Perspectives on Chinese, Buddhist, and Environmental Philosophy

Abstract

Appeals to the significance of a culture, tradition, or way of life can simultaneously edify and alienate different audiences as they serve an identity-forming and other-excluding function. The imaginary that some cultures are civilized and complex and others natural and simple has been complexly mediated through the historical entanglements and interactions between, on the one hand, colonialism and Eurocentrism and, on the other, varieties of anti-colonial resistance and the postcolonial formation of contemporary national, cultural, and religious identities. It is in this context that claims of the ostensible intrinsic naturalness and “greenness” of a culture or tradition are perceived and debated.