Showing papers on "Westernization published in 2000"

The Culture of Sectarianism : Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon

Abstract: Focusing on Ottoman Lebanon, Ussama Makdisi shows how sectarianism was a manifestation of modernity that transcended the physical boundaries of a particular country. His study challenges those who have viewed sectarian violence as an Islamic response to westernization or simply as a product of social and economic inequities among religious groups. The religious violence of the nineteenth century, which culminated in sectarian mobilizations and massacres in 1860, was a complex, multilayered, subaltern expression of modernization, he says, not a primordial reaction to it. Makdisi argues that sectarianism represented a deliberate mobilization of religious identities for political and social purposes. The Ottoman reform movement launched in 1839 and the growing European presence in the Middle East contributed to the disintegration of the traditional Lebanese social order based on a hierarchy that bridged religious differences. Makdisi highlights how European colonialism and Orientalism, with their emphasis on Christian salvation and Islamic despotism, and Ottoman and local nationalisms each created and used narratives of sectarianism as foils to their own visions of modernity and to their own projects of colonial, imperial, and national development. Makdisi's book is important to our understanding of Lebanese society today, but it also makes a significant contribution to the discussion of the importance of religious discourse in the formation and dissolution of social and national identities in the modern world.

Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th-20th Centuries

Abstract: Until the publication of this remarkably comprehensive history of the Sephardi diaspora, only limited attention had been given to the distinctive Judeo-Spanish cultural entity that flourished in the Balkans and Asia Minor for more than four centuries. Yet the great majority of Sephardi Jews, after their expulsion from Spain in 1492 and subsequently from Portugal, found their way to this region, drawn by the political stability and relatively tolerant rule of the Ottoman Empire, as well as by promising socioeconomic conditions. Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue show how Sephardi society and culture developed in the Levant, sharing language, religion, customs, and communal life as they did nowhere else, both during prosperous times and during the declining fortunes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The impact of westernization, the end of Ottoman power, and the rise of fragmenting nation-states transformed this vital community in the modern era. And, like many other Jewish communities, the unique Judeo-Spanish culture was dispersed and destroyed by the Holocaust and the migrations of the twentieth century. "Sephardi Jewry" presents its vivid history in a readable, well-documented narrative.

Rapid Social Change and the Turmoil of Adolescence: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Abstract: This article is a selective literature review, viewing adolescence in a cross-cultural perspective. Starting with the Mead/Freeman controversy, it centers on the following question: Which are the cultural contexts that best ensure a smooth transition from childhood to adulthood? The review covers some of the ethnographic research, both case studies and work using the hologeistic method (those using the Human Relations Area Files), and some of the research in cross-cultural and developmental psychology, but neither cross-national comparisons nor studies with migrants in multicultural societies. It is found that social adolescence is a universal life stage, but that it takes very different forms in different societies. Its extension into a youthperiod occurred in societies with an age-grade system, and is nowadays linked to urbanization, industrialization, and formal education. Adolescence does not need to be a period of storm and stress, and the generation gap and problem behaviors considered a “normal” part of adolescence are in fact culturally produced. In many situations, these problematic aspects of adolescence are linked to rapid social change or acculturation, most often in the form of westernization. Societies that manage to keep some continuity, cultural identity, and basic values such as family solidarity, often also manage to avoid importing the problems of adolescence despite social change. Of importance are the tolerance and flexibility of adults, close contact between generations, appropriate role-learning and acceptance into the adult community, including in the economic sphere.

Feminism, Anthropology and the Politics of Excision in Mali: Global and Local Debates in a Postcolonial World

