What The Rest Think Of The West

Provides a historical look through the eyes of outsiders as they survey and scrutinize the politics, science, technology, religion, family practices, and gender roles of civilizations not their own. This book emphasizes the broader figurative meaning of looking west in the scope of history. "There are things that only outsiders can see, and the true promise of anthropology has always been to use such insights to allow human beings to understand more of their shared humanity, to understand how we are the same through our differences. This only works if everyone gets to play the outsider and everyone gets to take their turn as the observed. So far, geopolitical inequalities have ensured this kind of genuine, liberatory anthropology has not yet really emerged. But books like this—and this book is far and away the best and most thoughtful collection of its kind yet to appear—are a crucial first step in the process of creating one."—David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years "Intellectual exchange between the West and Asia has long been one-sided, handicapped further by lack of translations. This superbly introduced and edited anthology, which shows the diverse ways in which visitors from Asia perceived modern Western society and culture, fills a big gap in our self-understanding."—Pankaj Mishra, author of From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt against the West and the Remaking of Asia "'To see ourselves as others see us' isn't just a famous line from Robert Burns; it's an urgent requirement for the global twenty-first century. In this eye-opening book Laura Nader tracks, over the course of more than a millennium, a wide range of Eastern travelers' cultural impressions of Europe and America. These frank, sometimes brutal observations, augmented by Nader's…