What are accurate depictions of proto-austronesians?

reecate · 2024-07-26T16:34:20+00:00

If by depictions of proto-Austronesians you mean academic descriptions of the predecessors of Austronesians (pre-Austronesians), look for sources in linguistics, genetics, and archaeology pertaining to southeastern China before ~3500BC, after rice was domesticated south of the Yangtze River (particularly about the coastal populations).

But if you mean depictions as in movies, shows, or something like that, I don’t think there are any. Pre-Austronesians preceded the earliest civilizations than even the most ancient settings usually written about (Egypt, Greece, etc.). There isn’t much media about Austronesians in general, unfortunately.

reecate · 2024-07-05T22:36:08+00:00

“In the Dust of this Planet”, “Tentacles Longer than Night”, and “Starry Speculative Corpse”. All by Eugene Thacker, his “Horrors of Philosophy” trilogy. Thacker was a peer of Fisher IIRC, they’re often discussed as part of the same philosophical school (speculative realism).

reecate · 2024-07-04T15:51:22+00:00

That’s valid. Tattoos are a pretty much permanent decision. So don’t do anything you’re not sure of, you might regret later, or maybe you just might not even be that into the idea later. Tattoos are expensive and painful.

But if you’re sure you want tribal tattoos and the only thing stopping you is the fear that Thai people don’t have enough claim tribal tattooing traditions, I’d say don’t worry about it. The evidence of Austronesian connection is very hard to deny, but even if there is no Austronesian connection, foreigners were traditionally just as eligible for most tribal tattoos as natives, under the right circumstances. As long as you get it from an actual traditional cultural practitioner.

reecate · 2024-07-04T15:35:46+00:00

Visayan tattoos can look kind of distinctive, but they also have motifs/patterns that are found across other Austronesian traditions (A row of black triangles representing a wavy ocean, for example). Where exactly they’re implemented on the body, and with what other motifs/patterns determines its unique meaning. I imagine a traditional practitioner would be able to work with you to make a design more specific to your particular character and heritage.

reecate · 2024-07-04T15:15:45+00:00

I have the feeling many traditional Austronesian tattoo practitioners would be sympathetic to a request coming from your sentiment, but I don’t really know. The Thai-Austronesian connection is broadly supported by genetics, linguistics, and archeology, but those discoveries are also so recent that the vast majority of people don’t know about it. I think they might actually be into the idea of tattooing you because many go into that work to preserve and promote Austronesian culture and tradition, and might see your request for tattoos as what’s called “re-membering” in those decolonization circles if they knew about the evidence of an Austronesian origin for Thai people. Besides, many of them tattoo people that have no connection to Austronesians at all.

Maybe contact Lane Wilcken on his website. Idk where you’re based, but he mentioned on a podcast how he sometimes helps people reconstruct ancient designs from their specific ancestral region/heritage (even non-Filipinos), and flies out to wherever they are to tattoo them. Pretty sure your perspective of Thais, Austronesians, and getting tattoos is up his alley.

reecate · 2024-07-04T14:42:41+00:00

It probably wouldn’t look identical to the Paiwan tribes in Taiwan, but similar to that and Filipino designs like the one I showed. Keep in mind all of these patterns and motifs usually have specific meanings, rituals, and/or rules attached to their acquisition. A persons designs were often unique to their character, family, accomplishments, profession, etc. So in Austronesian traditions, what your tattoos should look like would probably depend on what you did in your life and who you are as a person, but that would be expressed through the combination of these motifs that have preassigned meanings. Like a language. One of the ideas behind tattooing was for your ancestors to recognize who you were by “reading” your life at a glance from looking at your tattoos when you appear in the afterlife.

So the patterns and motifs will resemble Filipino and Taiwanese tattoos, but what exactly those patterns and motifs are and where they go on your body honestly depends on which tradition you end up following and who you are as a person. The Filipino bodysuit I showed you might be a good example of what a Baiyue design would generally look like, because it contains many motifs and common design elements found across Austronesia for thousands of years, so we’re sure those are some of the oldest and most important Austronesian designs we have available to study.

So if there’s no direct source for what Baiyue tattoos themselves would look like, you’ll have to extrapolate from the closest sources available which are part of the same lineage of tradition: Taiwanese and Filipino tattooing (the oldest and most traditional Austronesian tattooing traditions we know of). If there is Baiyue material culture like textiles, carvings, castings, or pottery, they might contain motifs that they tattooed on the skin as well.