Abstract: This article examines the politics and discourses surrounding female circumcision, and explores ethical approaches to its study for feminist anthropologists. First I present an overview of the international debate on these operations, and review the literature on "female genital mutilation." Unfortunately these writings that are meant to help empower African women can "colonize" them (after Mohanty, 1991). Second, the current debates around the practice in Mali are discussed. The issue has become a metonym for politically, ideologically and economically motivated discussions on gender, age, caste, Islam and Westernization. Resume: Cet article explore les discourset les relations de pouvoir qui entourent et sous-tendent les debats sur la circoncision feminine. L'auteure explore des approches ethiques qui pourraient etre adoptees par les anthropologues feministes. Tout d'abord, un survol historique des debats sur la scene internationale est presente, incluant une revue des publications sur les >. Malheureusement ces ecrits qui se veulent liberateurs pour les femmes africaines peuvent avoir comme consequence de les coloniser a nouveau (cf. Mohanty, 1991). Dans une deuxieme pattie l'auteure presente les resultats de ses recherches sur les debats actuels sur l'excision au Mali. Le debat sur l'excision fonctionne comme une metonymie a travers laquelle sont debattue d'autres grandes questions sociales et politiques sur les rapports sociaux entre les sexes et entre les jeunes et les aine-e-s, sur la stratification sociale par castes, et sur les merites compares de l'Islam et de l'occidentalisation.IntroductionFor a feminist anthropologist, there is no comfortable position from which to study female circumcision. The very decision to write (or not) about the topic becomes a political statement, and so is one's choice of tone and terminology. The issue has become a highly sensitive nexus where converge some of the most difficult ethical debates in feminism and anthropology: the issues of cultural relativism, international human rights, difference, ethnocentrism and Western imperialism.This article examines the politics and the different discourses surrounding the issue of female circumcision, and explores ethical approaches to their study for feminist anthropologists. The first part presents an historical overview of the international debate on these operations, sketching the meanings that they have come to carry for feminists, anthropologists and human-rights activists. A review of the literature on "female genital mutilation" illustrates how most anti-circumcision activists dismiss "tradition" and try to inscribe new meanings onto the practices, categorizing them as "violence against women." Yet writings which are meant to help free women from oppression unfortunately have often been seen to "colonize" (after Mohanty, 1991) African and Muslim women. This predicament suggests a role that anthropologists can play in this debate: helping to both contextualize these operations, discussing their local functions and cultural meanings and to understand why efforts to eradicate what are considered by Western feminists to be such offensive, patriarchal practices, are resisted by women themselves.The specific cultural meanings of female circumcision, however, are multiple and changing. The research I recently completed in southern Mali(f.1) was based on an understanding of culture as a complex "network of perspectives," as "an ongoing debate" (Hannerz, 1992: 262). Malian society is one in which ethnicity has always been fluid and where cultural meanings, as well as individuals, have long and extensively crossed group boundaries (cf. Amselle, 1990), particularly in urban areas where I worked. The current debates and discourses on and around excision in Mali that I survey in the second part of this article reveal that this issue has become a metonym for politically, ideologically and economically motivated discussions on gender, age, caste, Islam, Westernization and the role of the state. …

When East Meets West: Decontextualizing the Quality of East European Higher Education

Abstract: This paper discusses the new quality movement in East European higher education. Over the past decade quality assurance agencies have been established in most of the countries in the region. It has been argued that through quality assurance, East European states continue controlling higher education politically. However, a more complex interpretation of the situation may be appropriate. Analysing the post state-socialist quality assurance practices, it is proposed that the relationship between the political power and orthodox academe allows even in the current public policy vacuum using them primarily in one direction, fighting non-traditional institutions, programmes, and teaching methods. While post state-socialist countries present their quality assurance initiatives as a part of the Westernization programme, they stand in strong contrast to the 'fitness for the purpose' mantra applied in Western Europe. However, there have recently emerged signs, for example, the OECD performance indicators project, s...

Realizing the potential of management and leadership: toward a synthesis of Western and indigenous perspectives in the modernization of non-Western societies

Abstract: This paper analyses the dilemma of developing countries in the non-Western world in their struggle to achieve economic and social development. The dilemma results from two opposing pulls that accompany the urge for modernization: the application of new knowledge and technologyfromtheWest and thepreservation of cultural identity, enduring traditional values, and wisdom that have held the society together over the centuries. The analysis is focused on India where the dilemma and the tensions inherent in the transition arequite pronounced. Thedebateover tradition and Westernization isexamined against the background of India'sexposure toWestern ideasthrough its system of higher education. To realizethepotential of management, a shift is proposed fromthepredominantly centralized, bureaucratic model of educational administration to a managerial-professional model that would synthesize Western and indigenous perspectives. Attempts to discover the ‘Indianness’ of Indian management are reviewed. The concept of lea...

