Kedmon,
When I originally posted about the BBC program I was drawing on the
terminology they themselves were using but there the contrast was between
christian west/islamic near east. Earlier exchanges on science made the
association of science and "west" and I was also responding to that
distinction since what I've been trying to say throughout is that science is
not a product of the 19th and 20th century world hegemony of european
countries and the USA.
I was drawing the western/non-western distinction out of a previous xmca
discussion. Nevertheless, I think that what I want to say is
christian-European, specifically western European and its colonies. Any
distinctions grow fuzzy when they are descriptive but the primary cultural
areas I would point to are England, the low countries, Germany, Scandinavian
countries, France, Switzerland, northern Italy, and to some degree Spain.
When I hear this I remember all of the discussions in developmental
economics and theories of underdevelopment about what countries were 1st,
2nd, and 3rd world. Basically I accept Wallerstein's model concerning
center, semi-periphery, and periphery in the world economic system since the
16th century. This focuses on those countries in which industrial
capitalist economies developed first and most completely (thus Paraguay,
which was the most industrial country in South America in 1852, would not be
included since that development was episodic and destroyed by military
power). Of course Japan deserves particular consideration but it should be
remembered that its emergence on the world stage began with its "opening" to
the west (USA) in the 1850s.
The issue probably more directly concerns the world view fostered through
Christianity that developed specifically in those European countries
Wallerstein identifies as center and which can be contrasted to cultural
regions defined in terms of other major world religions (i.e., Islam,
Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism).
This center-periphery economic structure and corresponding determination of
dominant cultural traditions is all changing with the transformations of
modes of production occasioned with cybernetic technology. As Jay Lemke
pointed out in his paper "Metamedia Literacies": "The dominance of
cyberspace by the Euro-American cultural tribes will inevitably be
short-lived. Asian societies have the technology and the confidence in their
cultural traditions to ensure that the global exchange will not take place
entirely on our [euro-american] terms, as it has for the past couple
centuries." In a very real sense then, the process of cultural
hybridization will become much quicker than it has in all previous human
history and the terms West-East, etc. will soon be simply matters of
cultural-historical etymology.
Paul H. Dillon
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Feb 01 2000 - 01:01:51 PST