Author: Tai Ng Publisher: iUniverse ISBN: 059542547X Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 400
Book Description
This book explores how complementary Chinese and Western cultures are, how they should learn from each other to establish a dynamic balance, and how institutions need constant redefinition and renewal in order to prosper. By studying the history and development of thought and philosophy in these cultures, it suggests lessons from our past that may shed light on current events and help us in handling future challenges. The book presents answers to the following important questions: Do Chinese people think differently from Westerners, and if so, how and why? What are the key differences between Chinese and Western culture and why? How did China become the most technologically advanced and sociologically sophisticated nation in the world until the seventeenth century, and why did it ultimately decline? What are the key characteristics of political institutions in historical China and Europe, and how were they significant? In this postmodern time and era of globalization, what can we learn from Chinese culture and experiences? As China rapidly industrializes, what can it learn from the West without repeating some of the mistakes that Europeans and North Americans made in their periods of industrialization?
Author: Richard Nisbett Publisher: Hachette UK ISBN: 1857884191 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 295
Book Description
When Richard Nisbett showed an animated underwater scene to his American students, they zeroed in on a big fish swimming among smaller fish. Japanese subjects, on the other hand, made observations about the background environment...and the different "seeings" are a clue to profound underlying cognitive differences between Westerners and East Asians. As Professor Nisbett shows in The Geography of Thought people actually think - and even see - the world differently, because of differing ecologies, social structures, philosophies, and educational systems that date back to ancient Greece and China, and that have survived into the modern world. As a result, East Asian thought is "holistic" - drawn to the perceptual field as a whole, and to relations among objects and events within that field. By comparison to Western modes of reasoning, East Asian thought relies far less on categories, or on formal logic; it is fundamentally dialectic, seeking a "middle way" between opposing thoughts. By contrast, Westerners focus on salient objects or people, use attributes to assign them to categories, and apply rules of formal logic to understand their behaviour.
Author: Guobin Xu Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan ISBN: 9789811340796 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Promoting cultural understanding in a globalized world, this collection provides a concise and unique introduction to Western culture, through the voices of Chinese scholars. Written by a team of experts in their fields, the book provides insights into Western history and culture, covering an interdisciplinary range of topics across literature, language, music, art and religion. It addresses such issues as tourism and etiquette, as well as the key differences of distinct cultures, providing readers with a succinct yet effective way to master a basic understanding of Western culture.
Author: Michael Saffle Publisher: University of Michigan Press ISBN: 0472122711 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 345
Book Description
Western music reached China nearly four centuries ago, with the arrival of Christian missionaries, yet only within the last century has Chinese music absorbed its influence. As China and the West demonstrates, the emergence of “Westernized” music from China—concurrent with the technological advances that have made global culture widely accessible—has not established a prominent presence in the West. China and the West brings together essays on centuries of Sino-Western musical exchange by musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and music theorists from around the world. It opens with a look at theoretical approaches of prior studies of musical encounters and a comprehensive survey of the intercultural and cross-cultural theoretical frameworks—exoticism, orientalism, globalization, transculturation, and hybridization—that inform these essays. Part I focuses on the actual encounters between Chinese and European musicians, their instruments and institutions, and the compositions inspired by these encounters, while Part II examines theatricalized and mediated East-West cultural exchanges, which often drew on stereotypical tropes, resulting in performances more inventive than accurate. Part III looks at the musical language, sonority, and subject matters of “intercultural” compositions by Eastern and Western composers. Essays in Part IV address reception studies and consider the ways in which differences are articulated in musical discourse by actors serving different purposes, whether self-promotion, commercial marketing, or modes of nationalistic—even propagandistic—expression. The volume’s extensive bibliography of secondary sources will be invaluable to scholars of music, contemporary Chinese culture, and the globalization of culture.
Author: Anthony E. Clark Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1611461499 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 238
Book Description
Western missionaries in China were challenged by something they could not have encountered in their native culture; most Westerners were Christian, and competitions in their own countries were principally denominational. Once they entered China they unwittingly became spiritual merchants who marketed Christianity as only one religion among the long-established purveyors of other religions, such as the masters of Buddhist and Daoist rites. A Voluntary Exile explores the convergence of cultures. This collection of new and insightful research considers themes of religious encounter and accommodation in China from 1552 to the present, and confronts how both Western Europeans and indigenous Chinese mitigated the cultural and religious antagonisms that resulted from cultural misunderstanding. The studies in this work identify areas where missionary accommodation in China has succeeded and failed, and offers new insights into what contributed to cultural conflict and confluence. Each essay responds in some way to the “accommodationist” approach of Western missionaries and Christianity, focusing on new areas of inquiry. For example, Michael Maher, SJ, considers the educational and religious formation of Matteo Ricci prior to his travels to China, and how Ricci’s intellectual approach was connected to his so-called “accommodationist method” during the late Ming. Eric Cunningham explores the hackneyed assertion that Francis Xavier’s mission to Asia was a “failure” due to his low conversion rates, suggesting that Xavier’s “failure” instigated the entire Chinese missionary enterprise of the 16th and 17th centuries. And, Liu Anrong confronts the hybridization of popular Chinese folk religion with Catholicism in Shanxi province. The voices in this work derive from divergent scholarly methodologies based on new research, and provide the reader a unique encounter with a variety of disciplinary views. This unique volume reaches across oceans, cultures, political systems, and religious traditions to provide important new research on the complexities of cultural encounters between China and the West.
