European perceptions of religion and society in 18th-century China & Bengal, and their subverted gaze in local art and encounter
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4371784 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Wim De Winter (0000-0003-3182-9180, Ghent University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 278-298 |
| Publication date | 2020-04-02 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Religion (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0048-721X • E-ISSN: 1096-1151 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/0048721x.2020.1713518 |
| OpenAlex | W2998803294 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 17 |
This essay presents two late 18th century European travelers’ encounters with and perceptions of religion in Chinese and Indian societies. While C.L.J De Guignes made an extensive tour of Chinese pagodas, Balthazar Solvyns was depicting Bengali people in 1794. Both traveler's works reveal a lineage of ideas involving exoticism and early-modern orientalism. While creating images of religion based on superstition and alterity, they did not take into account how the gaze was reversed unto them. While Solvyns created images of ‘the Hindoos’, Bengali artists were depicting the European colonial presence in scroll paintings and temple sculptures. These depictions may be considered as mimetic practices subverting the relational gaze, incorporating the European presence in order to overcome it. Contrasting early ethnographical European descriptions of Asian religions with their original contexts, a subverted gaze shines back upon the self-image of early modern European scholars seeking to make exotic Asian religions ‘known’
Aesthetics · Alterity · Art · Bengali · Colonialism · Epistemology · Exoticism · Gaze · Literature · Orientalism · Postcolonialism (international relations) · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Islamic Studies and History · Philosophy · Psychology
'The Heathen in his Blindness…'
Was Hinduism Invented?
Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Cherishing Men from Afar
Revelry, Rivalry, and Longing for the Goddesses of Bengal
The Last Dutch Embassy To the Chinese Court (1794-1795)
Europe's "Discovery" of China and the Writing of World History
Unfabling the East
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
The Dutch East India Company through the Local Lens
AHR Forum
Europeans in late Mughal south Asia
Cultural flows and cosmopolitanism in Mughal India
The Enlightenment
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |