Student email

A student just emailed me saying that finding the facts that we need to know for the course isn't too hard but that she was having difficulty finding the overall themes from which essay questions could be chosen. Here is my reply:

I'll give you some hints on finding the themes and then give you a couple. For finding the themes you want to look closely over the introductions that Professor Harlow has provided on the course notes. Remember at the beginning how we had the long discussion on what makes up Asia and all that? There are courses notes on that and some questions might be pulled from there about how we define Asia. Each topics 1 and 2 have short introductions in the notes and each chapter in the sourcebook has introductions. Professor Harlow wrote those so there is a good chance you will find themese from there. Topic 3 doesn't have an introductory paragraph but it does have that chart comparing India and China. Make sure you understand that (if you have trouble just bring the questions to the review session). Then look through your notes. If you see ideas that are stressed in lecture and then again in discussion, there is a good chance that those are important themes.here are some examples

1) Buddha as hillbilly and rabble rouser, what does this mean, what does it say about Buddhism and about the people who first became Buddhists

2) India, China and writing history, Chinese tended to see politics as very important and history as a way to become moral and to act in a politically effective way whereas Indians tended to stress otherworldly religious ideas. Therefore we have a bunch of early Chinese history and not so much Indian history (and a lot of the early stuff is by non-Indians!).

3) look at the whole thing about memory and history, when do we have history? also, what happens when we have writing that we can't read (Indus Valley)