The Inner Lives of Cultures conference: read all about it
Author: Counterpoint
The Inner Lives of Cultures
Counterpoint’s Inner Lives of Cultures conference took place over two days, February 25-26, in Brussels
The keynote address, Unity of civilisation, plurality of cultures, was given by Tzvetan Todorov, historian, essayist and Directeur de Recherche Honoraire at the CNRS in Paris. Click here to download or stream the podcast of this address in full.
Speakers from Mexico, Brazil, Uzbekistan, Russia, Romania, China, India, Indonesia, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, presented papers discussing the deep cultural values of their own cultures.
You can stream videos of several of these presentations on our cultures pageFull audio of all the speaker’s contributions will be made available in the coming days.
From the conference:Kenan Malik talks briefly on getting beyond the idea of building bridges between discrete, rigid, homogenous cultures, to understanding that we all simultaneously inhabit multiple cultures:
Sun Shuyun on how dialogue can allay deap-seated fears:
Ramin Jahanbegloo talks about how the cross-cultural experience “not only challenges but completes the experience of modernity in our world”, through a story that has transcended cultural boundaries.
Turning Cultures inside out
Cultural relations is about conversations between people. Counterpoint’s Inner lives of cultures project seeks to decipher the whispered, or tacit, discourses of individual cultures, so the dialogue between us all can become deeper, more informed, and more productive.
Our aim is to turn the inside of cultures out: to make explicit the different ways in which particular cultures structure the world and the place of the self within it, to open up and talk about what can seem inexplicable from the outside.
We’re exploring the inner lives of cultures, from Romanian surrealism to Indian democracy, in order to better understand others, ourselves and the ways in which we co-exist, happily or not.
Eva Hoffman is working with Counterpoint on this. In an article summing up the project she asserts that “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.” She goes on to ask, “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?”
These questions were discussed at our conference in Brussels, marking a fascinating beginning to the project.
Explore Counterpoint’s cultures page now: watch Shashi Tharoor on the vibrant meld of Indian culture, Sun Shuyun interviewed on Tibet, or an investigative documentary on North Korea, and much more.
