CounterpointStimulating debate with the British Council

In our highly interconnected, and simultaneously de-centered world, cultural relations need to be thought of as a reciprocal process, whose aim is a deeper and richer mutual understanding. How do we gain insight into the matrix of symbolic meanings, visions of society and self, forms of private and public discourse which constitute the “inner life” of each society and culture? And how can we conduct meaningful cross-cultural dialogue across sometimes deep and subtle cultural differences?

This project begins from the premise that in our interconnected, and simultaneously de-centered world, cultural exchange cannot consist simply of exporting or promoting “our culture” abroad. Rather, cross-cultural relationships have to be thought of as a reciprocal process, whose aim is a deeper and richer mutual understanding. However, in order to achieve such understanding, we need first of all to have a sufficiently deep and rich idea of what constitutes culture in the first place – as well as a sufficiently comprehensive and three-dimensional picture of specific cultures, in all their variety and particularity.

One definition of “culture” confines itself to the articulated and formal expressions produced by various countries and societies: their literature, music, art and artefacts.   But culture in its fullest sense, is also a kind of experiential matrix or map  – a system of symbolic meanings and beliefs, of explicit values and implicit codes, which structure the world for us and give us a way of orienting ourselves within it.  Indeed, just as physical vision apparently requires pattern and form, so we could hardly have perceptions of the human world, or a coherent sense of self, outside the cultural mapping of experience.  The culture we come into gives us our earliest templates for what constitutes personhood, and what it is to have a self; for what is beautiful or disturbing, for how family life is structured and intimacy conducted.

On that level, “culture” is not something that exists outside of ourselves or that we use or consume; rather, it exists within us, and forms our conscious views and unspoken premises, our sensibility and pitch towards the world. When we are initiated into a particular culture, we are brought into a web of overt and subliminal beliefs which delineate a sort of moral, social and sometimes metaphysical topography: concepts of    virtue and transgression, visions of the good life and the good society, and in some cases, of spiritual aspiration. Moreover, differences in cultural modes of being can inform not only the obvious parameters of social experience, but our most interstitial and intimate perceptions, and even feelings – what Michel Foucault called “the practices of the self”. Different cultures have varying predispositions towards a spectrum of psychological states – serenity, excitement, cheerfulness or melancholy – as well as a different sense of where the human median lies. For example, behaviour which is considered healthily assertive in one society, may be seen as unacceptably aggressive in another; what may be seen as sensitivity to others’ needs in one hierarchy of values, may be perceived as weakness of character elsewhere.

Such “deep values” may be difficult to grasp from the outside; and sometimes, they can be — to an outsider – very surprising. For example, not every culture thinks revenge is bad, or the cultivation of individuality good. In some societies, certain kinds of loyalty or obedience can be experienced not only as obligatory, but as pleasurable; while certain forms of freedom can seem not only decadent, but frightening. In some, emotional volatility which may to us seem “irrational” may be experienced as natural and perfectly intelligible; elsewhere, causing ripples in the fabric of calm is seen as a terrible breach of etiquette. Certain kinds of personal disclosure which we may think of as quite unproblematic, may be seen as embarrassing or entirely unacceptable;  or simply as belonging to the sphere of private life.

But it is at this level that we need to understand other societies if we are to conduct meaningful and fruitful relations across political and cultural boundaries – and it is only at this level that certain problems and conflicts can be identified, and thus perhaps addressed.  The sources of global conflicts today are often, in their essence, cultural. Their expressions may be ideological or political, but their roots are often buried in the deep soil, or fabric, of cultural attitudes and assumptions.

How, then, can successful dialogue be conducted across differences that are both deep and subtle? Perhaps one useful metaphor for the transactions involved in such dialogue is that of translation. Like literal translation, cross-cultural back and forth requires a simultaneous receptivity to the other culture’s existential language, and a strong and conscious sense of one’s own. And, like literal translation, such processes call for a kind of sensitive cross-checking between the two “languages,” or forms of sensibility. We need to try at least to enter into another culture’s inner life, so to speak, its expressive palette and system of assumptions and values. What is esteemed, desired, loved – and what is feared or rejected? What are sources of self-respect, or of guilt and shame? At the same time, one’s original language has to remain as a point of reference. If the translation is to be successful, one cannot lose one’s own cultural idiom, or standpoint.  Very often, such dialogue can lead to a discovery both of difference, and of underlying similarities, or perhaps certain human universals. But it also has to be recognized that some differences may be in some ways unbridgeable, or non-negotiable; and in confronting these, one needs to be able to assert one’s values and acknowledge one’s cultural identity, rather than collapsing it into “the Other.”  Indeed, to lose one’s perspective or sense of cultural self is to lose the possibility of authentic dialogue, and the vantage point from which differences can be perceived in the first place.

As part of this project, we have asked leading thinkers and commentators from various parts of the world to give us insight into their cultures’ inner lives, so to speak – their “deep values” and affective vocabularies, their social structures and governing conceptual discourse. What are the processes of individuation and coming into a sense of self; forms of sociability and belonging (communal groups, religious institutions; visions of the “good life,” or the forms of private and public discourse?

But of course, modern, or modernizing societies are complex organisms, with internal  fractures, class divisions, ethnic differences. Moreover, in a global, intermingled world, no society is immune from external influences, or the sheer momentum of change. And so, we would also like our contributors to reflect on how the “deep values” of their cultures inform with the contemporary situation or problematic in their countries – what the interplay is between older visions of society, for example, and current forms of governance; or between older loyalties, and modern social structures. In a sense, the basic question we might put to our contributors is simply, what might be surprising to us about their societies and cultures; what we might not know about, or easily misunderstand.

In addition, in the second phase of this project, we would like to solicit papers on more general, or “meta-cultural” topics, such as forms of dialogue and  ways of understanding “the Other”; on religion and ideology as cultural systems; on various configurations of tradition and modernity. It might also be interesting to have contributions on forms of discourse which make claims to universality – for example, the scientific method, philosophical argument, or the psychoanalytic theory of development. Would these be a help in cross-cultural conversations – or a hindrance?

Finally, from a cross-cultural perspective, we might ask whether contemporary multicultural democracies are a specific cultural system. Or is there such a thing as global modernity – or indeed, post-modernity – and what part does technology play in creating it? Finally, it might be useful, within the framework of this discussion, and its acknowledgment of cultural difference, to think about the limits of cultural relativism and about the discourse of human rights, with its premise of certain moral universals.

Eva Hoffman was born in Kracow, Poland and moved to Canada when she was thirteen.  She is the recpient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Award and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, she currently resides in London.  She is the author of Lost in Translation, Exit into History, Shtetl, and After Such Knowledge.