AEMI

JANJA ŽITNIK SERAFIN
whether these encounters are with
films, cartoons, and other television
programming, provides an intercultural
connection. /.../ For example, if
we watch Hamlet in London, regardless
of the fact that we are physically
located in the foreign culture, we cannot
(and often we do not want to)
remove ourselves from our own particular
culturally conditioned position
as reader/viewer. Nor can we erase the
intertextual experiences derived from
our mother tongue, which inform all
our subsequent reading and often condition
our understanding of literature
and our relationship to it. The effects
of primary literary socialization as we
experience it in lessons of our mother
tongue also has an important influence
on all our subsequent encounters
with literary texts in other languages
and from other cultures. Whether
these effects in certain individuals become
cultural limitations or whether
they encourage wider and more varied
possibilities of experiencing texts
from foreign literary systems is dependent
on the development of the
necessary intercultural awareness that
both requires and allows a deeper understanding
of one’s own culture and a
greater openness to the production of
foreign cultures. The development of
intercultural awareness and expanded
experiential possibilities brings the
diversification and enrichment of understanding
without the danger of hybridization
or other threats to primary
language identity.
27
distinguishes, for example, only those
colours for which his language provides
an established name. Therefore speakers
of different language communities and
cultures will ‘see’ the different individual
colours that they can describe in words;
in this way, words create perception.
In the reflection and discussion about
subjective conceptions, we are limited
to our maternal or our first language,
which is also the language of our primary
relationship to the world and our
emotions (Grosman 2004: 26).
In this sense intercultural awareness is
also crucial in terms of our perception
of internationally established terminology.
In order to be able to understand
the terminological dilemmas of our own
as well as those of others – either in the
context of ethnic and migration studies
or in any other discipline or field of research,
we should develop a high level
of sensitivity to the different meanings
or different shades of meanings of a particular
term depending on one’s cultural
background even though that term has
been generally accepted by the leading
scholars in the respective research field.
Or, in other words, the more we develop
our intercultural awareness, the more
questionable the generally accepted terminology
becomes regardless of the fact
that it is indispensable for any kind of
scholarly communication. Therefore
terminology is and must be constantly
revised, not only for the purpose of its
necessary updating but also for its due
relativization.
Because individual languages segment
reality and name it in different ways, the
speaker of a specific language sees and