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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.


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This review of eating disorders in Asia suggests that an understanding of the diversity and distinctiveness of the individual countries and cultures that comprise ‘Asia’ is crucial to understanding the emergence and rise of EDs across this vast region, suggesting that eating disorders are not culture-bound or culture-specific, but rather culture-reactive.
Abstract: Once concentrated among adolescent Caucasian females in high-income Western countries, today, eating disorders (EDs) are truly global. Building upon previous work describing the rise of EDs among cultures in transition, we contextualize the emergence of EDs in Asia by locating this development within the broader discourse about the processes of change that have radically transformed Asian societies over the last three decades. By identifying where EDs are emerging in the region, and by examining their particular expression, our aim is to explicate a fuller story of the relationship between culture and eating disorders. Much of the discussion of EDs in non-Western societies is predicated upon the assumption that an increase in EDs is the by-product of “Westernization”, the term used to describe the process by which increased cultural contact with the West results in the transmission of so-called ‘Western’ ideas and cultural norms to a non-Western culture. While the Westernization literature represents a historical anchor in our understanding of EDs in Asia, we propose that this analysis is incomplete in that societal change in the form of industrialization and urbanization occurring independently from, or in tandem with, “Western” influence are critical factors contributing to the rise of EDs in Asia. Further, our review of eating disorders in Asia suggests that an understanding of the diversity and distinctiveness of the individual countries and cultures that comprise ‘Asia’ is crucial to understanding the emergence and rise of EDs across this vast region, suggesting that eating disorders are not culture-bound or culture-specific, but rather culture-reactive. Taking into account both the historical influence of Western culture and the more contemporary effects of Asian industrialization and urbanization, key distinctions among respective Asian cultures expands our understanding of the development and expression of EDs globally.

227 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors explored the role that orientalism has played in shaping ethnic inequality among Jews in Israel, and argued that the imperatives of this westernization project were the initial impetus to exclude Middle Eastern Jews, as well as non-Jewish Arabs, from emerging Israeli society.
Abstract: This paper explores the role that orientalism has played in shaping ethnic inequality among Jews in Israel. Earlier works usually explain ethnic exclusion as a function of Jewish life on Israeli territory. Here, however, exclusion is located within an earlier history of a Jewish encounter with orientalism and Western European colonialism. It is argued that prior to their immigration to Israel, Jews the world-over had been stigmatized as Oriental. Through a complex process, they accepted this stigma, and they arrived in Israel deeply invested in developing the new country as “western” and uncomfortable with anything identified as “eastern .” It is the imperatives of this westernization “identity project” that account for the initial impetus to exclude Middle Eastern Jews, as well as non-Jewish Arabs, from emerging Israeli society. Viewing history from this perspective, ethnic cleavages in the Jewish world appear to have a historical stability and consistency that is at odds with the current focus on contingency and historical indeterminacy.

223 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Pinar Bilgin1
TL;DR: For example, this article pointed out that there may be elements of non-Western experiences and ideas built in to "Western" ways of thinking about and doing world politics, and pointed out the need to look beyond the spatial confines of the West in search for insight understood as "difference".
Abstract: The laudable attempts at thinking past ‘Western’ir should not limit their task to looking beyond the spatial confines of the ‘West’ in search for insight understood as ‘difference’, but also ask awkward questions about the ‘Westernness’ of ostensibly ‘Western’ approaches to world politics and the ‘non-Westernness’ of others. For there may be elements of ‘non-Western’ experiences and ideas built in to ‘Western’ ways of thinking about and doing world politics. The reverse may also be true. What we think of as ‘non-Western’ approaches to world politics may be suffused with ‘Western’ concepts and theories. Indeed, those who are interested in thinking past ‘Western’ir should take an additional step and inquire into the evolution of the latter. While looking beyond the ‘West’ may not always involve discovering something that is radically ‘different’ from one's own ways of thinking about and doing world politics, such seeming absence of ‘difference’ cannot be explained away through invoking assumptions ...

221 citations

Book
19 Jul 2000
TL;DR: In this article, Ussama Makdisi argues that sectarianism represented a deliberate mobilization of religious identities for political and social purposes, not a primordial reaction to westernization or simply a product of social and economic inequities among religious groups.
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.

201 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
202366
2022165
202124
202035
201935
201838