Transculture: the Emergent Property of Intercultural Encounters

by Karen-Claire Voss

This paper was presented at the INST (Research Institute for Austrian and International Literature and Cultural Sciences) Conference:  The Unifying Aspects of Cultures, Vienna, Austria, November 7-9, 2003.

This essay is somewhat autobiographical in as much as I will draw on my own experience of living in different cultures, but it goes beyond more than mere autobiography.  What I intend here is to provide a map, a map not of the territory itself, but one showing the direction in which an immeasurably rich territory lies, a territory that is inherently perpetually rich, that is inherently a place where there will always be a frontier compelling exploratory efforts; hence, a place where there will always be still unexplored land; in short, a terrain that is wild, unknown, uncharted.  The terrain of transculture is a place beyond time, beyond space, and beyond any individual culture.  Transculture is a ’place’ where one can expect to encounter hitherto unsuspected dimensions of one's self through encounters with what Basarab Nicolescu has called "the mirror of the Other."  [1]  

Cultural Identity

Cultural identity as such is something which every human being experiences, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the individual.  We often feel a deep resonance with the forms taken by our own particular cultural heritage and its traditions, but people who have the opportunity to live for an extended period of time in a country other then their own native land can also experience this resonance in a culture in which they happen to find themselves.  It includes such things as a feeling of possessive pride when encountering art forms and folk ways emerging from a particular heritage, a consciousness awareness of the possibilities of expression afforded by a particular language, and that swelling up of emotion which is often occasioned by a particular country’s national anthem.  The latter demonstrates a form of cultural identity that is closely linked to one that is often primarily political in character.

My Own Intercultural Experience

Thus far I have experienced degrees of varying cultural identity on four different occasions.  The first time was when I was growing up in the United States, in a city very close to Manhattan.  While it could be expected that I would have had the greatest sense of identity there, in what is commonly referred to as one’s ‘homeland,’ in my case this was not what happened.  If I had reflected on this subject at all (which I was not then inclined to do) I almost certainly would have said that I was American, but the fact is that being American did not play big part in the process of my becoming.  On the contrary, from the time I was a very young child I always had the sense of being some kind of alien, of not belonging, of being foreign, of being most definitely ‘Other.’  I think that it was this sense which compelled me to leave home when I was but seventeen, to go to California where, as I put it then, “I wanted to go and be a hippie.”  Then, as now, California is a place characterized by the bizarre, the unusual, and, occasionally, truly excellent cutting edge phenomena.  I eventually married there, gave birth to my first daughter, and when she was but six months old my husband and I had to go to Lincoln, Nebraska where I lived for two years.  This is a place almost dead center in the middle of the United States and Lincoln’s claim to fame, as it were, is its football team and its corn fed beef.   There I was exposed to still more cultural forms, albeit variations of American culture.  At this point, on account of these different moves and also traveling through the States I was more than a little familiar with the immense cultural variations one encounters within the U.S.variations, but my encounter with an entirely different culture came  when I was but twenty-two, by then divorced and remarried, and moved to Australia to spend five years there. [2] I have a vivid memory of the first time I turned on the television and watched the news because I became conscious that what I was listening to emerged from a completely different perspective than the one I was used to.  This marked the occasion of my first realization that the United States was not the axis mundi.  That realization was very significant because up until that moment my assumption that it was had been entirely unconscious.   I spent my first two years there in Canberra, the capital city.  Canberra is an interesting phenomenon because the city was created as a capital ex nihilo as it were in around 1914.  Canberra is the hub of all major diplomatic and political activity in Australia and since it is a relatively small city the effects of being in such close proximity to those circles can be felt by anyone living there, even if they are not themselves connected to them.  In those days I was still a hippy and experienced great discomfort at being thrust into a situation where everything, even table manners, was a thinly veiled attempt to ape the British. [3] I did, however, learn to produce and preside over sit down, multi-course dinners for twelve, which included a soup course and fingerbowls!  No mean feat for a young woman of that age.  I remember one dinner party which we attended that was given by a world famous philosopher and his wife.  The other guests were also academic philosophers (all male) and their wives.  There I was, seated at table, finding myself working hard at keeping up with the conversation around me and at one point the topic turned to Heraclitus.  Since my philosopher-husband had embarked on a kind of Professor Higgins-like campaign to develop my mind, I was then in the midst of reading a lot in an effort to do precisely that.  At what seemed to me an appropriate place in the conversation I ventured to say entirely truthfully:  “I’ve been reading Heraclitus and I think he is very interesting,” at which point one of the philosophers turned his gaze upon me and said, “Oh.  Which translation?”  I was so very young and ignorant and terribly unsure of myself that for some reason his question devastated me.  I felt ashamed that I did not know Greek and therefore could not read the original.  I felt embarrassed that I had not known enough even to consider the fact that I was reading a translation, let alone to note the name of the translator.  Without another word I excused myself from the table to go to the bathroom and then made my way from the bathroom to the darkened living room where I sat on the edge of a cushion at the end of a couch until my husband came in.  “Take me home,” I said.  “I just can’t go back in there.”  He went back into the dining room to make some excuse or other and then took me out to the car and drove us home.  I also remember attending a philosophy conference in Sydney or Melbourne with my husband and going to a cocktail.  There I saw two philosophers playing chess [4] in the middle of what was an otherwise festive gathering and remarked to one of the two (to whom I had previously been introduced) that what they were doing struck me as incredibly weird. [5] “How could you do this at a party?” I asked. 

