Cultural Hybridity: Contradictions and Dilemmas

This book is an ambitious attempt to bring together a group of scholars from diverse disciplines to interrogate everyday life events in various interpersonal and organizational contexts so as to answer an age-old question: what happens when (carriers of) cultures meet, or to use a worn-out phrase, when East meets West? This book’s essay authors read and take off from the editor Chan Kwok-bun’s two theoretical essays, in 2002 and 2003, respectively,
Both sides, now: Culture contact, hybridization and cosmopolitanism and Imagining/desiring cosmopolitanism . The result is this book which argues than other than clash of civilizations, assimilation, conversion, and essentialism as expected outcomes of cultural encounters, we are much better off to focus our analytical attention on processes rather than outcomes, on emergence, dialectics, contradictions, ironies and paradoxes, complexity, and attempts at learning, growing, synthesizing, integrating, self-actualizing, creating, innovating, changing, transforming–at personal, micro, macro, global levels. Or, in one word: hybridity. Contexts of cultural encounters analyzed in this book range from business organizations, through individual travels, to personal philosophies, from mechanical models to complex systems as social imaginaries. This book was originally published as a special issue of World Futures: Journal of General Evolution.