Absolution said:
Tai is too big for that list.
It is like Turkic or Germanic.
A massive ethnic group which includes many different peoples and even civilizations.
I hate repeating myself. But to reiterate: the difference between the court cultures (and this is what we're talking about) of
what-is-now Thailand and Laos were no greater than those of courts inside Thailand and, hell, even Laos. This is quite beside the point that even talking about "Thailand" or "Laos" is anachronistic in the extreme. Suggesting otherwise would require that one project colonial boundaries back into the distant past. This is patently absurd because as TK noted, Lanna straddled both sides of the modern border. This begs the question: what then is Lanna? Thai or Laotian. (Hint: the answer is neither).
Furthermore, the use of "Tai" to denote an elite culture (not ethnicity) common to courts is well accepted. While I accept one could confuse my use of "Tai-as-a-court-culture" with "Tai(-Kedai)-as-a-linguistic-group" (which I hasten to add is never ever ever ever used to denote an ethnic group), I fail to see how that was possible considering what I wrote. Among other things: I never once mentioned language, which is, I think, irrelevant for the most part in the formation of durable identities in Southeast Asia. The implication here being that you can't even be bothered to parse other peoples posts. I can forgive Civciv5 because he's probably Laotian, judging by his responses, and has kept it rather cool. What I can't understand is why someone who hasn't been suckled on the nationalist teat can be this closed minded.
I also strenuously object to the conflation of linguistic groups - e.g. Turkic, Germanic and Tai - with ethnic groups. It's inaccurate and doesn't hold up to even the most cursory examination. Consider that Malagasy, one of the official languages of Madagascar, is actually a part of the Barito sub-branch of Indo-Melanesian. Using the logic you've employed here, would suggest that Dayaks in Borneo were of the same ethnic group as Malagasy people, despite an almost complete lack of historical contact. The Germanic example is no less ridiculous: grouping Iceland and Germany. And Turkic would have me link Uighurs with Azerbaijanis.
You also can't complain about lumping groups together into unwieldy groups such that "they include many different peoples and even civilizations" because of your ungodly inclusion of "the Indonesians" whatever-the-hell-that-word-is-supposed-to-mean-in-600-freaking-AD. Even using Melayu is problematic, because it didn't even mean a court culture at that point but a place - Malayu.
Plotinus said:
Personally I'd be inclined to say that one cannot define "civilisation" any more than one can define "sport". Any definition that one produces will inevitably exclude some cases that one would like to include, and include some that one would like to exclude. That doesn't mean that the term can't be used meaningfully any more than "sport" can, it just means that one has to judge on a case-by-case basis without clear criteria. But that's all right, we do that all the time. The assumption that you can't have a meaningful discussion about something without having a watertight definition of it is a Platonic one, and it's wrong.
This cannot be emphasized enough. There are always exceptions. The mere fact of them existing doesn't mean we shouldn't bother, but that we should work to include them, or at least acknowledge them as being exceptions.
TheLastOne36 said:
I swear I remember reading somewhere that most Mongols were actually settled in central Asia, and lived sedentary lives.
There were always lots of settled and semi-settled Mongols.