kurdistan

Radicalization of Russia’s Muslims—Are Crimean Tatars Next? (Part 2)

[Part 1 can be read here. Thanks to Iryna Novosyolova for a helpful discussion of some of the issues discussed in this post.]
 
In 2014, the Russian Federation acquired another Muslim group that may prove troublesome both within Russia and globally: the Crimean Tatars. According to the 2002 Russian census, there were only 4,131 Crimean Tatars living in the country, concentrated …

Radicalization of Russia’s Muslims—Are Crimean Tatars Next? (Part 1)

[Thanks to Iryna Novosyolova for a helpful discussion of some of the issues discussed in this post.]
 
A recent article in Foreign Affairs listed the use of the French language as the best predictor of a country’s rate of Sunni radicalization and violence, and particularly of the percentage of a country’s Muslim population that joins in the international Jihad. According to …

India: Milk in the Northwest; Meat in the Northeast

But milk drinking and the consumption of other dairy products is by no means uniformly distributed across India. Instead, as the maps posted here indicate, the country has a strong longitudinal gradient in this regard.

Tatarstan: A “Hostage of Freezing Relations between Russia and Turkey”?

[Many thanks to Ekaterina Lyutikova for most helpful discussions of some of the issues discussed in this post, as well as for the photos, some of which are used as illustrations below. I’m also grateful to Martin W. Lewis for helpful discussions and edits and for modifying the Wikipedia map of Percentage of Ethnic Tatars, used below.]

Tatarstan has not been …

Population History, Population Density, and Cultural Values in the Philippines

Owing to this long history of internal migration, the population distribution of the Philippines has become somewhat more even. Mindanao is no longer a frontier zone, and is now moderately populated by Philippine standards

Chavacano: A Spanish-Based Creole Language of the Philippines

Chavacano is interesting from both linguistic and historical-geographical perspectives. To begin with, it is widely considered to be one of the world’s oldest creole tongues, with a history dating back some 400 years.

Base-Maps of the Philippines & Linguistic/Regional Controversies in the Archipelago

GeoCurrents is continuing its distribution of customizable base-maps, constructed in easy-to-use presentation software. (The files are found at the bottom of this post, in both PowerPoint and Keynote [preferred] formats.) Today’s contribution is a province-level map of the Philippines. This map is available in several versions (with province names and without them, in color and in grey, aggregated into regions, …

Maritime Linkages in the Linguistic Geography of the Philippines

The best example of seas connecting opposing shores is probably the Philippines, a quintessentially archipelagic country composed of more than 7,000 islands.

The Regionalization of California, Part 1

Like all US states—and indeed, virtually political units—California is divided into a number of informal and special-purpose regions. Regional designations in California are used ubiquitously in the media, in academic reports, and in everyday conversation. They are unavoidable and necessary. But as is generally the case with regionalization schemes, the numbers, names, and spatial outlines of California’s regions vary widely …

Is Japan a Religiously Divided Country? Fabian Drixler on Japan’s East/West Divide

 
I was surprised by the depiction of Japan in Scolbert08’s map of world religion. The map depicts the main island of Honshu as essentially bifurcated into a more Buddhist west and a more Shinto east and northeast*; Shinto is also shown as more prevalent on the island of Shikoku and to a lesser extent in southern Kyushu, whereas Hokkaido in …

Additional Oddities of Kiribati’s Line Islands

Before moving on from the current series of posts on Kiribati, it is worth exploring a few additional aspects of this intriguing country.
The first of these points may be somewhat trivial but is still worth mentioning: The recent Gilbertese colonization of the Line Islands undermines the stock idea that Polynesia can be delimited within a vast triangle, with apexes situated in …