[The Western World's] thinking about itself was formative for modern notions of the divisons of the world. Most European surveys of other civilizations, ...translated the cultures and artifacts of other continents into examples of past European civilizations and created metaphoric correspondences to make the strange familiar in terms of the known. Scholarly thinking now increasingly questions the binaries associated with East and West to recognize the way that these heuristic oppositions required the inevitable contrast between the Americas and Europe on the one hand, and the Levant, India, China, Japan, and Formosa on the other.