"When one flies over vast territories of South Asia, from Karachi to Saigon, and once the desert of Thar has been crossed, this land divided up into the smallest plots and cultivated up to the last acre, at first sight seems somewhat familiar to the European. When it is looked at more closely, however, a difference emerges. These faded, washed out shades of pink and green, this irregular formation of fields and rice-paddies constantly appearing in different designs, these boundaries blurred as if in a patchwork – the whole carpet, so to speak, is the same; but because form and colour are less clear, less well-defined than in the landscapes of Europe, one has the impression of looking at it “wrong side up”. This is, of course, merely an image. But it reflects rather well the different positions of Europe and Asia in regard to their common civilization. From the material point of view, at least one seems to be the “reverse side” of the other; one has always been the winner, the other the loser, as if in a given enterprise (begun, as we have said, jointly) one had secured all the advantages and the other all the embarrassments [...]
Comparing itself with America, Europe acknowledges its own less favourable position as regards natural wealth, population pressure, individual output and the average level of consumption; rightly or wrongly, on the other hand, it takes pride in the greater attention it pays to spiritual values. It must be admitted, mutatis mutandis, that Asia could reason similarly in regard to Europe, whose modest prosperity represents, for her, the most unwarranted luxury. In a sense, Europe is Asia’s “America”. And this “Asia” with less riches and more population, lacking the necessary capital and technicians for its industrialization, and seeing its soil and its livestock deteriorating daily while its population increases at an unprecedented rate, is constantly inclined to remind Europe of the two continents’ common origin and of their unequal situation in regard of their exploitation of a common heritage. Europe must reconcile herself to the fact that Asia has the same material and moral claims upon her that Europe often asserts she herself has upon the United States. If Europe considers she has rights vis-à-vis the New World whose civilization comes from hers, she should never forget that those rights can only be based on historical and moral foundations which create for her, in return, very heavy duties towards a world from which she herself was born."
- Claude Lévi-Strauss, The View from Afar
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