Modern European culture and 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 a temporal dimension. The need to confront 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 relationships. This international collection of essays sweeps over a 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 nation-State building process. The book is the outcome of the European research 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)” 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 of 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 written on British colonial ideologies, republican political thought and empire, French historiography and the non-European world and English political historiography. He published critical editions of works by Lord Bolingbroke, Edmund Burke, the abbé Raynal and Anquetil-Duperron, and authored books on James Mill and British India (1979), the English Universal History and colonial historiography (1989), the American Revolution (1998) and the European expansion in Asia (2002). On the cultural history of human diversity he has co-edited two previous collections of essays, The Problem of Human Diversity in the European Cultural Experience of the Eighteenth Century (Cromohs, 8, 2003,) and Le problème de l’‘altérité’ dans la culture européenne aux 18e et 19e siècles: anthropologie, politique et religion (Napoli: Bibliopolis, 2006). His more recent research regards ‘live human ethno-exhibitions’ in early-modern Europe and nineteenth-century Italian anthropological culture and the perceptions of racial differences. 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.

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 20

Encountering Otherness. Diversities and Transcultural Experiences in Early Modern European Culture
(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2011)
Abbattista, Guido
Modern European culture and politics have been largely shaped by the century-long material and cognitive relationships with several forms of ethno-anthropological, sociological and cultural diversity according to both a spatial and a temporal dimension. This international collection of essays sweeps over a 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 nation-State building process. The book is the outcome of the European research 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)” 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).
1889 17590
L’expérience de l’ ‘Autre’ des missionnaires et le discours anthropologique. À propos des ‘Nouvelles de la presqu’île américaine de Californie’ (1772) du missionnaire jésuite Johann Jakob Baegert
(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2011)
Lüsebrink, Hans-Jürgen
This contribution presents and analyzes the work of the Jesuit missionary Johann Jakob Baegert who was born in Alsatia in 1717 and sent to the Californian Peninsula in the mid-eighteenth century, in a threefold perspective: in the first part the specific characteristics of Baegert’s biography are presented and pointed out; the second part considers Baegert’s main work, the Nachrichten von der Amerikanischen Halbinsel Californien (Nouvelles de la presqu’île américaine de Californie) published in German in 1772 in Mannheim, as an ethnographic counter-discourse directed abstracts 381 against dominant European visions of South America and Lower California, exemplified in the article on the subject published by Bruzen de la Martinière in his Grand Dictionnaire géographique, historique et critique (1723). Finally, the third part of the contribution analyzes the anthropological dimensions of Baegert’s discourse, especially the use of comparisons and the perception of intercultural encounters and cultural particularities in his main work as well as in letters addressed to his brother, which were published in an Alsatian periodical.
1137 1114
Catholic civilization and the evil savage: Juan Nuix facing the Spanish Conquista of the New World
(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2011)
Guasti, Niccolò
This paper analyzes the Riflessioni imparziali sopra l’umanità degli Spagnuoli nell’Indie, published in 1780 by the exiled Spanish Jesuit, Juan Nuix (1740- 1783). This work, conceived as an extensive commentary on Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes and Robertson’s History of America, presented two main points: a strong censure of the black legend version of the Spanish enterprises in America and, secondly, a peculiar point of view on 'otherness' in relation to the Spanish conquista of America. The most interesting aspect of the Riflessioni is its explicit attempt, according to the ideological positions of a ‘conservative’ Jesuit like Nuix, to revive – through a modern language – the ‘Imperial Spain paradigm' within a Counter-reformist frame: to this purpose he simply turned upside down, by claiming them as positive, all the black legend arguments.
1160 2025
The Holy Land in British eyes: sacred geography and the ‘rediscovery’ of Palestine, 1839-1917
(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2011)
Hary, Maggy
Due to the relative weakness of the Porte in the nineteenth century, access to and circulation in the Ottoman Empire were facilitated for European travelers and diplomats. In 1838, Britain opened a consulate in Jerusalem and, soon afterwards, British explorers and geographers began to survey the Holy Land in search for evidence that would allow them to authenticate the biblical narrative whose veracity was then increasingly questioned. ‘Sacred geography’, as such enterprise became known, emphasized the features of modern Palestine that confirmed Scriptures while everything that did not fit in the biblical framework – notably Islam and the Ottoman presence – was either ignored or disparaged as the reasons of the Holy Land’s supposed decline. Such discourse laid the foundations of future imperialist designs on Palestine, notably Zionism, which was to be officially endorsed by Britain in the Balfour Declaration of 1917.
1265 1578
Thinking about the history of Africa in the eighteenth Century
(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2011)
Thomson, Ann
It is generally believed that sub-Saharan Africa was largely unknown to eighteenth-century Europeans except as the source of slaves, and it is largely absent from philosophical history. However, eighteenth-century writings about Africa provided many histories of nations with different types of government, which belie the view of one undifferentiated mass peopled by savages with no history. But abolitionist writings represented Africans primarily as innocent children of nature, the victims of European traders who provoked wars by their Machiavellian maneuvers. This made it impossible to place them in a coherent historical narrative or to accord them a political history of their own, and as Africans could not be assigned a clear place in the stadial scheme of history, they were generally excluded from historical thinking. They became childlike victims to be enslaved or, increasingly, converted and civilized by the Europeans. Thinking about the Africans was increasingly confined to the field of natural history and anthropology and to their place in the racial hierarchy.
1239 4494

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