Eastern Vs Western

In a mere quarter century, Mainland China has grown into a hotspot of international self-help. Though the self-help industry has a centuries-long tradition in the Anglo-American realm, this particular, commercial type of life advice is relatively new in Mainland China, first emerging in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. Nonetheless, self-help books counseling individuals about the art of life have conquered China’s book market, while US-style ‘self-help gurus’ now play an important role in China’s speaker circuit and mass media. At first, the Chinese mainland simply imported foreign self-help books (translated from English to Mandarin), yet it eventually gave birth to a glocalised and creatively assertive cultural industry. Individual-oriented, US-style self-help now flourishes in the heart of the Middle Kingdom, blatantly defying the dichotomy between ‘Western individualism’ and ‘Eastern collectivism.’

This chapter will first outline the young history of US-style self-help in mainland China and discuss the glocalised character of Chinese self-help culture. Second, it will discuss the structural transformation of the Chinese book market and mass-mediated public sphere which enabled and continues to facilitate the prominence of the self-help industry on the Chinese mainland. Third, it will sketch self-help’s role in public life, which involves touching upon its limited autonomy and weak delineation as a cultural field, its relatively privileged position vis-à-vis institutionalised religion, and its significance as a source of guidance to uprooted individuals chasing after the ‘Chinese Dream’ in the rat race of China’s new market economy.

This study proves that in accordance with Islamic Studies, the East-West tension nowadays have been melted, although not entirely. The epistemological dimension of lecturers’ educational background at the Graduate School cases becomes the basis on both side to work collaboratively. With this finding, this study suggests that lecturers’ collaboration not only can be traced through the intrapersonal or interpersonal aspects. The need to combined those two levels with an additional aspect, the epistemological dimension; become substantial. This study tends to bridge the work of Achinstein (2002) who much focuses on the interpersonal aspect of teachers’ collaboration, and Keranen & Prudencio (2014) who concerned on the intrapersonal. This study was conducted to reaffirm a general statement which declared the UIN as a smelting place. The intellectual ‘melting-pot’ was identified since the university was constructed with different academic traditions; derived from the pesantren tradition,...

Romanian Dacianism represents a neo-nationalist movement that experienced in the past years an important raise of popularity in the virtual sphere and it can be seen nowadays as an extension of elder forms of nationalism (notably the development of the “theory of continuity” in second half of the XIX century or the protochronism in the '70s). In this article, I will discuss primarily about the political, economic and cultural changes that allowed the spread of the phenomenon, and I will try to reflect on the production of the dichotomy “east” vs. “west”, employed by the promoters of the movement in the elaboration of public speeches on the social media. Since the fall of communism, in December 1989, Romania passed from a socialist planned-economy to the free-market. The persistence of the period of transition brought to the development of an “identity crisis”. In fact, it is exactly within the effort of integration in the European Union, in the context of the Europeanization process, that a new myth of nation is created by nationalists and it has the role to define a “new national identity”, based on Dacian roots (antic population antiquity that inhabited the territory of nowadays Romania). In this context, the image of the “Occident” has been negatively embodied and then re-interpreted and transformed in a “collective enemy” or a “collective culprit”. The imaginary of “them”, the “occidentals”, is translated by the construction of some myths of conspiracy. The appropriation of a vernacular, non Western model of modernity can be seen in this particular case as a social construction of peripherality. Based on the analysis of articles promoted and discussed on the Facebook page of the movement, I will describe further how the construction of a national imagery and the production of otherness contribute to the creation of a “vernacular modernity”. Two examples will be elaborated for this purpose: the “fear of islamization of Europe”, and the “victory of Conchita Wurst at the European Song Contest in 2014”.