LSO 190 Lecture 1: Origins of East-West Contacts

1. LSO 190Lecture 1: Origins of East-West Contacts

2. Transculturation: • Cultural change produced by the sudden or gradual introduction of elements of a foreign culture. It is often driven by trade, war, largescale migration and exploration. It often produces a new form of mixed or hybrid culture which replaces the original culture.

3. Globalization: • Globalization is a process of interaction and integration among people, corporations, governments and organizations around the, a process driven by international politics, trade, and commerce and aided by information technology. Internet technology has accelerated the process of globalization since the 1990s.

4. Siddhartha Gautama, the Historical Buddha

5. Buddha in ‘Western’ robes (3rd century CE)Discovered in Afghanistan in the 1930s: Evidence that Western and Asian cultures were converging long before we once assumed

6. Buddha and Hercules (3rd century BC)Discovered in Afghanistan in 1980s

7. ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ Buddhist Monks7th century CE illustration

8. Alexander with elephant head-dress Gold, 3rd century BC

9. Christianity in Korea: An example of the mingling of global cultures with the spread of empires

10. Native American ‘Madonna and Child’

11. Japanese Victorians: Western Dress in 19th Century Japan

12. Japanese Punks

13. ‘Chinatown’ in London

14. Stereotype: • A set of often inaccurate, simplistic generalizations about a national, ethnic, religious or racial group. Stereotypes are often negative and contribute to tensions between groups.

15. The ‘Eurasian’ Landmass

16. “The West”

17. “The East”

18. Herodotus (484-425 BC)Considered to be the first historian in Western civilization. He recorded some of the first ‘Western’ descriptions of ‘Eastern’ or ‘Asian’ societies, in which some of the earliest Western stereotypes of Asia emerge.

19. Eastern cultural innovations that transformed the Western world: • Agriculture • Animal domestication/husbandry • Monotheism (a belief in one god) • Coinage • Written language • Science, mathematics and astronomy

20. Regions using the Phoenician alphabet, the oldest verified alphabetic system in the world.

21. Euclid of Alexandria (325-265 BCE)The ‘Father of Geometry’

22. Ptolemy (90-168 CE)The ‘Father of Astronomy’

23. Alexander the Great 356-232 BCHis creation of a huge empire which spanned from Greece in the West to parts of modern India in the East created a vast space where Eastern and Western cultures slowly converged, creating new hybrid cultures.

24. The Empire of ‘Alexander the Great’

25. Seated Buddha, 1st–mid-2nd century AD Pakistan, ancient region of GandharaBronze with traces of gold leaf. It’s style closely reflects Greek sculpture of the period, evidence of the spread of Greek cultural forms during the conquests of Alexander.

26. Dish with Apollo and Daphne, ca. 1st century BCPakistan, ancient region of Gandhara (The legend of Apollo and Daphne was a well known tale in Greek Mythology).

27. Alexander Marries Roxana (1517)

28. The Roman Empire and Han Dynasty China (200 CE)

29. Zhang Qian departs for the ‘Western Regions’ (190 BCE)(He was an envoy sent by Han Dynasty China to reach the Roman Empire. He never got to Rome, but he did reach further West than any East Asian person before him, bringing back knowledge of life in ‘the west’).

30. The ‘Silk Road’

31. The ‘Silk Road’ in the 1st Century CE

33. Roman glassware

34. Ancient Luxury: A Roman woman having cosmetics and perfume applied

35. The Chinese envoy Gan Ying seeking ‘Daquin’ (1st Century CE)He brings back even more detailed information on Roman and ‘western’ society.

36. Ptolemy’s ‘Map of the World’ which includes ‘Serica’ and ‘Sinae’(15th century copy of the 150 AD map)