GeoCurrents

Brazil’s Changing Geography of Murder

Martin W. Lewis — Thu, 23 May 2013 16:30:46 +0000

Brazil is noted for its high murder rate. In the Wikipedia map posted here, Brazil falls in the highest homicide category, with more than 20 slayings a year per 100,000 people. This figure significantly exceeds that of the United States (4.8) and vastly exceeds those of such countries as Japan (0.4) and Iceland (0.3). Yet Brazil is hardly the most ...

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Dan Brown, Overpopulation, and the Plunging Fertility Rates of Turkey and Iran

Martin W. Lewis — Tue, 21 May 2013 16:29:51 +0000

Global overpopulation has recently returned to the public spotlight with the publication of Inferno, the latest offering from novelist Dan Brown, author of the 2003 blockbuster The Da Vinci Code. A mystery thriller on the surface, Inferno is ultimately a piece of demographic fiction. As one reviewer notes, “The specter of a catastrophically overpopulated Earth, its desperate people grasping and ...

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The Russian-Finnish Borderlands: Territorial Changes, Population Transfers, and Linguistic Changes

Asya Pereltsvaig — Sun, 19 May 2013 05:39:21 +0000

An earlier GeoCurrents post mentioned Finns among the nationalities deported by the Soviets before and during World War II. As it turns out, the situation in the Finnish borderlands is rather more complicated than that. The territory between St. Petersburg and Helsinki is home to a number of ethnic groups whose histories range from cultural and linguistic assimilation to population transfer to outright ethnic cleansing.

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Stalin’s Ethnic Deportations—and the Gerrymandered Ethnic Map

Asya Pereltsvaig — Fri, 17 May 2013 16:39:58 +0000

An earlier GeoCurrents post on Chechnya mentioned that the Chechens were deported from their homeland in the North Caucasus to Central Asia in February 1944. However, the Chechen nation was not the only one to suffer such a fate under Stalin’s regime. He took to gerrymandering the country’s ethnic map by moving whole nationalities around like chess pieces on the board.

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Television and Fertility in India: Response to Critics

Martin W. Lewis — Fri, 17 May 2013 02:29:45 +0000

(Note to readers: My recent blog post on television and fertility in India has attracted some attention, including a detailed critique on the blog Challenging Civilization. This post is my response to this critique.) First, I would like to thank Tom Smith at Challenging Civilization for taking the time write a thoughtful critique of my blog post on television and fertility ...

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Bhutan’s Paradoxical Development

Martin W. Lewis — Mon, 13 May 2013 22:40:20 +0000

The southern rim of the Himalayas is rarely mapped as a region, as it encompasses two independent countries (Nepal and Bhutan) and five Indian states.* As a result, maps depicting economic and social development of the area can be misleading, as they typically contrast the two Himalayan countries with India as a whole. To address this situation, I have made ...

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Do “Ultraconserved Words” Reveal Linguistic Macro-Families?

Asya Pereltsvaig — Fri, 10 May 2013 01:58:57 +0000

Today’s post takes on a recently published article by Mark Pagel, Quentin Atkinson, Andreea Calude, and Andrew Meade entitled “Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia”, published in PNAS. First, Asya Pereltsvaig examines the article from a linguistics point of view, and then Martin Lewis considers it from a cartographic perspective.

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India’s Plummeting Birthrate: A Television-Induced Transformation?

Martin W. Lewis — Wed, 08 May 2013 05:06:26 +0000

(Note: As can be seen, GeoCurrents has a new, more streamlined appearance. The “GeoNotes” feature has been replaced by section that highlights “featured posts,” as we found it increasingly difficult to differentiate regular posts from “notes.” We also hope that the new format will make it easier for readers to access older posts. To initiate the new format, today’s post is ...

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The Geography of “Cucumber”

Asya Pereltsvaig — Thu, 02 May 2013 17:00:43 +0000

Several earlier GeoCurrents posts examined the history and geography of culinary vocabulary, particularly words for ‘cheese’, ‘onion’, and ‘tea’. It has become clear that the distribution of such words in European languages tells a story of both common descent and borrowing. But a completely different picture emerges if we examine words for ‘cucumber’ (see map on the left). Here, areal patterns are more conspicuous than those of language-family relationships.

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A Fracas in Caracas—Maduro Wins the Election but Capriles Refuses to Concede Defeat

Asya Pereltsvaig — Wed, 01 May 2013 18:01:37 +0000

Following the death of President Hugo Chávez on 5 March 2013—coincidentally the 60th anniversary of Joseph Stalin’s death—Venezuela held a presidential election on 14 April. Chávez’s chosen successor and the acting president Nicolás Maduro won, but by a very narrow margin. His opponent, Henrique Capriles Radonski had run in the previous election in October 2012, losing to Chávez by 11 percentage points. But this time the margin of victory was narrow, less than two percentage points.

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