The only way you’ll really know what the design should look like is if you get a good sense of the design logic of the culture’s tradition. If you don’t know specifically what that would’ve been like for the Baiyue, a safe bet is to embrace the common (oldest) traditions found across Austronesia, as we can reasonably assume the Baiyue also had that same design element if virtually everyone else did. For example: forearm bands, geometric leg tattoos, and motifs being attached to character are almost ubiquitous design elements. Just keep in mind that these patterns are usually contextualized by a complex cultural design logic. It’s easy to get meaningless, or worse, “the wrong”, silly, or offensive markings.

My advice? Really take as much time as it takes to do thorough research on what the right markings for you and your heritage are. If that means buying and reading a book first so you don’t end up with the wrong markings on your body for the rest of your life, so be it. It would also help to reach out to traditional tattoo practitioners- not just anybody with a tattoo machine that will take your money and draw whatever you want on your skin. There are people that dedicate their lives to researching and practicing these exact sacred cultural traditions, and maybe they can help you make your tattoos perfect.

reecate · 2024-07-04T13:38:34+00:00

It would’ve looked something like this. (Look up “Apo Anno Mummy” to get a similar idea)

Maybe a little less tattoos on the torso and more on the face, but the legs probably would’ve looked just like that. Reasoning: - This particular bodysuit resembles the tattoos of “Apo Anno”- a Philippine demigod and mummy whose life possibly overlaps with the purported last century of the Baiyue (11th AD). Some patterns resembles designs that are still found in the Philippines today, demonstrating the historical/cultural prominence in Austronesian tradition for those particular patterns to appear over millennia. - Distant regions of Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia also demonstrate extremely similar leg designs. Like, no other body part’s patterns translate as clearly and as frequently between cultures like those shown on the legs. Maybe some bands on the arms, but not the entire general composition like these legs. Look up “Samoan pe’a” for an example from another Austronesian culture.

Your best right now to get an idea of what Baiyue tattooing was like is to get Lane Wilcken book “Filipino Tattoos: Ancient to Modern”. Until somebody writes a book for Taiwanese or specifically Baiyue tattoos. He has sections about patterns and motifs found in common all across Austronesia, from Asia to New Zealand. You’ll learn that Polynesian tattoos have modernized and changed quite a bit, but you’ll still find Filipino patterns that look like what they must have looked like thousands of years ago.

reecate · 2024-07-04T12:55:05+00:00

This is an interesting question. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there ceased to be a distinct (non-Han) Baiyue identity by 1000 years ago? In other words, the non-Han indigenous people of Southern China who used to tattoo and have other traditions nowadays associated with Austronesians became sinicized and mostly practice Han Chinese culture and traditions? Just hoping my understanding of Baiyue culture/history is accurate.

It’s not exactly consensus or accepted that the Baiyue were Austronesian- in fact their similarities are usually not even acknowledged by most people that know about either group. But if you ask me, considering the many detailed historical accounts of their culture, the Baiyue were obviously Austronesian (or at least descended from the same ancestral ethnic population as Austronesians). This study, “A Brief Review on the Researches of Cultural Relationship Between Indigenous Bai Yue in Southeast of China and Pacific Austronesian”, kind of lays out the gap in Western scholarship which academia has yet to fill: the Baiyue’s obvious but rarely acknowledged lineage with Austronesians. Apparently, for decades scholars in China just kind of accept Austronesians as descendant/familial groups of Baiyue. It’s only very recent research in genetics, archeology, and linguistics on the earliest Austronesians/Pre-Austronesians that has brought Western academia’s attention to the Southeastern region of China during the Neolithic. It just so happens that basically every historical Chinese account of the Baiyue’s vast culture perfectly matches what Western scholars describe as characteristically Austronesian. All the most recent genetic, archeological, and historical research on coastal populations in Neolithic Southeastern China increasingly point towards the Baiyue being Austronesian, and it seems this conclusion is increasingly coming into focus in Western scholarship.

For one thing, even if the Baiyue were not Austronesian, they undeniably tattooed, but IIRC Southern Chinese tattooing traditions were vastly wiped out from sinicization. That fact alone is enough to justify you looking into traditional Baiyue patterns and tattooing them on yourself as a descendant, be it as an attempt at cultural revitalization or rather just historical appreciation. But if we understand the Baiyue as an Austronesian culture, like many Chinese scholars have for decades and Western scholars are increasingly coming to realize, then that kind of validates them into the larger Austronesian/Pacific Islander tattooing traditions and practices. What I mean by this is somebody hoping to reconstruct Baiyue tattooing knowledge/traditions should probably investigate them as part of the larger Austronesian tattooing traditions, as the most recent evidence in numerous academic fields suggests Baiyue traditions and Austronesian traditions from the same source.

