Visual Culture Studies In Europe: Fill & Download for Free

There are so many ways to come at this question:-The big brother/little brother relationship with China, going back centuries. Perhaps the most important effect: Japan had a functional writing system, yet imported Chinese characters, which it imposed on its atonal language, because its elite felt the Chinese method was superior. These were combined with the earlier writing system -- also imported from China -- to produce a workable script, though with anomalies like 12+ ways to pronounce and use the character for "life," depending on the kana suffix. As a result, Japan has an unusually difficult written language requiring an exceptionally long time for children to learn, and relatively easy for adults to forget (I've met Japanese who have to study it again after being away for five years.) This contributes to a sense of uniqueness, because of difficulty, and is probably why it has such an exceptionally rich visual culture.-Isolation from events shared by much of the world. The destruction of the Mongol ships in a typhoon (the "divine wind" or kamikaze) spared Japan from the brief but important domination of the Mongols that affected the world from Europe to China. The failure of Hideyoshi's rebellion and the Tokugawa restoration blunted Western contact and held back social reform for several centuries. Japan eventually opened under pressure, but kept most of its social structures intact (there was, until after World War II, a large and complex royalty structure as elaborate as anything in Europe.)-A shared illusion that the emperor's family is an unbroken line from its origin (probably not, but don't bring this up.) There is no equivalence in rulers, at least not with an elaborate system of bureaucratic record-keeping, anywhere.None of these things should be taken as a positive or negative judgement of Japan. They are simply big differences, and reasons why I think it is one of the most foreign countries you can visit - it looks very familiar and modern, but frequently things have causes and effects well out of one's habits and expectations.

Probably music and whatever else from the humanities interests you. If it's history, popular culture, romanticisation, the renaissance, visual arts, literature... whatever.

I think if we visualize this it is easier…It is clearly Swiss, Danish, Belgian, Austrians, Dutch, UK, and a bit with the French as well…a bit…and on the other side there is some overlap with Czechs.This is about what you would expect due to position on the map, right?The reality is in Northern Europe there is not a lot of genetic distance between the populations at all.Northern Europe, despite the linguistic and cultural differences are not very genetically different. Most of the genetic diversity in Europe is in the south, and to some degree one can argue that northern Europeans are a subset of Central/Southern Europeans that moved back north after the last Ice Age. So the diversity is MUCH LESS West to East than it is from South to North.In fact the modern European phenotype or many things we associate with northern (including light eyes, blond hair) didn’t come about until the end of thelast Ice Age…hell I would be willing to be most of the populations in the region have had significant gene flow between them within the last 5–6,000 years, 10K at the outside max.So another way to look at it is that the majority of the ancestors that make up today’s Northern Europeans have not been genetically separated into different breeding populations for that long, relatively speaking.Northern Europeans, especially Northwestern Europeans are right on top of each other genetically.https://www.nature.com/articles/nature07331.epdfDE = Deutschland.Genetic Structure of Europeans: A View from the North–EastInvestigation of the fine structure of European populations with applications to disease association studiesIn relation to Central and Eastern EuropeansGenetic studies on Bulgarians - WikipediaOther source：Collin Anthony Spears' answer to How much common ancestry do Ethnic Russians and Han Chinese have?White modern Northern Europeans are genetically more like brown South Asians than brown(ish) ancient Northern Europeans wereThe genes in Spain fall rather evenly - Gene ExpressionThe genetic complexity of prehistoric Sweden - Gene ExpressionCollin Spears's answer to Why did evolution produce white humans? The first Homo Sapiens came from Africa and moved north. What caused them to get whiter? Is there an evolutionary advantage of being white in northern parts of the earth?Blue-eyed humans have a single, common ancestorRecent advances in the study of fine-scale population structure in humans