After two years of this, life in the capital seemed intolerable and I manufactured some emotional crisis or other (the details of which I honestly do not remember) so as to have an opportunity to escape.  It was at this time that I began to experience a deep sense of connectedness with Australian culture.  I was then pregnant with my second daughter.  I separated from my husband and found and rented a beautiful old house deep in the countryside about an hour and a half outside of Canberra.  At the outskirts of a small village called Braidwood, the house was on a large acreage that served as a sheep station and the property was named Packwood.  The rent was incredibly cheap and the landlord proved amenable to paying for paint and so I embarked on the task of revamping the inside.  The result was beautiful; people still talk about that house.  My husband and I reconciled and he and I and my daughter set up housekeeping there.  The new baby was born there on the sheep station.  This was a halcyon period in my life.  We spent three years there and it was during this time that I really entered into domesticity and the culture of Australia.  I joined the Country Women’s Association, learned how to spin wool, watched the annual sheep shearing, made candles and soap, cooked, and even got to the point where I was actually more or less up to date on local gossip and the latest developments in national politics.  I learned traditional country songs.  I suspect that even my accent changed a bit.  I know that my daughter, who was around three when we first moved to Packwood, did indeed acquire a British accent because I still have a cassette of her singing “I’m a Little Teapot.”   We both began to feel at home there to such a degree that toward the very end of my husband’s tenure at ANU we applied for Australian citizenship and, much to our delight, learned that we were considered more than acceptable candidates.  However, when he couldn’t find another academic position, we abandoned that plan and returned to California.  The Australian experience was now behind. 

For the next twelve years we lived in San Jose, California.  I seem always to have been fated to embark on life-changing enterprises when pregnant.  This time, I was pregnant with my third child and, ever my Professor Higgins, my husband told me that taking a course “would be good because it would give you something interesting to do while waiting” for the baby.  I took his advice and enrolled in a course about goddesses.  It was taught by the brilliant feminist theologian, Carol P. Christ, and after attending only a few times it occurred to me that I really liked what she was doing.  Shortly after that it dawned on that I could do the same thing!  Thus began my university career.  I enrolled in the fall as a freshman in the Religious Studies program there and brought the new baby to class with me to nurse.  At this point I became something of a ‘superwoman.’   I kept the house, took care of the children, found a part time work study job and attended classes.  I proved to be a promising student.  In any case, I finished my undergraduate degree in record time—three and a half years—and immediately moved into a special Master’s program in the Philosophy of Myth and Symbol which I completed within a year.  Shortly after that, I began teaching and taught my very first class in the very same room where I had sat and learned about goddesses. 

Life went on and throughout this period I found myself experiencing a cultural identity of a very different sort.  During these years I threw myself headlong into the academic culture, and, with the same enthusiasm and energy that had spurred me on when I was learning how to hostess formal dinner parties and later, to spin wool, I now learned how to produce research papers considered sufficiently excellent for me to present at conferences and even occasionally publish.  Just as other cultures, that of academia possesses its own body language, tones of voice, and nuance, and I eagerly absorbed it all.  In 1991, my husband was awarded an NEH grant which meant that he could take off working for an entire year.  Given that I was then besotted with everything French, I persuaded him to move the whole family—three girls, a dog, and a cat—to France.  Since we didn’t think we could afford to live in Paris we opted to rent a small house in the countryside just outside Lyons, thinking at the time that since Paris was but a three hour TGV ride away, we would be afforded easy proximity.  We couldn’t have been more wrong.  The TGV ticket was expensive and we were only able to afford one or two trips to the fabled City of Lights.  I still had not had my fill of things French, and so, at the end of our first year, when it was time for him to return to the U.S. to take up yet another fellowship at a Midwestern university, I persuaded him that since our two youngest girls were enrolled in French school where they were presumably becoming acculturated, assimilated and learning French, [6] the best thing for me would be to stay on in France to try and find a way for all of us to support ourselves and make a new life there.  He agreed.  He left and I was on my own.   

There I was, firmly ensconced in a culture which was the most complex of any I had hitherto encountered.  I proceeded to learn about haute French cuisine:  the breads, the cheeses, which wines to serve with which foods.  On my trips to Paris (which became more frequent the year I was left alone) I assiduously studied everything, not least of all the way the women spoke, moved, and dressed.  When I was in Paris I had many opportunities to participate in French academic culture.  While I had found American and Australian academia formidable, neither could compare with what I was exposed to there.  I remember attending a cocktail following a philosophical paper at the Sorbonne.  I met an interesting young Frenchwoman and spoke with her for a bit but when I tried to arrange a meeting with her later that week she excused herself in perfect, albeit accented English by saying she was busy working on her third book, and thus had no time for socializing, and then turned to address someone who had just approached us, speaking a language that I think was Portuguese.  In spite of the fact that by this time I had delivered a dozen papers at that many conferences and even had a few publications to my credit—a fairly respectable record for someone who was just in her second year of doctoral work—as she turned her elegant back on me I experienced something not unlike the evening I hadn’t known the translator of the work on Heraclitus.  Ah, the French.

