[DOWNLOAD] "Searching for the Intercultural, Searching for the Culture." by Oceania " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Searching for the Intercultural, Searching for the Culture.
- Author : Oceania
- Release Date : January 01, 2005
- Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 200 KB
Description
Francesca Merlan (this volume) contrasts two views of 'the intercultural' which I also want to examine here. Merlan's own use of the term 'intercultural' borrows the 'inter' from 'intersubjective', that is, relations that occur within the same field or on the same ground, or as Paul de Man puts it, 'grounded in a common sentiment' (de Man 1986:21). A more common approach to the intercultural is activity that occurs 'between cultures' or 'between two worlds'. This relies on a view of culture as relatively hermetic, self-referring and discrete. Here, 'culture', the effect of human interaction, produces 'cultures', human society as an artefact. While cultural interaction can certainly thicken into relatively stable configurations, to talk of 'a culture', is to use a noun without referent since 'the culture', I argue here, doesn't exist as such. It is a construct of the modernist mode of thought brought to explanatory efficacy in a particular political climate. How we view culture, and the interaction of presumed cultures, governs our approach to intercultural politics in areas such as appropriate governance and the recognition of cultural rights. The practical implementation of cultural rights in appropriate political expressions has arrived at a dead-end because of the application, explicitly or by absorption, of modernist views of social functioning which produce, on the one hand hermetic cultures with rights, and incidentally, a problematic space between them. By critically interrogating the construction of this space as to its historical production and its own consistency we can question the construct of the 'cultures' themselves which intersect in this theorised intercultural space. Ultimately we should be able to open up a new discourse on approaches to political rights drawing on alternative conceptions brought to prominence by the critique of cultures and the intercultural. Alternative views tend to go by terms which simply say what they are ranged against, for instance post-structuralism, postmodernism or deconstructionism. These terms cover a range of theorists and a wide variety of works, but they have common characteristics. According to Henrietta Moore this