Transculture

Description

Mikhail Epstein:

"Transculture is a model of cultural development, which differs from both leveling globalism and isolating pluralism. Among the many freedoms proclaimed as inalienable rights of the individual, there emerges yet another freedom which is probably the most meaningful one – the freedom from one’s own culture, in which one was born and educated.

This is completely different from the political right to freely choose one’s place of living, to emigrate and to cross state borders. Too many people who leave the geographical location of their culture remain, for the rest of their lives, prisoners of its language and traditions. Other migrants, having turned their back on their past, become prisoners of a different, newly acquired culture. Perhaps, only a small number of people, when acceding to two or several cultures, are able to keep their freedom from any of them.

Transculture is a new aspect of cultural development, which transcends the borders of traditional national, racial, gender and professional cultures. Transculture overcomes the isolation of these traditions, language and value determinations, and broadens the field of “supra-cultural” creativity.

We acquire transculture at the boundaries of our own culture and at the crossroads with other cultures. Transculture is a freedom that cannot be proclaimed, but only sought and partly realized through the risky experience of one’s own cultural wanderings and transmutations.

From the mid-1990s, the transcultural vision began to take root in the West too, in connection with the crisis of the concept of “multiculturalism.” Unlike “multiculturalism” which establishes value equality among different cultures and their self-sufficiency, the concept of transculture implies their openness and mutual involvement. The principle that applies here is not that of difference, but that of “interference,” of “dispersion” of symbolic values of one culture in the field of other cultures. If “multiculturalism” insists on the individual’s belonging to “his” “natural” culture, which is biologically and biographically predefined (“black culture,” “women’s culture,” “youth culture,” “gay culture,” etc.), “transculture” implies diffusion of initial cultural identities as individuals cross the borders of different cultures and assimilate them.

At the same time, transculture should be distinguished from global culture, which disseminates identical models (mostly American) to the whole of humankind. Transculture is not the common and the identical, present in all cultures, but more, the cultural diversity and universality as an asset of one individual. Transculture is a state of virtual belonging of one individual to many cultures.

Transculture is a field of “vnenakhodimost” (exotopy) in relation to all present cultures, it is the freedom of every person to live on the border of his “inborn” culture or beyond it, be this culture white or black, French or Georgian, male of female. Although culture in its development distances itself from nature, it still preserves many natural, ethnic, psychophysical and socio-class elements. Transculture is the next step of culture towards liberation from its own linguistic prison, from its manias and its phobias." (http://glossary.isud.org/2007/11/transculture.html)

More Information

• The concept of transculture is presented in detail in the book by Ellen Berry and Mikhail Epstein “Transcultural experiments: Russian and American models of creative communication” (New York, 1999).

• The concept of transculture was first presented in the following publications: Epstein Mikhail. To Speak the Language of All Cultures // Nauka I Zhyzn [Science and Life]. 1990. No. 1. Pp. 100-103