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The Unifying Aspects of Cultures

SECTION:

Transcultural Stereotypes in Works of Art and Literature

Markina M. V. (Tambov, Russia)
Text as an Intercultural Mediator

One of actual problems of modern linguistics is the world language model study, its language conceptualization. Much prominence given to the language as a peculiar knowledge about the world picture what makes for language and culture close links. At the present stage language, culture and man are studied as semiotic objects and they are viewed as mental structures, since they answer the intellectual functions (text transmission, new text creation, memory).

The problem of international relations (right / adequate intercultural understanding, right verbal / averbal conduction) is representing its actuality under active inter cultural communicative conditions.

The subject of intercultural communication analysis (i.e. the appropriateness of knowledge use by the mutual understanding achievement in intercultural communication), has been logically conditioned by the development of the cognitive school in psychology. Within the bounds of concept systems comparison, it is preliminarily necessary to describe and fix the knowledge of such systems. We dare say that by the inocultural analysis, we ought to take into consideration "foreign" national culture perception-work. The author's experimental data allow maintaining, that "foreign" culture is interpreted as "divergence from the norm" and in such cases, "the norm" is considered to interpret as a "native" cultural gestalt, but "foreign" cultural gestalts of consciousness with the gestalts of "native" culture.

The analysis of an inocultural text is possible to fulfil in two ways:

1. When "equivalent" gestalt is sought in the "native" culture and the knowledge that is a part of perceptible and intellectual unite of the gestalt, is transferred to the inocultural subject, which is interpreted by means of "foreign" gestalts. In our opinion, such method of inocultural text analysis has a great drawback - it does not lead to the knowledge extension, because it calls for no new knowledge.
2. When the distinctions between comparable gestalts of "foreign", "native" cultures and the reflexion of this distinction. So, the subject of "another" culture, as we come to know it, doesn't have to loose its "foreign content" ("native" gestalt mustn't replace "foreign" one), but it has to impel to the distinctions search, what leads to making new knowledge, that enriches man as he comes to know "foreign" culture.

Intercultural communication reveals and intensifies the distinctions of ethnocultural perception, because there may be different phenomena of "inconvergence" in the process of two different "world pictures" comparison.

World picture of this or that epoch, which is peculiar for the definite culture type, is an invariant represented by variants of scientific, religious, ethical, and other world pictures. These variants are fulfilled in the definite texts, which may be viewed as the concrete realizators of the general world picture..

THE UNIFYING ASPECTS OF CULTURES

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