Preface: “Rice and Language Across Asia”

Abstract

This special issue of Rice presents a selection of papers from the international symposium “Rice and Language Across Asia: Crops, Movement, and Social Change,” held at Cornell University, Ithaca, USA, on September 22–25, 2011. The goal of this meeting was to reexamine the relationship between the beginnings and spread of rice agriculture and cultural, social, and linguistic developments of early Asian societies. Rice farming is but one aspect of the development of early agriculture inAsia, which of course also involved animal domestication and the adoption of other crops such as millets, tubers, and other vegetables, but the special focus on rice is justified because of the highly significant role of rice in the agricultural transformations and expansions across Asia over the last ten millennia. This included the growth and dispersal of early human populations, as well as the dramatic influences on social organization that accompanied the introduction, development, and increased reliance on rice farming. Recent years have seen rapid advances in the multiple related fields of research that bear on these questions: in linguistics and historical linguistics, in particular in the fields of language reconstruction and subgrouping; in both human genetics and plant genetics; in archaeology, including especially in the burgeoning subfield of archaeobotany; in anthropology (see O’Connor this volume and O’Connor 1995), deploying a deep historical and regional approach of a certain kind that had become uncommon in anthropology), as well as in other related fields, such as economic history, climate research, and others. For some time now, scholars in these disparate yet related disciplines have grappled with the pursuit of data and the comparison with results from other disciplines: see for example the collected essays volumes by Sagart et al. (2005), Sanchez-Mazas et al. (2008), Petraglia and Allchin (2007), Peregrine et al. (2009), Enfield and White (2011) and others. All face the problems of how to compare research results and how to achieve interdisciplinary communication and mutual reinforcement between scholars addressing the problems of shared concern, across different disciplines. All of the contributions to our September 2011 symposium, including those presented here, were contributed in the spirit of extending these discussions and exchanging views between disciplines on the complex relationship between crops, language, and sociocultural developments in early Asia. Because of the interrelated lines of evidence emerging from linguistics, genetics, biology and environmental studies, archaeology, anthropology, and history, the complexity of the issues cannot be avoided, and further interdisciplinary engagement will continue to be necessary. This includes a need for further effort to facilitate the communication between disciplines, and a need for reflection on the adequacy of indiscipline terminology and ways of thinking that may be taken for granted within disciplines, but the limits of which become even more apparent in interdisciplinary encounters than M. Fiskesjo (*) Department of Anthropology, Cornell University, McGraw Hall, Room 204, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA e-mail: magnus.fiskesjo@cornell.edu