Professional Documents
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Most of the essays in this volume were rst presented as papers at a twoday conference held in Paris in 2009 at the Centre dtudes de lInde et
de lAsie du Sud (CNRS/EHESS).1 Our aim in organizing the conference
and publishing the present collection with substantially revised contributions was to provide a space for dialogue between scholars working on dialogic forms of cultural mediation in the early modern and modern world.
We were interested in particular in confronting research in the history of
South Asia with that on other areas in order to identify comparable locally
important, yet often invisible, histories against the looming global context of trade, communication networks, imperial claims and developing
political formations. Since from the sixteenth century, face to face cultural encounters, premised on perceived and assumed dierence, became
an inescapable part of social landscape and for somesuch as interpreters,
merchants, travelers, missionaries, etc.a special eld of expertise, they
also dened and shaped textual and visual sources as well as rituals and
practices.
1)
We thank the participants of the conference (18-19 December, 2009)Gauvin Bailey,
Charlotte de Castelnau-lEstoile, Jocelyne Dakhlia, Monica Juneja, Kapil Raj, Atsushi
Yamanashiwho were unable to contribute to this volume for their comments during the
discussion. The conference was made possible by a generous grant from the Centre dtudes
de lInde et de lAsie du Sud (CNRS/EHESS, Paris). Our special gratitude goes to Denis
Matringe, the former director of CEIAS, as well as Jos Gommans and Maurits van den
Boogert who believed in our project from the start. We also warmly thank the anonymous
readers who helped us in perfecting each and every article in this volume.
DOI: 10.1163/15685209-12341234
216
See for instance Simon Schaer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, James Delbourgo, eds., The
brokered world: go-betweens and global intelligence, 1770-1820 (Sagamore Beach, Mass.:
Science History Publications, 2009).
3)
See Emily A. Schultz, Dialogue at the margins: Whorf, Bakhtin, and Linguistic Relativity
(Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990): 53.
4)
Cosimo Zene, The Rishi of Bangladesh. A History of Christian Dialogues (London and
New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002): 29.
217
On perspectivism in history see Brian Lightbody, Genealogy and Subjectivity: An Incoherent Foucault (A Response to Calvert-Minor). Kritike: An Online Journal of Philosophy
4/1 (2010): 18-27.
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