Libro

MEDIA LITERACY AND INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE
Strategies, Debates and Good Practices
The study and understanding process of contemporary cultures is impossible
without a high dose of transcultural analysis. The possibility of finding in a small
town anywhere in the world scenarios of evident multiculturality -like in people,
goods, appliances, information or food- reveals the analytical need to
understand the cultural process. What is more, it becomes necessary to
analyze its mixing -its paradoxical change- such as the mutability property that
has a living organism which in its social life, it is constructed and transformed
according to the experiences, images, representations and relationships that
weaves with a network of different actors manifested in its visible structure or
within its latent processes.
The internalization of Zhaocai Mao within a cultural space to which it does not
belong, involves the interaction between distant worldviews. Its everyday
interaction, but especially the assimilation of a new charm in the daily ritual of a
new culture, starts the communicative dialogue of mutual recognition (which is
no less a recognition of their own contexts) under which the new symbol is
accepted as if it was own: the indeterminate communication process is
originated, where the actors develop a mutually dependent relation whose
ultimate expression is staged in the exchange of symbols (Chen, Fang and
Faure, 2011: 321).
2. Holistic approach
Likewise, the cultural communication process can accept the system of family -
labor structure of the "Bazaar Zhong Yu" and assimilate it, both within the
rational legal system that frames the trade relations and workers in Spain, as in
the traditional system of social relations whose cultural habits change. It
becomes symbolic dialogue: from making purchases of certain goods in the
traditional village shops to buy them in the "Bazaar Zhong Yu" recognizing that
they come from different contexts, but accepting them. The process is the ability
of culture in the information age to reconcile opposites and to form a dynamic of
"cultural friction" (Shenkar, et al., 2008, in Fang, 2012: 5) that pops up a “new
negotiated culture” (Brannen and Salk, 2000, in Fang, 2012: 6) which takes of
every one of its ingredients the right dose to function in a definite context and at
certain time.
Thus, the process of study and cultural analysis implies a holistic approach from
four complementary perspectives: a) A historical or temporary perspective of
the culture that allows a longitudinal representation of changes in the living
organism, like a dynamic object, going beyond the vision of culture as static and
unchanging object. b) A cross-culture perspective, away from binary
dimensions 1 , which contrary, would allow building a characterization of the
study object as a stage in evolution, like a dynamic process that has multiple
internal changes, even in the absence of addressing external factors. c) A
1 A binary dimension responds to the metaphor of the onion raised by Fang (2005-2006). The
onion vision focuses on cultural difference and its unit of analysis and it is established on the
traditional nations or nationalities, forgetting a deeper study of internal dynamics that, as a living
organic object, has each element of nation or nationality (Fang, 2012).
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