Knowledge across Cultures: a contribution to dialogue among civilizations

Knowledge across Cultures is a major collection of papers, some 25 in total, from a wide range of international scholars. When it advertises itself in the subtitle as ‘a contribution to dialogue among civilizations ’ – a fairly enormous claim – it is reassuring to see scholars from China, India and Arab states alongside Western scholars from the USA, Canada and Hong Kong contributing to this collection. The preponderance favours Canadian and Chinese scholars, although Alamin M. Mazrui while trained at Stanford has strong links to Kenya, the only African country represented. The editors Ruth Hayhoe (Director of the Hong Kong Institute) and Julia Pan (Senior Researcher at the Ontario Institute for Education at the University of Toronto) – a connection that accounts for the Chinese-Canadian initiative – explain that the book originated in a conference held in Toronto 1992 that was designed to examine major civilisational perspectives on knowledge and higher education. They comment that most of the chapters were written before Samuel Huntington published his ‘clash of civilizations’, although this fact is not registered in any significant way by the revised papers or the editors, which is a disappointment. The notion of ‘a contribution to dialogue among civilizations ’ would seem to impinge on Huntington’s project in interesting and novel ways and provide the space for a reassessment of his influential position, but more on this later. The 1992 conference, originally conceived as a dialogue between China and Canada, was extended in 1994 through a second conference drawin