Encountering another culture can dissolve one’s own sense of meaning

Evidence

When we discover that there are several cultures instead of just one and consequently at the time when we acknowledge the end of a sort of cultural monopoly, be it illusory or real, we are threatened with the destruction of our own discovery. Suddenly it becomes possible that there are just others, that we ourselves are an ‘other’ among others. All meaning and every goal having disappeared, it becomes possible to wander through civilisations as if through vestiges and ruins. — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 14

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Giddens’s reflexivity: recognizing contingency of one’s own framework undermines naive trust in a single institutional order. — connects to: Everyday interaction rests on unproblematic, taken-for-granted world-certainty; Other minds as alter egos intensify complexity, requiring language to reduce it; Encountering another as free alter ego shatters the taken-for-granted world (+22 more)

Related

• Encountering another as free alter ego shatters the taken-for-granted world (similarity 0.90)
• Other minds as alter egos intensify complexity, requiring language to reduce it (similarity 0.88)
• Everyday interaction rests on unproblematic, taken-for-granted world-certainty (similarity 0.87)
• Estrangement from one’s own culture enables genuine judgment of it and others (similarity 0.84)
• Cross-cultural encounters reveal that one’s own life-world is not beyond question (similarity 0.82)
• Perceptions of the Other are always shaped by available cultural tools (similarity 0.80)
• Culture does not divide into one coherent culture per community (similarity 0.79)
• Jung’s primitive-archetype theory is vitiated by colonial contact. (similarity 0.78)
• Urban meanings resist my choice and present as thing-like as the in-itself (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Culture-specific behavioral meanings generate most urban culture-shock abroad #exemplifies (0.75)
• Perceptions of the Other are always shaped by available cultural tools #expands (0.70) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 351
• Cultural meanings are unstable and shift with the social field #corroborates (0.60)
• Cultural meaning shifts with the social field it enters #corroborates (0.60)