Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 4

We went in the first episode from Ireland to the island of Britain. Then we went on to the continent of Europe, through France to Germany, down the Danube, across to Romania and Bulgaria and into Greece. And see what I’m doing there. Those are all countries most listeners will probably be able to visualise on a map. Although, as my listenership goes beyond Europe and beyond America, I want to perform the same trick in people’s minds.

I want to create new mental models, mental geographies, psychogeography if you like, of the area I call Manuland, which is the area where we traditionally speak Indo-European languages, between Ireland and India. And if that sounds a bit like gobbledygook to you, well, by the end of listening to the Atlas series and the orientation series, you will totally understand what I mean by Manuland, and the ambition I have for reworking our mental models of the past 6,000 years: populating our mental models of the past 6,000 years with a lot of different development and evolutionary trajectories, all mainstreaming the linguistic element, but also the cultural, the religious, the migratory, the historical, and so many other dimensions across this geographical area.

Populating Our Minds with the Geography

So I also want to populate your minds, our minds, with the geography that for me, before I started this project, was really sketchy. I now realise that we as humans have an amazing capacity to fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we know. And I remember, for instance, meeting and befriending my first real friend from Central Asia. It was, and it is, a real experience for me. Because previously, before I arrived in Ukraine on a January night, around 11 o’clock at night in January 2015, I had a very sketchy view of Ukraine itself. I had seen it from the border in what was then Czechoslovakia, back in the early 90s, when I and a friend had made our way by train to the border. We wanted to see Ukraine. We wanted to see what by then was the former Soviet Union. And then, while I spent seven years in eastern Ukraine as a diplomat, obviously my mental model of Ukraine expanded enormously, and my geographical mental model expanded enormously. But really, what was east of the border of Ukraine, between there and the coast of Japan, between there and Afghanistan, was quite sketchy, and still is quite sketchy, I don’t mind admitting to you.

However, in this particular episode we are going to be talking a bit about that area of Central A