Cross-Cultural History and the Domestication of Otherness

Through case studies spanning Europe, America, Africa, and Asia, this book illuminates our historical understanding of what happens when different cultures meet. Here, twelve cultural historians explore the mechanism and inner dynamic of such encounters, and demonstrate that while they often occur within a global context, they only acquire meaning locally, where culture inherently resides. The contributors show that traditional, macro-scale frameworks of interpretation are too abstract and general to capture change caused by cross-cultural contacts, and that such change can come about only at the grassroots level, where the domestication of otherness takes place.