Edited by Guido Abbattista:

Encountering Otherness and Transcultural Experiences in Early Modern European Culture. EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2011, 394 pages. ISBN: 978-88-8303-306-3

« Modern European culture politics have been largely shaped by the century-long material and cognitive relationships with several (domestic and exotic) forms of ethno-anthropological, sociological and cultural diversity according to both a spatial and temporal dimension. The need to confort and handle « diversity » did not just result from the European expansion process in the world, but coincides with the most classic problem of politics, consisting in the effort to harmonize different interests, groups, religious faiths, customs, languages, ethnic identities and merge them into some form of viable and durable co-existence. Approach to cultural diversity has produced two ideal extremes: suppression through assimilation or its perpetuation through radical « othering ». Historical experience has offered, however, a large variety of policies and of intellectual or ideological constructs of a « transcultural » kind, with the transfer, adaptation and dialogue of political, religious, economic patterns of multiplicity of such cultural experiences according to a global, transcultural outlook, ranging from European encounters with exotic, savage peoples of newly discovered lands of conquest and colonization, to the European research project, « EUO-European Cilture and the Understanding of Otherness: Historiography, Politics and the Sciences od Man in the Birth of the Modern World (Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries) » conceived and directed by Guido Abbattista with researchers from eleven European universities and sponsored by the Italian Ministry of Education University and Research (Interlink program for 2006-2008) »

Guido Abbattista, Professor od Modern History and Director of the Doctoral School in the Humanities at the University of Trieste (Italy), is a specialist of eighteenth-century historical and political culture in France and the Anglo-American world, particularly on colonial and imperial themes and the representation of human diversity. He has been director of several national and international research projects, among which the MIUR-Interlink project « EUO-European Culture and the Understanding of « Otherness »: Historiography, Politics and the Sciences of Man in the Birth of the Modern World (Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries) », from which the present volume has originated.

Table of contents

Guido Abbattista (Università di Trieste):

« Introduction » ………………………………………………………………………………………………………(9)

Guido Abbattista:

« Trophying human « otherness ». From Christopher Clumbus to contemporary ethno-ecology (fifteenth-twenty first centuries) »………………………………………………………………………………………………………………(19)

Lucia Felici (Università di Firenze):

« Una nuova immagine dell’Islam (e del cristianesimo) nell’Europa del XVI secolo »……………….(43)

Guillermo Pérez Sarrión (Universidad de Zaragoza):

« The idea of « naturality » in the Hispanic monarchy and the formation of spanish identity between the sixteenth and the eighteeth centuries: an approach »…………………………………………………………………………………(67)

Joan-Pau Rubiés (London School of Economics):

« Ethnography, philosophy and the rise of natural man 1500-1750″……………………………………..(97)

Laszlo Kontler (Central European University, Budapest):

« The Lappon, the Scythian and the Hungarian, or our (former) selves as others. Philosophical history in eighteenth-century Hungary »………………………………………………………………………………………………………….(131)

Borbala Zsuzsanna Török (Universität Konstanz):

« The ethnicity of knowledge: statistics and Landeskunde in late eighteenth-century Hungary and Transsylvania »………………………………………………………………………………………………………………(147)

Jesús Astigarraga (Universidad de Zaragoza):

« Les images de l’Espagne chez les économistes napolitains des Lumières: le cas de Filangieri »…….(163)

Javier Usoz (Universidad de Zaragoza):

« Political economy and the mirror of « otherness »: moral and foreign political models in the works of the Spanish economist T. Anzano (1768-1795)…………………………………………………………………………………..(183)

Ashley Eva Millar (London School of Economics):

« Your beggarly commerce! Enlightenment European views of the China trade »…………………………(205)

Paul Cohen (University of Toronto:

« The power of apprehending « otherness »: cultural intermediaries as imperial agents in New France »…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………(223)

Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink (Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken):

« L’expérience de l’ »Autre » des missionnaires et le discours anthropologique. A propos des Nouvelles de la presqu’île américaine de Californie (1772) du missionnaire jésuite Johann Jakob Baegert »………………………..(239)

Ann Thomson (Université de Paris VIII, Vincennes-Saint-Denis):

« Thinking about the history of Africa in the eighteenth Century »……………………………………………….(253)

Marco Platania (J. W. Goethe Universität, Frankfurt):

« Madagascar « possession française ». L’historiographie coloniale en débat: une mise en perspective »…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….(267)

Niccolo Guasti (Università di Foggia):

« Catholic civilization and the evil savage: Juan Nuix facing the Spanish Conquista of the New World »…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….(285)

Balázs Trencsényi (Central European University, Budapest):

« Civilization and originality: perceptions of history and national specificity in nineteenth-century Hungarian political discourse »…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………(305)

Maggy Hary (Université de Paris VIII, Vincennes-Saint-Denis):

« The Holy Land in British eyes: sacred geography and the « rediscovery » of Palestine, 1841-1917)…… (339)

Monika Welrheim (Universität Bonn):

« A la quête du passé des autres: les expéditions des voyageurs Dupaix et Waldeck à Palenque (Mexique) dans la première moitiés du XIXe siècle »…………………………………………………………………………………………..(351)

Irene Galdo (Università del Piemonte Orientale, Vercelli):

« Snapshotting the « Other »: images of the « otherness » in Samuel Butler’s life and work (1835-1902) »……(363)

Abstracts:

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..(379)

Contributors:

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………(389)

Contact: gabbattista@units.it