Points of Contact: Crossing Cultural Boundaries

This collection of eight essays examines specific cases of contacts between Pacific Rim and western European cultures to explore the phenomena of appropriations, intersections, transculturations, and discrete identities. The exchanges in ideas, religion, and culture resulting from contacts among these areas, whether through actual or virtual travel, indicate mutual affinities and occasionally interdependencies, but also separate and independent identities. Each of these essays concerns the portability, mutability, and adaptability of aspects of the exchange of ideas, and, in nearly all cases here examined, an affirmation of identity on the part of each culture in the exchange. The cases of intersections examined here generally indicate developments of cultures approaching one another and then retrenching.