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Knowledge in transit

Throughout history ideas have moved at different speeds and for enormously different reasons. The flow of ideas between East and West has been particularly intense since the 19th century. The flow within Asia has a far longer history. With each exchange, the original idea, concept or imaginaire changes those who espouse it and is changed by them. Thus traditional concepts are rarely ousted by the new. They are more likely to be enriched or modified and to accommodate the new or be accommodated to it. Reflections of these borrowings and reworkings can be found in both the concrete organisations and institutions within a society (for instance political, legal, educational systems), in the various genres of scholarly and creative writing and in cultural artefacts. 

A broad interdisciplinary study of the processes and results of inclusion and rejection, of acceptance and resistance that developed as a result of intercultural exchanges and borrowings can provide an excellent basis for a new understanding of the complex mechanisms involved in the appropriation of the new in a broad variety of cultural contexts in Asia.  By investigating the manner in which philosophical, religious, historiographical, political, social, literary or artistic concepts have travelled between East and West and within the East over time, we can develop a broad conceptual framework for understanding the dynamics of cultural contact both historically and in the present.