Implicit understandings : observing, reporting, and reflecting on the encounters between Europeans and other peoples in the early modern era edited by Stuart B. Schwartz

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Schwartz, Stuart B.

Series:

Studies in comparative early modern history

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Europe--Relations.

Europe.

Intercultural communication.

Ethnopsychology.

Discoveries in geography.

Physical Description:

xv, 637 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge [England] ; New York, NY, USA : Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Summary:

This volume brings together the work of twenty historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars who have tried to examine the nature of the encounter between Europeans and the other peoples of the world from roughly 1450 to 1800, the early modern era. The book is world-wide in scope - ranging from Hawaii, Australia, and China to the Americas and Africa - but is unified by the central underlying theme that implicit understandings influence every culture's ideas about itself and others. These understandings, however, are changed by experience in a constantly shifting process in which both sides participate. This makes such encounters complex historical events and moments of 'discovery'. The scholars gathered here grapple with the questions of how we observe, and how observation and representation can reveal as much about ourselves as about those we observe.

Contents:

The outer world of the European Middle Ages / Seymour Phillips

Cultural conflicts in medieval world maps / John B. Friedman

Spain, circa 1492 : social values and structures / Miguel Angel Ladero Quesada

The conquests of the Canary Islands / Eduardo Aznar Vallejo

Tales of distinction : European ethnography and the Caribbean / Peter Hulme

Persian perceptions of Mongols and Europeans / David Morgan

Sightings : initial Nahua reactions to Spanish culture / James Lockhart

Dialogues of the deaf : Europeans on the Atlantic coast of Africa / Wyatt MacGaffey

Early Southeast Asian categorizations of Europeans / Anthony Reid

Beyond the Cape : the Portuguese encounter with the peoples of South Asia / Chandra Richard de Silva

The "Indianness" of Iberia and changing Japanese iconographies of Other / Ronald P. Toby

Essay on objects : interpretations of distance made tangible / Mary W. Helms

The indigenous ethnographer : the "indio ladino" as historian and cultural mediation / Rolena Adorno

What to wear? Observation and participation by Jesuit missionaries in late Ming society / Willard J. Peterson

Demerits and deadly sins : Jesuit moral tracts in late Ming China / Ann Waltner

The theatricality of observing and being observed : eighteenth-century Europe "discovers" the? century "Pacific" / Greg Dening

North America in the era of Captain Cook : three glimpses of Indian-European contact in the age of the American Revolution / Peter H. Wood

An accidental Australian tourist : or a feminist anthropologist at sea and on land / Diane Bell

Circumscribing circumcision/uncircumcision : an essay amid the history of difficult description / James A. Boon.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 587-601) and index.

ISBN:

0521452406

9780521452403

0521458803

9780521458801

OCLC:

30318947

Online:

Publisher description