Forgotten brigade of the forgotten war: Turkey's participation in the Korean War

Abstract: The Korean War has been called America's forgotten war, a vaguely remembered and unpopular police action that took place between the glorious victories of the Second World War and the ignominious defeat of Viet Nam. But if the Korean War occupies only a small place in the popular memory, the role played by Turkey in the war has been almost entirely forgotten. In the United States, few who did not fight in Korea seem to remember the Turks were there at all. This really becomes apparent if you happen to be up at three in the morning watching M*A *S*H reruns hoping to go to sleep. Turkish soldiers rarely figure in the scripts of M*A *S*H, and when they do, their image is ambiguous. It is not entirely clear whose side they are on. Turkey's involvement in the Korean War is not seen by Turks as being a major event in their recent history. A few blocks from the Ankara train station there is a monument to those who died in the Korean War. The monument is unobtrusive, a fact of life, but not a major feature of the landscape. Yet Turkey's participation in the Korean War was a crucial point in recent Turkish history. Indeed, the decision to participate in the Korean War was an important aspect of a re-evaluation of Turkey's place in international politics and economics that emerged at the end of the Second World War. It came along with reconsideration of the meaning of westernization, democracy, civil-military relations, secularization and the role of Islam in society, the role of the state in the economy and state interference in social and cultural affairs. Participation in the war ended nearly 30 years of a policy of non-involvement in international conflicts, while this period laid the foundation of debates within Turkey, not only on domestic but also on foreign affairs, that continue even in the 1990s. This article concentrates on Turkey's participation in the Korean War in terms of three questions: 1. Why did Turkey participate in the Korean War, especially after

The Cultural Logic of the Korean Modernization Project and its Gender Politics

Abstract: In this article I seek to examine the cultural discourse of the modernization project in Korea. I especially focus on women and how they were incorporated within state modernization programs. South Korea has industrialized rapidly since the implementation of its modernization project in the early 1960s which implied economic political and social-institutional development. However these institutional changes were not value-free because the modernization process has been essentially oriented towards westernization and signifies an extinction of the past. Conflicts and tensions erupted around meanings values and norms as embedded in the modernization project. The Korean modernization project which mobilized the whole nation by making the project a collective effort "ours" tried to resolve certain problems by separating the material/economic associated with the West from the East/Korean. In this process women as homogenous and ahistorical subjects were mobilized to represent the spiritual cultural and a reconstituted patriarchal tradition of the nation/ state. These patterns were established through the dissemination of cultural norms and ethics. This article explores these cultural and normative processes whereby women are shaped into dutiful patriarchal subjects--as daughters wives and mothers--in the Korean modernization project. (authors)

Is there a 'space' for enabling disparate knowledge traditions to work together? Challenges for Science (Education) in an African context.

Abstract: In recent years we have witnessed a rethinking of the status of Western science as a result of critiques of science by sociologists of knowledge, feminists and post-colonialists Turnbull (1997:551) points out that Western Science is undergoing a process of 'decentring' recognising that there are other ways of knowing in addition to Eurocentric and egocentric ones. These developments provide particular challenges for science (education) in Western and non-Western countries, in the context of complex globalisation processes, currently prevalent. Recently, we have witnessed the optimism for an African Renaissance, including the role that science and technology can play in Africa 's development. This article critically explores a 'space' for knowledge production, which may enable both Western science and African Indigenous knowledges to coexist. The implications of such a 'space' for science (education) in an African context are explored.

