Friendship and Hospitality: The Jesuit-Confucian Encounter in Late Ming China
Dongfeng Xu
The Jesuit mission to China more than four hundred years ago has been the subject of sustained scholarly investigation for centuries. Focusing on the concepts of friendship and hospitality as they were both theorized and practiced by the Jesuit missionaries and their Confucian hosts, this book offers a new, comparative, and deconstructive reading of the interaction between these two vastly different cultures. Dongfeng Xu analyzes how the Jesuits presented their concept of friendship to achieve their evangelical goals and how the Confucians reacted in turn by either displaying or denying hospitality. Challenging the hierarchical view in traditional discourse on friendship and hospitality by revealing the irreducible otherness as the condition of possibility of the two concepts, Xu argues that one legacy of the Jesuit-Confucian encounter has been the shared recognition that cultural differences are what both motivated and conditioned cross-cultural exchanges and understandings.
Year:
2021
Edition:
1
Publisher:
State University of New York Press
Language:
english
Pages:
371
ISBN 10:
1438484941
ISBN 13:
9781438484945
Series:
SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture
File:
EPUB, 1.08 MB
IPFS:
,
english, 2021