Overlapping Territories: Asian Voices on Culture and Civilization

Such an interdependent, yet chaotic, world order, in turn, raises new philosophical questions. Identity, culture and civilization cannot be understood anymore simply in terms of traditional categories. These categories are called into question through mutual interrogation and mutual enlargement of horizons, and this inevitably entails hybridization and pluralization.

The Asian voices included in this book speak of recognition of and respect for the ‘otherness’, the other outside as well as inside. The writers mostly see globalization as well as their own cultural positions through dialogical imagination in which a Western philosophical framework is deployed to find out their Asian positions, and the reverse, the Asian reality is used to problematize the Western framework. Thereby this book attempts to shed light on the question of how we are to understand culture and civilization.