Constructing Chinese Masculinity for the Modern World: with Particular Reference to Lao She's The Two Mas

Abstract: In the early decades of the 20th century, Chinese identities were subjected to profound challenges posed by the West. Traditional Chinese linkages between gender and power were shaken by contact with aggressive western imperialism. Although there are numerous studies on this impact, almost nothing has been written on its effects on the Chinese constructions of masculinity. Did East-West contact significantly change the male ideal? If so, how did the new image integrate traditional and Western gender configurations? This article first examines the theoretical basis of masculinity models in traditional China, and then analyses the ways in which a Western context could alter the ways Chinese intellectuals reconstruct these models to arrive at a new male prototype. As one of the best known examples of the interface between East and West, Lao She's (1899–1966) novel Er Ma (The Two Mas) will be used as a case study. The 1920s was a time when many Westernized intellectuals such as Xu Zhimo were totally enamoured by European civilization, to such an extent that Xu's influential friend Hu Shi once called for a “wholesale Westernization” of Chinese culture. While there was a great diversity of masculine ideals in this period, the effects on the male identity from contact with the West were fundamental and enduring, and the images presented in The Two Mas were in many respects typical of the Republican era.

Chinese Learning (kangaku) in Meiji Japan (1868–1912)

Abstract: Japan’s development since the middle of the nineteenth century is usually summarized under the headings ‘modernization’ and ‘westernization’. Such a perspective neglects the importance of indigenous traditions in the shaping of modern Japan, including Chinese learning (kangaku), which had been thoroughly assimilated and had formed the basis of the dominant ideology in the Tokugawa period (1600-1868). The leaders of the Meiji restoration of 1868 all had a kangaku education and their ideas were strongly influenced by it. Kangaku continued to play a dominant role in Japanese culture until well into the Meiji period and did not fall into decline until the mid-1890s. The main reason for this was not contempt for contemporary China in the wake of the Sino-Japanese war (1894-5), as has been argued, but the new national education system which stressed western knowledge. It was not a sign of waning interest in China, but of new forms this interest took. China became the object of new academic disciplines, including tōyōshi (East Asian history), which applied western methods and a new interpretative framework to the study of China.

On Adam Smith and Confucius: The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Analects

Abstract: This book is part of a broad study about Confucianism and its implications for modernisation of the Confucian regions (covering Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, Japan, South Korea, North Korea, Vietnam, and Singapore). The purpose of this book is to compare the ethical, social and economical principles advocated by Adam Smith and Confucius. Adam Smith is the most influential thinker in developed economies in modern times. Confucius was the most influential thinker in the Confucian regions before the West became influential in these regions. The book shows that it is important to compare the two great thinkers in order to understand whether or not Westernisation of the Confucian regions is sustainable and whether or not there will be 'clashes of civilisations' between the Confucian regions and the West.

India another millennium

Abstract: In this collection of essays, edited and with an introduction by Romila Thapar, fourteen of India's foremost scholars and specialists in various fields explore the challenges that lie before twenty-first century India in its quest for a democratic and just society. Globalization and the IT revolution provide a new context to the problems faced by contemporary India. But will globalization ensure rapid economic growth and development in the face of low literacy, rising population, and the gradual withdrawal of the State from social commitments? Will imitation westernization, and the consumerism that comes with it, further a just society? What are the strains that democracy will be subjected to in the empowerment struggle by marginalized groups, and the growing social and economic disparities that are often accompanied by violence and terrorism? How will India's multiculturalism be affected by the upsurge of various identities and of exclusionist nationalism? Will the family as an institution be transformed to enhance gender justice? Will new technology ensure the autonomy of the media? Can the mauling of the Indian landscape be halted? Covering a large canvas, this book compels us to look at the hard choices before India in the early decades of this millennium.

Education between Globalisation and Local Culture: A World without Frontiers for Students without Traditions?.

Abstract: An anthropological examination of the impact of globalization on education in the Arab world reveals that education is standing on uneasy middle ground between the Westernization of educational structures and philosophies and the preservation of national and local customs and traditions The transformation of education from a means to acquire a father's trade to a commodity in the global market system is most obvious among the upper socioeconomic classes Because today's high-paying jobs require international travel and communications and awareness of technological advances and their application in the workplace, education is losing its role as a national integration machine and becoming a derivative of the global market, which may be characterized as follows: English-based, deterritorialized, and reliant on analytical skill and the problem-solving skills and dexterity needed to react to constant flux and change Case scenarios of Beiruti teenagers studying at American schools in Lebanon illustrate that, although international schools and universities are increasingly exposing the Lebanese teenagers who attend them to Western culture, these schools cannot transcend their local and national environments, which formulate the "hidden curriculum" for student learning The case scenarios also demonstrated that students appropriate foreign cultural forms in context-specific ways, which makes them creators of a new culture (Contains 18 references) (MN) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document Sunday 9 April, 2000 Ms Lucia Volk Crossroads of the New Millennium Education Between Globalisation And Local Culture: A World Without Frontiers For Students Without Traditions? US DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office of Educational Research and Improvement ED CATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) This document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality Points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessarily represent official OERI position or policy Prepared and Presented

