Who We Really are as Resourceful and Creative Cultural and Linguistic Travellers: Combatting Divisive, Blocking Narratives and Finding Threads that Connect Us

Abstract

A postmodern approach recognises the ideological and therefore distorting, prejudicial and divisive nature of large, national and civilisational culture definitions. It is therefore necessary to find ways, in everyday and professional life, to put these definitions aside and therefore dissolve them. To do this, choices need to be made to find ways of bypassing the ‘us’-‘them’ blocking narratives that are produced by these definitions that we have been brought up with and which easily surround us. We need to search for more personal thread narratives that find hybrid identities that we share and which bring us together. These choices arise in the everyday process of small culture formation on the go in which we pass by and make sense of each other. The grammar of culture lays out the various forces that inhabit these blocking and alternative thread narratives.

Keywords

• culture
• narratives
• ideology
• social construction
• hybridity