Encounters with Civilizations is a broad-ranging work, uniting sweeping themes such as history, culture, the media, social issues, and politics. Building around comparative analyses of aspects of Albanian, Egyptian, British, and Indian cultures, Alpion addresses the problems people experience in their encounters with civilizations different from their birth cultures.The course of history has made the confrontation and comingling of different cultures inevitable. It has also engendered ambivalence toward the cultures involved, including a desire to emulate the new culture, or resentment, or conflicting attitudes toward the relative strength or weakness of both birth and new cultures. Alpion describes how Egyptian culture and politics have been shaped by foreign domination while retaining ancient customs at the social level. In comparison, Great Britain has been an imperial power whose cultural preeminence has shaped the images of smaller countries in the eyes of the world. Alpion writes of English images of his native Albania and offers a penetrating analysis of Mother Teresa as a Christian missionary in Hindu and Muslim India, focusing on her cultural presentation via the media and the cult of celebrity.Whether discussing the customs of Egyptian coffee houses or Alexander the Great as a defining figure in Western and Eastern culture, Alpion grasps the impact of these cultural encounters. He makes us aware that understanding and resolving such differences involves considering ultimate issues of life and death.

Encounters with Civilizations is a broad-ranging work, uniting sweeping themes such as history, culture, the media, social issues, and politics. Building around comparative analyses of aspects of Albanian, Egyptian, British, and Indian cultures, Alpion addresses the problems people experience in their encounters with civilizations different from their birth cultures.The course of history has made the confrontation and comingling of different cultures inevitable. It has also engendered ambivalence toward the cultures involved, including a desire to emulate the new culture, or resentment, or conflicting attitudes toward the relative strength or weakness of both birth and new cultures. Alpion describes how Egyptian culture and politics have been shaped by foreign domination while retaining ancient customs at the social level. In comparison, Great Britain has been an imperial power whose cultural preeminence has shaped the images of smaller countries in the eyes of the world. Alpion writes of English images of his native Albania and offers a penetrating analysis of Mother Teresa as a Christian missionary in Hindu and Muslim India, focusing on her cultural presentation via the media and the cult of celebrity.Whether discussing the customs of Egyptian coffee houses or Alexander the Great as a defining figure in Western and Eastern culture, Alpion grasps the impact of these cultural encounters. He makes us aware that understanding and resolving such differences involves considering ultimate issues of life and death.

Roger Hart debunks the long-held belief that linear algebra developed independently in the West. Accounts of the seventeenth-century Jesuit Mission to China have often celebrated it as the great encounter of two civilizations. The Jesuits portrayed themselves as wise men from the West who used mathematics and science in service of their mission. Chinese literati-official Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), who collaborated with the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) to translate Euclid’s Elements into Chinese, reportedly recognized the superiority of Western mathematics and science and converted to Christianity. Most narratives relegate Xu and the Chinese to subsidiary roles as the Jesuits' translators, followers, and converts. Imagined Civilizations tells the story from the Chinese point of view. Using Chinese primary sources, Roger Hart focuses in particular on Xu, who was in a position of considerable power over Ricci. The result is a perspective startlingly different from that found in previous studies. Hart analyzes Chinese mathematical treatises of the period, revealing that Xu and his collaborators could not have believed their declaration of the superiority of Western mathematics. Imagined Civilizations explains how Xu’s West served as a crucial resource. While the Jesuits claimed Xu as a convert, he presented the Jesuits as men from afar who had traveled from the West to China to serve the emperor.

Written in a lively, engaging style, and designed to complement social studies curriculum as well as programs in the social sciences and humanities, this reference vividly recreates and analyzes pivotal encounters, exchanges, and conflicts between cultures and civilizations that profoundly influenced the course of human history.

This innovative book examines cross-cultural encounters before 1492, focusing in particular on the major cross-cultural influences that transformed Asia and Europe during this period: the ancient silk roads that linked China with the Roman Empire, the spread of the world religions, and theMongol Empire of the thirteenth century. The author's goal throughout the work is to examine the conditions--political, social, economic, or cultural--that enable one culture to influence, mix with, or suppress another. On the basis of its global analysis, the book identifies several distinctivepattern of conversion, conflict, and compromise that emerged from cross-cultural encounters. In doing so, it elucidates that larger historical context of encounters between Europeans and other peoples in modern times. _Old World Encounters_ is ideal for students of world geography, religion, andcivilizations.

Cultures around the world have recently become more isolated and aggressive in defending their socio-cultural domain. However, throughout history, many civilizations have established extensive and long-term cultural ties with diverse cultural groups. Despite ideological schisms that emerged between civilizations from time to time, our hunger for cultural encounters and coexistence shines through. Cultural Encounters and Tolerance Through Analyses of Social and Artistic Evidences: From History to the Present sheds light on different histories and presents evidence of cultural encounters, coexistence, and acculturation. This publication presents cultural assets as more mobile than ideologies across boundaries as it can be more often seen in the cultural arena. Covering topics such as the effects of colonialism, geometrical forms, and architectural heritage, it serves as an essential resource for architects, art historians, cultural historians, students and professors of higher education, sociologists, anthropologists, researchers, and academicians.

Part of the NEW Ginn History series, these colourful KS2 pupil books cover key moments in world history. The series includes Victorian Britain, Ancient Greece, Explorations and Encounters and Britain since 1930. Photography, cartoons and illustration bring the past to life while questions at the end of each chapter provoke further thinking and a Glossary reinforces key words and concepts.

History is an encounter with the past, and the past is a history of encounters. Encounters in World History is designed to introduce students to both of these sorts of encounters. Using primary and visual sources, the authors employ the encounter theme as a fundamental organizing principle. By nesting sources in thematically integrated chapters, comparison and analysis of sources can be more substantive, while also providing more internal structure for instructors. At the same time, this is a world history reader, and it follows a chronological format. The material has been presented in such a way that instructors can craft their own courses, emphasizing the aspects they think most important. Chapters are organized so that the general theme is presented in a chapter introduction and then revisited in the separate introductions to specific readings. The readers can be used to highlight preferred eras, cultural zones, or themes, or a unique mixture of all three.

Civilizations and World Order: Geopolitics and Cultural Difference examines the role of civilizations in the context of the existing and possible world order(s) from a cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary perspective. Contributions seek to clarify the meaning of such complex and contested notions as “civilization,” “order,” and “world order”; they do so by taking into account political, economic, cultural, and philosophical dimensions of social life. The book deals with its main theme from three angles or vectors: first, the geopolitical or power-political context of civilizations; secondly, the different roles of civilizations or cultures against the backdrop of “post-coloniality” and “Orientalism”; and thirdly, the importance of ideological and regional differences as factors supporting or obstructing world order(s). All in all, the different contributions demonstrate the impact of competing civilizational trajectories on the functioning or malfunctioning of contemporary world order.