Europe Observed

This conference is the culmination of a two-years’ long (2002-04) project sponsored by CEMS entitled "Europe Observed." The principal motive behind the choice of this theme was to go beyond the dominant paradigm of studying interactions across cultures in terms of a colonial European gaze directed at societies and cultures in different parts of the world. This theme reverses the direction of the gaze by focusing on the insights, observations, and thoughts about people from different parts of the world about Europe (i.e., its people, institutions, customs, etc). The emphasis of this conference is on the early modern period, defined generally to encompass the period between 1500-1800 C.E. In the early modern world, European colonial domination had not yet become fully entrenched. The emphasis on insights about Europe and Europeans as formed by persons from different parts of the world during this period enables us to go beyond inter-cultural perspectives seen from within the prism of orientalism and the colonial paradigm and to attempt instead to explore how inter-cultural interactions were molded at a time when power relations between Europe and many other parts of the world were far more fluid and less unequal; and when typical 19th- and 20th- century concepts such as the biological notion of race had not yet acquired the ascendancy that it did later.