Westernization

About: Westernization is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1154 publications have been published within this topic receiving 15791 citations. The topic is also known as: occidentalization.

Chapter Sixteen Skin Color Melancholy in Modern Japan: Male Elites’ Racial Experiences Abroad, 1880s–1950s

Abstract: This chapter focuses on the distance manifested by skin tone, namely the manner in which racial distances were perceived among Japanese elites from the 1880s to the 1950s. It was around the 1880s when racial interactions became widespread with the development of steamships and railroads. Racial experiences were most prevalent among those who ventured out of Japan, which means they were limited to the elites. In Japanese national identification, the West was regarded as the most important other than Yonehara. In modern Japan in particular, where Westernization was undertaken as a way for Japan to become Japan, the sense of dilemma, contradiction and disjuncture was perceived in many ways. This chapter seeks to shed light on the dilemma Japan faced with regard to its identity and frame of mind since the onset of modern period by observing reactions towards the perceived racial distance between Japan and the West. Keywords:Japan Westernization; Japanese elites; racial experiences

Teaching Social Conflict in Turkish American Studies

Abstract: Teaching American studies in Turkey involves hazards and opportunities for American scholars hopeful of internationalizing their perspective. The growth of the field in Turkey is one chapter in a history extending more than two hundred years from the adoption of Western-style education in the Turkish Republic and its predecessor, the Ottoman Empire (Davison 1990). Thus it is part of a process that Americans might readily think of as Westernization but that in fact is more complicated. On the one hand, support for American studies in Turkey has come in part from American and British institutions. In 1959 the Rockefeller Foundation donated money to establish the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at what is now Bosphorus University, and the history department there still calls on the American embassy to fund guest speakers. In the 1960s Peace Corps volunteers taught English language and literature in public high schools. Although Turkish faculty taught a few American texts, Americans teaching on Fulbright scholarships were the first specialists in American literature at Ankara and Haceteppe Universities when these universities began to establish the country’s first American literature departments in the late 1960s (Aytur 1996).9 On the other hand, Turkish government officials have initiated much of the support for Westernization in general and for the study of American and British cultures in particular (Davison 1988, 1990; Zurcher 1998; Raw 2000); the Turkish scholars to whom I have spoken do not have strictly ideological motivations for specializing in American literature or culture; and the American funds that helped stimulate Turkish study of American literature, history, and culture are drying up: the U.S. Information Agency has been folded into the U.S. State Department, and every year its funding of the Turkish American Studies Association Annual Meeting is cut a little more. Meanwhile, most active Turkish American studies researchers are interested in examining the problems rather than the “essence” of American culture and nationhood. In my department, we teach students about social conflict and injustice in or around the United States. Most of the department’s members were trained in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, and most have adopted a model of culture as a “whole way of conflict” (Thompson 1995: 185).10 The on-line academic catalog’s description of the department in

Sparking joy or sparking narcissism? A Western appropriation of the KonMari method

Abstract: This project seeks to understand the philosophical consequences of the Westernization of the KonMari method, a tidying method initiated by Japanese professional Marie Kondo that finds popularity wi...

Turkey and the United States after World War I: National Memory, Local Categories, and Provincializing the Transnational

Abstract: This essay focuses on the tumultuous period between 1918 and 1923, from the end of World War I to the declaration of the Turkish republic, when the United States became seriously engaged with the fate of the Near East because of calls for a US mandate over Ottoman Turkey. At its center is the history and historiography of a short-lived Turkish Wilsonian Principles League (WPL), founded by the feminist intellectual Halide Edib, which called for the United States to assume a mandate over Turkey. The way that the WPL is overremembered in modern Turkey and forgotten in the United States shows how ideas about gender and sexuality continue to infuse national memory in both countries. Examining Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to think of Turks as wards and the vilification of Edib by the first Turkish republican regime, the essay complicates the causal links we might be tempted to draw between racism and empire and asks us to consider the complex role that the local deployments of westernization play in the absence of actual US intervention.

The Impact of Existentialism on China's Democratic Education through Globalization

Abstract: With the process of globalization since 1960s, the world economy has been exerting a strong impact on the growth of economy as well as on other aspects of life such as politics, science and technology, environment, education, and culture. This impact has brought about opportunities and challenges. In the context of globalization, or some call it westernization; educational policy in China has been challenged. It has gone through a big transformation from education for political ideology to education for socialist modernization. In the process of globalization, the question of how to cultivate a person as a qualified global individual has been raised and been drawn to our attention. How would China be able to produce such an individual and make the education more democratic? The idea of Existentialism, the most influential philosophy in the twentieth century, offers great sources and suggestions for a way of building a richer, fuller, more genuine existence for all becoming persons.