Asia in Europe, Europe in Asia

Cover

Download PDF (985.1 KB)
 

Title Page, Copyright Page

Download PDF (149.5 KB)
pp. i-iv

Table of Contents

Download PDF (145.9 KB)
pp. v-vi

Acknowledgements

Download PDF (119.0 KB)
pp. vii-

We are grateful for the generous research grant received from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore, which enabled us to bring together scholars from Europe and Asia from different disciplinary backgrounds at a workshop, “Asia in Europe, Europe in...

1. Introduction

Download PDF (275.6 KB)
pp. 1-12

It has been more than fifty years since the processes of decolonization changed the political, economic and cultural landscape in Asia and its relations with its former European colonizers. For a long time, academic discussions on Europe and Asia have focused on the political implications...

PART I: Academic Discourses and Concepts

Download PDF (552.6 KB)
pp. 13-

2. Civilizational Encounters: Europe in Asia

Download PDF (284.2 KB)
pp. 15-35

When we think of the encounter between Asia and Europe, we are aware of a lack of balance between the two entities. ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ may be counterposed geographically; but in cultural and civilizational terms, the counterposing is problematical. There is a historic cultural unity to...

3. Locating Southeast Asia: Postcolonial Paradigms and Predicament

Download PDF (285.9 KB)
pp. 36-56

Social scientists have cut up the world into convenient regions: Africa, Latin America, Western Europe, East Asia and so on. A core argument for the regionalization of socio-scientific inquiry has always been that geographic proximity implies long-term cultural, economic, and social...

4. The Meaning of Alternative Discourses: Illustrations from Southeast Asia

Download PDF (288.3 KB)
pp. 57-78

The term ‘alternative discourses’ refers to works that attempt to both critically assess mainstream ideas in the social sciences that are generally regarded as unproblematic, as well as generate alternative concepts and theories. To the extent that mainstream social science is Eurocentric, the...

5. Redrawing Centre-Periphery Relations: Theoretical Challenges in the Study of Southeast Asian Modernity

Download PDF (291.6 KB)
pp. 79-101

The term modernity refers to a socio-historical transformative process which has its roots in the Western European experience from at least the 16th Century, marking a contrast to the medieval period. Implicit in this definition of modernity is the notion of historical progress that is based...

6. Rethinking Assumptions on Asia and Europe: The Study of Entrepreneurship

Download PDF (305.8 KB)
pp. 102-130

For a long time, developments in South and Southeast Asia have inspired scholars to invent a terminology specific to the region because they believed that the processes studied did not seem to fit into the existing type of classification. Marx’s ‘Asiatic mode of production’, Furnivall’s...

PART II: Linkages: Science, Society and Culture

Download PDF (552.6 KB)
pp. 131-

7. Royal Antiquarianism, European Orientalism and the Production of Archaeological Knowledge in Modern Siam

Download PDF (311.4 KB)
pp. 133-161

On the evening of 2 December 1907, before an audience of noblemen and state officials who had gathered in the ruined city of Ayutthaya for a three-day festive extravaganza, King Chulalongkorn (Rama V, r. 1868– 1910) gave the inaugural speech to the Archaeological (or Antiquarian)...

8. Foreign Knowledge: Cultures of Western Science-making in Meiji Japan

Download PDF (292.3 KB)
pp. 162-183

The term ‘transfer’, most of us realize, is a misleading description of how scientific or technological knowledge travels. It reduces a partial, unpredictable, and culturally nuanced process to the simple action of sending a parcel through the mail. Historians of religion or art are not...

9. British Colonial Rhetoric on ‘Modern Medicine’ and ‘Health at Home’: Realities of Health Conditions in 19th Century Britain

Download PDF (312.1 KB)
pp. 184-213

The field of colonialism, health and medicine has been extensively and creatively theorized by scholars located in a range of disciplines and the emergent literature on the subject is voluminous, varied and valuable. Any analysis of the relationship between colonialism...

10. Poverty, Gender and Nation in Modern Vietnamese Literature During the French Colonial Period (1930s–40s)

Download PDF (307.4 KB)
pp. 214-241

Modern Vietnamese journalism and prose fiction owe a debt to French colonialism. The conditions and opportunities created in the early twentieth century by colonial rule allowed for the emergence of new types of literature—modern novels and short stories—which in turn...

11. Family Linkages between India and Britain: Views from Gujarat and London

Download PDF (291.3 KB)
pp. 242-266

International migration, although certainly not a new phenomenon, has increased over the past few decades (Appleyard 1991, p. 5). People of South Asian origin, in particular from India, have always formed a significant part of this migration process. The Indian diaspora as it exists...

12. Framing ‘the Other’: A Critical Review of Vietnam War Movies and their Representation of Asians and Vietnamese

Download PDF (322.6 KB)
pp. 267-298

We Were Soldiers (2002), the cinematic image of the first major clash between regular North Vietnamese and U.S. troops at Ia Drang in Southern Vietnam over three days in November 1965, is the Vietnam War version of Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line. The director...

13. Métis, Métisse and Métissage: Representations and Self-Representations

Download PDF (295.7 KB)
pp. 299-321

What does it mean to explore the boundaries and the ambiguities surrounding the notion of racial frontiers at a time when mixed race identity is more a norm than an exception? Clearly, the meanings of race and skin colour are mediated by language, religion, nationality and...

About the Contributors

Download PDF (245.1 KB)
pp. 322-325