Cross-cultural History and the Domestication of Otherness

Through case studies spanning Europe, America, Africa, and Asia, this book illuminates our understanding of what happens when different cultures meet. Twelve cultural historians explore the mechanism and inner dynamic of such encounters, and demonstrate that while they often occur on the wave of global forces and influences, they only acquire meaning locally, where culture inherently resides. The authors shine a light into the nature of this process by showing 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 because that is where the domestication of otherness takes place.

Michal Jan Rozbicki is an associate professor of History at Saint Louis University. He has authored five books, including Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (2011) and The Complete Colonial Gentleman: Cultural Legitimacy in Plantation America (1998). George O. Ndege is an associate professor of History at Saint Louis University. His publications include Health, State, and Society in Kenya (2001) and Culture and Customs of Mozambique (2007).

PART I. Recovering Hidden Identities: Moriscos and Conversos * The Converso Phenomenon and the Issue of Spanish Identity—Kevin Ingram * Heretics, Christians, Jews? Jewish Converts and Inquisitors in the Early Modern World—Gretchen Starr-LeBeau * Disappearing Moriscos—William Childers * PART II. Missionaries as Cultural Brokers * Adapting Language to Culture: Translation Projects of the Jesuit Missions in Japan and China—William J. Farge * Jesuits in the United States Southwest during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Agents and Chroniclers of Cross-Cultural Ministry and History—Eduardo C. Fernández * The Task of Gender Role Differentiation in Foreign Missions: The Case of American Methodists in Rosario, Argentina, 1870-1880—Mark McMeley * PART III. Africa: Agency, Contestation, Acculturation * Africanizing Christianity: Cross-Cultural History and Conceptual Ways Forward—Paul Kollman * Conflict and Compromise: Western Biomedicine and Cultural Contestation in Colonial Kenya—George Ndege * Part IV. Cultural Adaptations * Genealogies, Geopolitics, and Governance: The Indigenization of the Native Nation and U.S. Colony of Hawai'i, 1874-1904—Christine Skwiot * Lessons in Whiteness: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth Century America—Kristen Anderson * Across the Alps: Italian Religious Culture in French Translation—Thomas Worcester * PART V. The Promises and Challenges of Cross-Cultural History * Cross-Cultural History: Toward an Interdisciplinary Theory—Michal Jan Rozbicki