Atatürk and the future of Turkey

Abstract: Turkey ended the 1990s in a tumult of economic difficulties and political successes. As Turkey forges ahead into the new millennium, striving for domestic stability and a strong foreign presence, the legacy of the Republic's founder — Ataturk — is ever‐present, and includes Westernization, internationalism, democracy, and secularism as the basic principles that will guide the Republic's progress.

Borderland Identities or Steering a Sinking Ship

Abstract: Only a decade ago, it was hard to imagine that the so-called wall of democracy would run along the Bug River, along the historical borderlands of Europe. It has been argued that NATO (and expected European Union) enlargement to the historic "gateway" represents a tangible commitment of the West to Central Europe, as well as to the borderlands, a region that has been unstable for centuries and that now has a chance to define itself politically and economically. Until 1989, Eastern Europe was a political rather than a historical construct, designating the zone between Germany and Russia--essentially the former Soviet bloc without East Germany or nonaligned but communist Yugoslavia. In the new, reunited Europe after the collapse of the USSR, this historically peripheral region has become central to the security and the economic stability of the West and, I would argue, of paramount importance to the development of the former Soviet region, including Russia. Historically, the borderlands were a territory of competing civilizations, East and West, a patchwork of ethnicities that bred a hybrid, multicultural personality. It extended between the Baltic and the Black Seas; from the west it was culturally influenced by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and to a lesser degree Austro-Hungarian and Hanseatic groups. Once a swampy, predominately rural region, characterized by ethnic diversity and thought of as backward and unruly, the borderlands were ethnically homogenized by World War II and Soviet experiences, through massacres, "ethnic cleansing," and mass deportations--or as Kate Brown puts it, "modernized."(1) Today the region has become a barometer for gauging the development of the former USSR, with significant progress toward European integration in the Baltic States, a nostalgic regressive regime in Belarus, and ambivalence in Ukraine. I argue that the collapse of the Russian monarchy and the reinvention of the former empire as the USSR represented the last gasp of its orientalism. The legacy of the Soviet collapse, in contrast, has been an ongoing attempt to reintegrate the entire Soviet continent into the West. That transition, involving deep economic and social readjustments, quite naturally tests the limits of cultural identity in several countries, especially in Russia, where the distinctions between ethnic, imperial, and ideological identities--including homo sovieticus--are fluid and ill-defined. It justifies dubbing the entire former Soviet region as Europe's borderland. I believe that Westernization is the corrective option and that the former bloc has been "playing catch up" since the collapse of communism. Timothy Garton Ash extends the idea of "catch-up revolutions" by suggesting that the revolutions that swept Central Europe in 1989-91 were correctives that produced no new ideas.(2) Ash qualifies his claim by pointing to the self-conscious, essentially post-modern character of the revolutionary changes, the minimization of violence, and the negotiated settlements. Those who criticize grafting Western ideas on a distinctive Eurasian ethos, or who point to retro-ideologies that have emerged in the region as examples of another way, miss the point of market globalization and the growing international consensus on civic responsibility. Even more important, communism uprooted agrarian societies and localized identities and led to the relative homogenization (Russification, denationalization) of the region. Although fears of "Weimar Russia" have been commonplace during the NATO enlargement debate, a more apt historical parallel is the disintegrating eighteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Preoccupied with its own internal conflicts, Russia cannot reconstruct its imperial or Soviet past, and it is not likely to invade its neighbors. From that point of view, Russia can either reinvent itself or implode, but it cannot regress into its Euroasiatic isolation. It is noteworthy that more than half of those polled support slow integration with Europe, and even supporters of the so-called Slavic nucleus, such as Vladimir Zhirinovsky, refer to it as "our East European community. …