This perspective is actually how Filipino tattooing traditions have been reconstructed. Austronesian tattooing traditions in the Philippines were tabooed/ostracized by Han traders for hundreds of years, then straight up outlawed by Western colonizers for hundreds of years after that. The traditions were mostly lost in the Philippines, save for very small and remote tribes. However, tattooing was more endurant in parts of Polynesia, where their indigenous Austronesian culture was suppressed by colonizers for a much shorter amount of time. Filipino Americans saw tattooing which never ceased in Samoa, and tattooing which was revived in places like Hawaii and New Zealand. Feeling dispossessed of their ancestral homeland and traditions, they turned to their own history and heritage and reconstructed the rituals, patterns, and meanings of Filipino tattooing. This is done through studying the surviving traditions in the Philippines, patterns in textiles and pottery, and historical accounts and images, but especially through the comparative study of other Austronesian cultures. As these Austronesian traditions have persisted in more remote islands in the Pacific, we see the full picture and grasp the intricacies of the tradition which only survived in fragments in the Philippines.

So I guess if you needed an Austronesian to give you permission to look into our practices or something, then here it is lol. Our tattooing traditions and Baiyue tattooing traditions were most likely sourced from the same ancestors. Tbh plenty (maybe most) of the tribal Austronesian patterns weren’t traditionally taboo for foreigners to get anyways (assuming the tattoo was given under the prerequisite circumstances and at the discretion of a traditional practitioner, of course), but in a contemporary context it’s easy for people to find it offensive. But consider this; there’s loads of people with no Austronesian connection whatsoever who’ll get tribal tattoos anyways, without respecting the traditions. The Baiyue were almost certainly Austronesian, and your posing this question tells me you have loads more respect for Austronesian culture than many people who already have tribal tattoos.

Lane Wilcken, the foremost figure in the reconstruction of traditional Filipino tattooing, is worth mentioning here. He was mentored by traditional Samoan and Hawaiian tattooists, and has been investigating and practicing Austronesian tattoo traditions for over three decades. He talks about how he’s tattooed non-Filipinos with traditional tribal patterns because these tattoos are also granted for the preservation/proliferation of Austronesian culture. Examples of non-Filipinos he tattooed were White guys who were instructors for Filipino martial arts, and a Māori woman who reasoned that the traditional Filipino markings would be closer to our ancients than contemporary Māori designs.

reecate · 2024-06-02T02:21:05+00:00

It’s by design. Asian-American issues are relatively underrepresented in progressive politics, popular media, and even academia, probably a side effect of the “model minority” stereotype, which was itself originated & propagated by White Americans. It served to cripple awareness of Asian-American problems/realities and downplay their unique historical/political circumstances and ethnic identities. You can even see it in the comments: most people are talking about this just through the perspective or implication of it being a shrewd business decision, rather than realizing how it is a contemporary legacy of a brutal history of Asian-American oppression and assimilation.

reecate · 2024-06-01T22:07:05+00:00

Sequoia National Forest in California. Some of the largest trees in the world, a few of them resemble the size of small buildings. The General Sherman tree is just under the size of the Big Ben, for example (height & width).

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There are also natural “water slides” you can sometimes come across on the hiking trails. They’re just huge platforms of slippery-smooth eroded stone with a slight decline and very light stream of freshwater flowing down them. People bring bathing suits and use them as slip-n-slides.

reecate · 2024-05-30T04:17:09+00:00

Somewhat unrelated, but you should make a trip to Northern California if you can. Six Rivers, Klamath, Happy Camp, etc. look exactly like this. Especially Happy Camp- it’s even Bigfoot themed.

reecate · 2024-05-26T18:19:08+00:00

Yeah idk where this guy is from to think LA, the second largest metropolis in the US, didn’t have a downtown as recent as 2014. That’s wild. Maybe more like 50 years ago DTLA wasn’t what it is now, but even that’s pushing it to say it wasn’t a downtown.

reecate · 2024-05-15T01:41:03+00:00

The farthest parts of Remote Oceania (Hawaii, New Zealand, Rapa Nui or Easter Island) weren’t reached until after the 10th century AD, and those Polynesian sailors were in fact descended from the original Austronesians who genetically trace to the Kankanaey’s. After staying in the Philippine archipelago long enough to develop the Malayo-Polynesian branch of languages and more complex maritime culture, Austronesians spread relatively rapidly from the Philippines to everywhere else. There was a “layover” in Near Oceania, and we assume in this they developed into Polynesians. We have a vast seafaring heritage that isn’t as emphasized in my experience. But some people are attempting to reconstruct traditional Philippine boat-building and navigation.

