Cross-Cultural Relationships
topic
Cross-cultural relationships as creative input — genuine friendships, working relationships, and intellectual exchanges with people from significantly different cultural backgrounds — provide access to the specific cognitive and perceptual frameworks that different cultural formations produce: different concepts of time, different assumptions about the relationship between individual and collective, different frameworks for understanding beauty, truth, justice, and meaning.
Role
Cultural frameworks are so embedded in the assumptions of their adherents that they cannot be seen from within — they must be encountered from outside, through the genuine relationship with someone who inhabits a different cultural framework and can reveal it through their different responses, different priorities, different intuitions, and different blind spots. The creator who has only experienced their own culture's frameworks mistakes those frameworks for universal human reality rather than for one cultural solution among many — and their creative work reflects this limitation in its parochialism.