Libro

MEDIA LITERACY AND INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE
Strategies, Debates and Good Practices
contextual perspective of culture -whose metaphor is represented in the ocean
of Fang (2005-2006) -, that involves an approach to the visible aspects or
cultural values, such as internal processes and the different moments of tension
that can, under certain circumstances, become visible. d) A complex view of
culture does not only fix his gaze on the national culture, but is concerned with
the internal and external dynamics that shape, such as assumptions, values
and behavior of individuals who are part of it and the culture of the groups 1 .
The acceptance of Zhaocai Mao as a symbolic object by different cultural
processes apart from those that actually comes demonstrate the three points
raised by Fang (2005-2006) in which is established a paradoxical nature of
culture, a cultural explanation that responds to a context and a specific time and
a new identity of national cultures responding to globalization platform. The
coexistence of paradoxical values –as it is showed by the Colombian immigrant
woman who has a Zhaocai Mao next to the statue of Jesus at her homerequires
the approach of an analytic stance that allows capturing the inner
culture mechanism that is being built on a specific time and place. In the middle
of this contextual perspective lies, without a doubt, the assessment that requires
the adoption of the most appropriate dynamic for the explained situation and to
determine, for example, the variation in working hours of the "Bazaar Zhong Yu"
to fit to Sundays which generally in Spain are not working days.
The assimilation of habits and objects, as a result of collision and cultural
clashes permits, under the characteristics of the information society, the
observation of the change processes in a more transparent way, although it
requires a very high analytic speed to the rapid change that means the evident
and daily collision between many cultures. Under a static perspective of the
culture, different and fast processes that happen inside the globalization –the
introduction of Zhaocai Mao in different Western shops 2 - will escape from the
explanatory methodological frameworks that are part of a scientific perspective
that appreciates the culture from a mechanic positioning (mechanic science),
and therefore, which do not reach to measure the dynamic of a multicultural and
global process.
3. Cultural exploration in a economical crisis
Cultural exploration -necessarily away of bipolar and exclusive visions and
taking distance of dimensions and indicators that represent serious problems for
measuring the diversity of the subject- finds in the Oriental tradition, according
1 The fact that groups were analyzed, as stated by Fang (2005-2006), involves the assimilation
of the philosophy of yin-yang to approach the understanding of the use and inclusion of the
opposing forces within a given value system. Thus, the cultural groups that are mixed in those
contrary forces are, to the author, four: national groups of specific cultures, ethnic groups in
specific regions, organizational and industrial groups and groups of global cultures with
common interests (2005-2006 and Fang Leung, 2005, in Fang, 2012: 6).
2 The situation, by the way, coincides with a high degree of social distance (in the West
European) in front of religious traditions, also caused by a high degree of exchange of cultural
and symbolic information.
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