Approaches To Asian Civilizations

A collection of essays representing the thinking on the topic of Asian studies in undergraduate liberal arts education, and how to guide these studies in the right direction. Each specialist and scholar discusses the significance of Asia to their discipline, and the importance of Asian studies regardless of major.

De Bary constructs a magisterial overview of three thousand years of East Asian civilizations, principally in the form of dialogues among the major systems of thought that have dominated the Asian world's historical development.

This book takes stock of the results of some two decades of intensive archaeological research carried out on both sides of the Bay of Bengal, in combination with renewed approaches to textual sources and to art history. To improve our understanding of the trans-cultural process commonly referred to as Indianisation, it brings together specialists of both India and Southeast Asia, in a fertile inter-disciplinary confrontation. Most of the essays reappraise the millennium-long historiographic no-man's land during which exchanges between the two shores of the Bay of Bengal led, among other processes, to the Indianisation of those parts of the region that straddled the main routes of exchange. Some essays follow up these processes into better known "classical" times or even into modern times, showing that the localisation process of Indian themes has long remained at work, allowing local societies to produce their own social space and express their own ethos.

Discusses the historical and cultural changes that occurred in Asia throughout history.

With particular emphasis on history, religion, literature and arts, this collection provides a multifaceted and representative picture of the classical civilizations of South-East Asia which will be of interest for comparative and cross-disciplinary studies in this field, as well as providing a number of historical and literary documents and translations of great scholarly value.