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‘Killing’ or ‘Curing’ Culture?

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Interculturality Between East and West

Abstract

This chapter also looks into discourses of culture, asking this provocative question: should we kill or cure the concept when dealing with interculturality? It starts with a short recap from the previous chapter. As a companion to that chapter, it adds extra elements to the discussions of culture in the Chinese context, converses reflexively about the idea of taste and culture in interculturality and reviews five problems associated with the concept that need special attention today. The consequences of these problems on interaction between people from different contexts and on their identification are also considered, and potential ways of averting these issues are suggested. The chapter does offer an answer to the question of killing or curing, weighing pros and cons. However, the authors suggest to move forward with interculturality by turning our attention to other (burning) issues, which are more central in today’s world. Although the concept of culture might return ‘underground’ in the rest of the book, the focus will be on the inter and ality of interculturality.

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Dervin, F., Sude, Yuan, M., Chen, N. (2022). ‘Killing’ or ‘Curing’ Culture?. In: Interculturality Between East and West. Encounters between East and West. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8492-0_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8492-0_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-16-8491-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-16-8492-0

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