Author: Paul Willis Publisher: John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 1509538321 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 184
Book Description
This book analyses modernity and tradition in China today and how they combine in striking ways in the Chinese school. Paul Willis – the leading ethnographer and author of Learning to Labour – shows how China has undergone an internal migration not only of masses of workers but also of a mental and ideological kind to new cultural landscapes of meaning, which include worship of the glorified city, devotion to consumerism, and fixation upon the smartphone and the internet. Massive educational expansion has been a precondition for explosive economic growth and technical development, but at the same time the school provides a cultural stage for personal and collective experience. In its closed walls and the inescapability of its ‘scores’, an astonishing drama plays out between the new and the old, with a tapestry of intricate human meanings woven of small tragedies and triumphs, secret promises and felt betrayals, helping to produce not only exam results but cultural orientations and occupational destinies. By exploring the cultural dimension of everyday experience as it is lived out in the school, this book sheds new light on the enormous transformations that have swept through China and created the kind of society that it is today: a society that is obsessed with the future and at the same time structured by and in continuous dialogue with its past.
Author: David L. Hall Publisher: State University of New York Press ISBN: 1438405510 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 362
Book Description
By providing parallel accounts of the contrasting developments of classical Chinese and Western traditions, Anticipating China offers a means of avoiding the implicit cultural biases which so often distort Western understanding of Chinese intellectual culture. The book shows that failure to assess the significant cultural differences between China and the West has seriously affected our understanding of both classical and contemporary China, and makes the translation of attitudes, concepts, and issues extremely problematic.
Author: Hu Wenzhong Publisher: Nicholas Brealey ISBN: 098424719X Category : Travel Languages : en Pages : 286
Book Description
"A classic must-read for everyone coming to work or live in China." - Shelley Warner and Tony Voutas, cross-cultural trainers and founders of Asia Pacific Access Ltd, China China is in the midst of unprecedented economic and cultural growth. In the last decade alone, China joined the World Trade Organization, hosted the 2008 Olympics and experienced a remarkable, record-high increase in its foreign currency reserves. As these changes unfold, frequency of contact between the Chinese and Westerners is dramatically increasing in the office, the classroom and the home. With thought-provoking glimpses into history and tradition, Encountering the Chinese provides fundamental information on Chinese cultural norms and values, giving clear context for contemporary social standards. Readers will learn the etiquette necessary to build successful personal and professional relationships with the Chinese both inside and outside the People's Republic of China. This revised edition of Encountering the Chinese also explains how Chinese values are changing rapidly-and why it is more important than ever to keep up. For instance, compliments, once declined out of modesty, are now widely accepted in coastal cities; and some terms of address that were proper to use only a decade ago have grown offensive. Encountering the Chinese provides invaluable insight into the diverse and changing Chinese culture.
Author: Liang Shuming Publisher: Amsterdam University Press ISBN: 9048554128 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 417
Book Description
Chinese culture, to readers of English, is somewhat veiled in mystery. Fundamentals of Chinese Culture (in pinyin, Zhongguo wenhua yaoyi), a classic of great insight and profundity by noted Chinese thinker, educator and social reformist Liang Shuming, takes readers on an intellectual journey into the five-thousand-year-old culture of China, the world's oldest continuous civilization. With a set of "Chinese-style" cultural theories, the book well serves as a platform for Westerners' better understanding of the distinctive worldview of the Chinese people, who value family life, group-centered life and social stability, and for further mutual understanding and greater mutual consolidation among humanities scholars in different contexts, dismantling common misconceptions about China and bridging the gap between Chinese culture and Western culture. As a translation of Liang Shuming's original text, this book pulls back the curtain to reveal to Westerners a highly complex and nuanced picture of a fascinating people.
Author: Anoop Nayak Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317904133 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 355
Book Description
Geographical Thought provides a clear and accessible introduction to the key ideas and figures in human geography. The book provides an essential introduction to the theories that have shaped the study of societies and space. Opening with an exploration of the founding concepts of human geography in the nineteenth century academy, the authors examine the range of theoretical perspectives that have emerged within human geography over the last century from feminist and marxist scholarship, through to post-colonial and non-representational theories. Each chapter contains insightful lines of argument that encourage readers towards independent thinking and critical evaluation. Supporting materials include a glossary, visual images, further reading suggestions and dialogue boxes.
Author: Tai Ng
Author: Richard Nisbett
Author: Guobin Xu
Author: Michael Saffle
Author: Anthony E. Clark
Author: Paul Willis
Author: David L. Hall
Author: Hu Wenzhong
Author: Liang Shuming
Author: Anoop Nayak