Written by Russian-American Professor Mikhail Epstein in 2009, it proposes a new way to interpret cultural differences.
It looks quite stimulating, and to me it is quite important because it gives a name to the feeling I felt my last day in Iceland, when I had the impression that my colleagues' presentations lingered too much on national identities, while I have always considered myself totally European.
Here is the abstract of the article:
ABSTRACT. This paper develops a concept of transculture as a model
of cultural development that differs from both leveling globalism
and isolating pluralism. While culture frees humans from the
material dependencies of nature, it also creates new, symbolic
dependencies—on customs, traditions, conventions, which a person
receives as a member of a certain group and ethnos. Among the many
freedoms proclaimed as rights of the individual, there emerges yet
another freedom—from one’s own culture, in which one was born
and educated. Transculture is viewed as the next level of liberation,
this time from the “prison house of language,” from unconscious
predispositions and prejudices of the “native,” naturalized cultures.
The case of the Japanese poet Araki Yasusada (1903–1972), a survivor
of Hiroshima, demonstrates how transcultural creativity, though cast in
the form of a literary hoax, can produce an internationally recognized achievement. Transculturalism is especially needed in world politics,
where the factor of fixed cultural identity based on race, ethnos,
religion, or ideological commitments turned out to be a source of
conflict and violence. This paper argues that the categories of opposition
and identity do not preclude the significance of the third
category, which is difference. The differences complement each other
and create a new interpersonal transcultural community to which we
belong, not because we are similar but because we are different. The
transcultural perspective opens a possibility for globalization not as
homogenization but, rather, as further differentiation of cultures and
their “dissemination” into transcultural individuals, liberating themselves
from their dependence from their native cultures. The global
society can be viewed as the space of diversity of free individuals
rather than that of fixed groups and cultures. It is an alternative to the
clash of civilizations and a hope for lasting peace.
