Encountering otherness: diversities and transcultural experiences in early modern European culture

Guido Abbattista

Ayuda

Encountering otherness: diversities and transcultural experiences in early modern European culture

Imagen de portada del libro Encountering otherness

Información General

Autores: Guido Abbattista (ed. lit.)
Editores: Università di Trieste
Año de publicación: 2011
País: Italia
Idioma: italiano
ISBN: 978-88-8303-306-3
Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)

Resumen

Modern European culture and politics have been largely shaped by the century-long material and cognitive relationships with several (domestic and exotic) forms of ethno-anthropological, sociological and cultural diversity according to both a spatial and a temporal dimension. The need to confront and handle ‘diversity’ did not just result from the European expansion process in the world, but coincides with the most classic problem of politics, consisting in the effort to harmonize different interests, groups, religious faiths, customs, languages, ethnic identities and merge them into some form of viable and durable co-existence. Approach to cultural diversity has produced two ideal extremes: suppression through assimilation or its perpetuation through radical ‘othering’. Historical experience has offered, however, a large variety of policies and of intellectual or ideological constructs of a ‘transcultural’ kind, with the transfer, adaptation and dialogue of political, religious, economic patterns of relationships. This international collection of essays sweeps over a multiplicity of such cultural experiences according to a global, transcultural outlook, ranging from European encounters with exotic, savage peoples of newly discovered lands of conquest and colonization, to the European nation-State building process. The book is the outcome of the European research project, “EUO-European Culture and the Understanding of Otherness: Historiography, Politics and the Sciences of Man in the Birth of the Modern World (Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries)” conceived and directed by Guido Abbattista with researchers from eleven European universities and sponsored by the Italian Ministry of Education University and Research (Interlink program for 2006-2008).