Meeting the Other: Issues and Approaches to the Study of Cultural Encounters in Historical Research Interest in the effects of the interaction of members of different cultural groups has a long tradition dating back to antiquity, but it was not until the nineteenth century that it became a subject of serious research. 1 However, since the 1980s there has been a proliferation of studies concerning the impact of cultural encounters, encompassing both physical contact – through travel, trade, exploration, slavery, colonisation, and migration – and concepts of alterity, 2 in a wide range of fields, including history, literature, anthropology, sociology, and psychology. 3 This increase in interest can be attributed to a variety of factors. It is, of course, a product of a more general ‘cultural turn’ evident in the humanities and social sciences dating from around this period. But more specifically, it appears to be associated with developing interest in understanding the impacts of colonialism and globalisation, and more recently has been inspired by the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and a desire to explicate the origin and nature of contemporary conflict between Christians and Muslims. 4 The study of cross- cultural engagements is important, among other reasons, because, as one scholar has eloquently put it, they ‘have frequently proven to be transformative movements in world history, occasions that have profound and often unexpected consequences, that are both material and cosmological’. 5 The aim of this essay is to identify different ways in which historians can conceptualise, and analyse the effect of encounters between people of different cultures in historical research, and examine their strengths and weaknesses. It surveys both traditional approaches, and new perspectives which provide alternative pathways for such research. 1 Floyd W. Rudmin, 'Catalogue of Acculturation Constructs: Descriptions of 126 Taxonomies, 1918- 2003', in Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 8(1) (2009), at http://dx.doi.org/10.9707/2307-0919.1074, pp. 3-4. While Rudmin references a pronouncement by Plato on the subjects, other scholars highlight the ethnographic information compiled by Herodotus in his History. An even older tradition may even been discerned in Homer’s Odyssey. 2 The state of being perceived as ‘other’, of being different to someone else. 3 Stuart B. Schwartz, 'Introduction', in Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, 1994), p. 5; Rudmin, 'Catalogue of Acculturation Constructs', pp. 3, 5. ‘Culture’ remains very much a contested term. Reflecting on the definition of culture, Greg Dening states, presumably tongue in cheek, that he had identified 366 discursive definitions of ‘culture’, and contributes his own: ‘Culture is talk. Living is story’, p. 226: Dening, Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures, and Self (Melbourne, 2004), p. 226. The OED Online provides a reasonable working definition for the purposes of this paper: ‘2 The ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society’, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/culture, accessed 1 April 2016. 4 Gordon M. Sayre, 'Renegades from Barbary: The Transnational Turn in Captivity Studies', American Literary History, 22 (2010), p. 348. 5 Tony Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Māori and the Question of the Body (Auckland, 2015), p. 1.