Cross-Cultural Perspective
topic
Cross-cultural perspective taking is the creative practice of inhabiting the conceptual frameworks, value systems, and perceptual habits of cultures different from one's own — understanding the same social phenomenon as it appears from within the cultural assumptions of Japanese collectivism, Confucian relational ethics, Ubuntu philosophy, or Indigenous ecological worldview — revealing the culture-specific assumptions embedded in one's own automatic perspective that appear as universal human nature until the cross-cultural encounter reveals their cultural specificity.
Role
Cross-cultural perspective taking is the creative capacity most directly developed by extended engagement with genuinely different cultures — and the capacity whose absence most consistently produces the ethnocentrism that mistakes one culture's specific solutions for universal human requirements. The creative practitioner who can genuinely inhabit different cultural perspectives has access to a vastly larger space of imaginable solutions, values, and ways of organizing human life than the monocultural practitioner — with each genuine cross-cultural perspective expanding the creative possibility space by revealing that the arrangements taken as necessary are actually contingent.