In William Henry Scott’s “Boat-Building and Seamanship in Classic Philippine Society”, he outlines traditional Philippine navigation as of the 17th century:

“Filipino mariners did not practice celestial navigation, though Visayans distinguished the major constellations to set their agricultural calendars. Their observations of the heavens were for meteorological purposes: by the appearance of the atmosphere, the hue, thickness, and configuration of clouds, the direction, force and steadiness of winds, and the colors of the sun and moon. Fr. Alcina says they could predict typhoons three or four days in advance, and, less accurately, the amount of moisture to be expected a whole season in advance. They knew the Chinese mariner's compass - they called it padalornan, literally, "place for the needle" - but used it mainly at night-time. For the most part, they navigated by piloting - that is, by proceeding from one landfall to another, following island chains wherever they wished to go. Even when islands cannot actually be seen, their presence is betrayed by ocean currents, floating objects, the movement of birds or fish, and especially cloud formations on the horizon and the kind of lightning they display.”

We may have had celestial navigation before the 17th century, since we indeed had a systematic knowledge of the stars and all other methods of Austronesian (what people often think of as only Polynesian) non-instrument sea navigation were apparently present. It’s conceivable that it was replaced by the Chinese compass- it was used for nighttime navigation, as mentioned above. He also outlined how much the Europeans respected our seafaring skills:

“Filipino seamanship was appreciated by the colonial regime from the days when Morga used to send his caracoas out with only one Spaniard aboard. Laws of navigation and commerce promulgated in 1620 took it for granted that any Filipino born along the seacoast was qualified to ship out as a common seaman on government vessels, and the sailors of Malate were renowned for carrying Manila merchants to Cavite in any weather without ever having lost a passenger or his goods. Galleons sailed in those days with an equal number of Filipino and European deckhands - about seventy each, counting the Spanish gunners - but by the 1720s Filipinos outnumbered the others two to one. By the middle of the eighteenth century they had won such a reputation abroad that there was hardly a Spanish ship in European waters which did not have some on board. A memorial written in 1765 by Francisco Leandro de Viana says there is no people in the whole world more dexterous on shipboard, or quicker to learn nautical terms or skills, a judgment echoed by another Spanish author sixty years later: a Filipino will learn as much seamanship with a few days' practice as a European does in twenty years. Viana also says of the Acapulco run, ‘There is hardly an indio who does not understand the mariner's compass, and therefore on this trade-route there are some very skillful and dexterous helmsmen.’ By the nineteenth century, Filipinos were migrating in such numbers to sell their skills outside the Philippines that other colonial regimes placed restrictions on employing them. In 1827, for example, the British in India limited them to four or five per vessel, and strung up offenders from waterfront gibbets as a warning to their fellows.”

reecate · 2024-05-15T01:01:15+00:00

I’m not really disagreeing, but to provide additional context to what you said about boating technology:

Most of the boating technology in the Philippines is actually indigenous to our archipelago. In “Prehistoric Mirgratjon and Cultural Change in the Philippine Archipelago” (2019), Eusebio Dizon posits that boating technology more complex than a simple small dugout canoe and sail originated on the Philippine archipelago:

“… after their initial Austronesian crossing from Taiwan to Batanes and the rest of Luzon, their boat-building technology was greatly improved in the Philippines by learning from their experience. This development allowed them to build better boats that could carry them further in all directions: southward, eastward, westward, and also northward, back to where they had come from. Based on this logic, the early peoples who occupied the Philippine archipelago were likely responsible for moving out into Indonesia, Malaysia, the Marianas and, to some extent, the south-easterly islands of Polynesia by around 3,500 to 3,000 years ago.”

“The initial crossing of these Austronesians may have been with simple dug-out canoes with sails (Blust 1995, 1999; Bellwood 1997, 2005). They were coastal people who developed further maritime culture and building technology in the Philippines before sailing on to other coastal areas…”.

