The urge to theorize has been a driving force of Western intellectual tradition. It underlies academic discourse, giving the scientific enterprise its vitality. Without systematic theorizing, much of contemporary culture, particularly technology, would be virtually unthinkable. This book chapter is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/97

The urge to theorize has been a driving force of Western intellectual tradition. It underlies academic discourse, giving the scientific enterprise its vitality. Without systematic theorizing much of contemporary culture, particularly technology, would be virtually unthinkable. Disciplines Communication This book chapter is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/296

For twenty years, the HIV epidemic has been defined largely by the dominant Western medical system of biomedicine. Epidemiological studies have identified the virus and its transmission pathways and biomedical institutions, such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), have shaped mainstream intervention programs. Theoretically, biomedicine has the information and resources available to contro...

and postcoloniality, but China has been an empire in the modern sense since the mid– eighteenth century, when it conquered vast lands north and west of “China proper.”1 his history has been largely hidden from view because of two unacknowledged obsessions: the fetishization of Western empires over other empires and the prevailing discourse of Chinese victimhood at the hands of Western empires. ...

when the army of iran was defeated by russian army, iranians began to know the western culture and thoughts and so the pre modern discourse was replacedby the modern discourse. the result of this revolution was ignorance of normal rules of past and important people. in this period some diplomatic and literary rules were rejected, and some famous poets as sadi and molavi were credited too. just ...

Recently, economists have re-discovered the fact of the cultural embeddedness of institutions. This raises the question whether there are transcultural universals of institutions and institutional design. The paper proposes that such universals cannot possibly be empirical givens, but have to be continuously created through transcultural discourse. I take a first step by putting family resembla...

Simmel develops his concept of the stranger in an overly structural and reductionist manner. Contrary to Simmel’s suggestion, there is an indeterminate relation between structural exclusion and the attribution of strangeness. After showing that ‘the stranger’ must be rethought in a culturalsociological way, this essay demonstrates an alternative approach. Articulating a ‘discourse’ that structu...

james morier’s the adventures of hajji baba of ispahan is among works in which traces of the new wave of colonialism at the beginning of the 19th century are clearly evident, a colonialism which, fortified by the newly-established discourse of orientalism, employed literary texts as building blocks to expand and buttress authority and dominance of the west over the east. this paper attempts to ...

In this chapter we review and describe principles of rhetorical organisation in Chinese. We start at the level of phrase and sentence, moving to the ordering of complex clauses. Chapter 7 continues the discussion and considers these principles of rhetorical organisation operating at the level of discourse. During the discussion we touch on the role that Western influence played on the sequencin...

There is an ongoing dispute over the global nature of Bioethics and its disputes which are generally believed to be Western in origin and orientation. This dispute has gone on for too long without the prospect of a resolution because, in my judgment, it has been pursued from a wrong end. The generally favored approach has been to identify the principles of bioethics as they feature in Western d...