Western Impacts on the Cultures of the East

Abstract

The Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences held on the 17.04.2019 a round table meeting “Contacts and Conflicts. Western Impacts on the Cultures of the East”. The meeting became a continuation in the series of annual forums, in which the scholars of diverse specialism (philosophers, art historians, historians, literary critics, specialists in Eastern languages, etc.) from many countries (from Madagascar to Malaysia, from Lebanon to Mongolia, from North Africa to South , from Iran to Japan) discuss problems of common interest. The topics vary from the multicultural studies, the interaction of culture and politics to the coexistence of traditions and modernization, including the place of the national cultures of the East in the broader transnational context. Among the results of this meeting are identification of the specific forms of the Western influence on the cultures of the East from Antiquity to the modern age. These forms of influence also include the ways of adaptation, assimilation or even rejection of the Western phenomena in the course of the cultural and civilizational exchange.