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An understanding of what is foreign is typically based on a radical differentiation between the self and that which we call the "other". In five wide-ranging essays, Napier examines a different process. He explores the ways in which the foreign becomes literally and metaphorically embodied as a part of one's cultural identity rather than as something outside of it. Preclassical Greece, Baroque Italy and Western post-modernism are among the artistic domains Napier considers, while the symbolic terrain ranges from Balinese cosmography to body symbolism in biomedicine. In each instance, Napier argues that assimilation is most successful when a culture is confident enough about itself to engage its core cultural images in a symbolic dialogue with those foreign images it perceives as most alien.