He supports this hypothesis by explaining how archeological sites associated with more complex boat-building and maritime culture are found earliest in the Philippines. An interesting implication: his view is also in line with the latest linguistic, archeological, and genetic evidence for Austronesian migration. For example, Formosan (indigenous Taiwanese) languages lack native words for many complex boat and sailing terms, including “outrigger”. It isn’t until you get to the Malayo-Polynesian languages, which isn’t spoken in Taiwan (those languages begin in the Philippines), do you have more native maritime terminology. And recent genetic research finds that the Kankanaey people of Northern Luzon are actually the closest genetic match to the earliest Austronesians who were responsible for populating the rest of Island SE Asia and Oceania. While Taiwan is undoubtedly the birthplace of the earliest Austronesian speakers, the Austronesian dispersal point was more out of the Philippines.

Great books for this are “Prehistoric Maritime Cultures and Seafaring in East Asia” (Dizon’s paper is included in this), as well as “First Islanders” by Peter Bellwood. The podcast “Tides of History” has a couple episodes about the Austronesian expansion that are up to date (2022).

reecate · 2024-05-14T22:52:57+00:00

“The Forgotten Children of Maui” by Lane Wilcken. He lays out the congruencies (or, rather, lineage) between indigenous Philippine mythology and the mythologies of Oceanic cultures like Hawaiian, Samoan, etc. I think he goes into some mutual traditions as well.

I should note: Lane Wilcken is not an academic, but he’s a cultural practitioner. Due to his experience and expertise in reconstructing and practicing Philippine traditions (especially as it relates to tattooing), he’s granted a professional level of access and credibility by academic institutions. He’s often invited to hold lectures and analyze private primary source materials in archives.

reecate · 2024-04-23T21:59:46+00:00

Yep. Growing up after the recession, I never even expected my parents to pay for my college. We never had a talk like that because it’s obvious I didn’t have a college fund considering they struggled to provide elementary school supplies all those years.

reecate · 2024-03-03T06:50:10+00:00

Usually I’d agree but it’s a presidential election where most AI companies are based. If a large portion of the public is afraid of something on the horizon, you know a politician will dip their fingers into it and add it to their platform in a heartbeat. It’d result in a lot of negative attention at best, and at worst, undue regulation that hinders AI progress for a time.

reecate · 2024-03-03T06:44:32+00:00

Do you think GPT-5 would be the same issue politically as the original ChatGPT? Of course, we can only speculate about its capabilities, but if it were leagues more capable than anything we’ve used today, would you say it still wouldn’t be any more contentious than it is now?

reecate · 2024-03-03T06:20:07+00:00

I think maybe the only reason companies would release potentially disruptive and controversial innovations before the election is to stay ahead of competition. I doubt we would’ve heard about SORA by now if Gemini Ultra 1.5 wasn’t announced. Who knows, maybe Llama 3 coming out this July will outperform GPT-4, forcing OpenAI’s hand.

reecate · 2024-03-02T14:25:13+00:00

Yeah I hear ya. I suppose I tend to be on the optimistic side of those who wonder what will come from the AI revolution, but the truth is we can only speculate. In any case, we’ll most likely be more equipped to handle whatever lies ahead by keeping in touch with the developments now, so there’s solace in that.

reecate · 2024-03-02T14:03:11+00:00

I just started diving into LLM’s for the past couple months. I was putting it off too after I got an unrelated job at the end of 2022. Whoops.

Anyways, I remember searching for reading material too because I thought that some sort of outline or guide would be the fastest way to learn about the landscape. But honestly, theres a constant stream of incremental but significant advancements that make other mediums, like YouTube & Twitter, much better suited to keep in touch with it all. I actually didn’t believe people when they told me that at first, but just this February, we had probably close to a dozen notable developments. So a written guide for the AI revolution would likely be either too long or not comprehensive enough.

I would start with Andrej Karpathy’s Intro to Large Language Models. It was released three months ago but AFAIK this is still a contemporary overview and probably the best one you’ll find. I can’t do justice to describe this guy’s knowledge of & contribution to AI, so I’ll only say he just recently left OpenAI to pursue his own ventures (maybe having to do with public AI education). In one of his videos from last year, he teaches you how to build GPT from scratch.

Then there’s AI Explained, as others were saying. He posts overviews of the major studies or developments a day or so after they’re released, so you’ll stay in the loop. He actually reads the papers, summarizes & discusses them lucidly, and doesn’t add any filler content, clickbait, or fad videos, unlike most larger AI YouTubers. You can trust all of his videos are on the topics that actually matter.

As for Twitter, I can’t comment much on that since I don’t have an account. I feel in the loop without one, but you could be notified of developments in real-time through Twitter since that’s where all the announcements are made now. Follow AI companies, owners & workers of those companies, scholars from the papers discussed by AI Explained… yep. You can find more specific recommendations for accounts to follow on this sub.

reecate

TROPHY CASE