After two years of trying, however, I had to give up my dream of staying there permanently.  It wasn’t meant to be and that would have to be that.  For a variety of reasons that are truly Byzantine, I found myself in Istanbul, Turkey and this is where I have stayed for the past ten years.  This is my fourth experience of living in another culture and it is here that I have experienced the most profound sense of being assimilated to a culture other than my own and it is here that I have most fully delighted in being able to enter and participate in a range of ‘foreign’ cultural nuances. 

The differences and similarities among the cultures I have described are both interesting and significant, but they are all instances of what is called the ‘multicultural’ or the ‘intercultural.’ Only here in Turkey have I begun to experience what Nicolescu calls ‘transculture.’  I think that I first became conscious of this when I left Turkey to participate in a conference in Locarno.  Most of the other participants were French but one was an Algerian who lived in France.  I was aware that I was American, but at the same time, I had the sensation that I was somehow representing Turkey.  Now, with the French my sense that I was a representative of Turkey came to the fore when I was interacting with them, but with the Algerian, however, what I found myself doing was talking in an impassioned way about the perceived ‘Otherness’ of those of ‘us’ (and here I felt utterly identified with Turkey) who came from countries like Algeria and Turkey.  In other words, my alignment kept shifting depending on who I was talking with.  Here in Istanbul, I find that if I am with foreigners, especially Americans and British, I rush to ferociously defend Turkey whenever I hear criticism of it.  On the other hand, when I am with Turks (and for the most part I move in a circle of Turkish people) I feel sufficiently identified with them that I will openly criticize things that go on here.  What is most interesting is that they usually accept this criticism.  It is extremely unusual for this to happen because normally, whenever a foreigner criticizes Turkey they do the same thing that I do now when I hear foreigners criticizing; that is, they vehemently defend whatever is being critiqued.  I believe this is an indication that they accept me as somehow being one of them. 

While I do identify with much of what one might call ‘Turkishness,’ my experience now is of participating in a whole range of cultural and national identities without feeling that I belong exclusively to any one of them.  My overwhelming feeling is one of being beyond any kind of limiting identity.  Now I generally feel myself a being who moves through Time and Space.     

While preparing this paper I did several Internet searches to get a sense of what was ‘out there’ related to the idea of the transcultural.  What I discovered is that with only a few exceptions, in particular, the work that is occasioned by CIRET, the word ‘transcultural’ has been appropriated and used by a variety of groups in ways that show that they do not understand its meaning. [7] It is being used as a kind of fashionable synonym for ‘multicultural.’  However, ‘transcultural’ is very different than ‘multicultural’ because the focus of the former is what is perhaps best described as the beyond.

Allow me to explain.

The Transcultural

In a world that has been radically and irrevocably changed by the Internet and by ‘globalization,’ that exceedingly problematic enterprise spawned by western capitalist imperialism, intercultural contact and exchanges are bound to occur.   I believe it is critically important that we become aware of the different levels on which such contact and exchange can take place.  While superficial exchange certainly entails acquiring new information, it can never result in the experience of a change of being.  In contrast, however, deep, genuine contact with ‘Otherness’ entails letting oneself actually be touched (i.e., changed) by the encounter.   It is within that space where one can experience the fact that the ‘Other’ is actually a hitherto unsuspected facet of ourselves.  The idea that each human being is somehow the repository of all human culture, that each and every ‘Other,’ whether foreign or not, is only another aspect, another facet of him or herself is breathtakingly radical and leads us into the metaphysical heart of the transcultural experience.

More than that, however, such lived experience of the transcultural also entails an experience of that ‘beyondness,’ I referred to above.  As Nicolescu writes, “The transcultural designates the opening of all cultures to that which crosses them and transcends them.” [8] What does this ‘beyondness’ look like?  Here, I want to give an example from my own experience here in Istanbul.  There have been times when I have shared time with a Turk, perhaps when we have had a meal together, drunk together, listened to music, talked, that we both experience a moment that is clearly more than the sum total of our respective experiences.  Of course, such moments are rare, of course they are nuanced and almost impossible, perhaps truly impossible, to adequately describe, but one invariably recognizes them when they come.  One feeling that accompanies moments like I have described is an overwhelming recognition of being a human being connected with all other humans.  Another feeling is the sense that one is but a part of that endless continuum we call ‘Life.’   

Now, such things may not fall within the realm of the empirical, but they are nonetheless real and as such possess ontological status.  In Hamlet, when William Shakespeare wrote “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” he was referring to phenomena like this and the emphasis in that pronouncement should properly be placed on the first occurrence of the word ‘are,’  the present indicative form of the verb ‘to be.’  Just as transdisciplinary approaches in general, the transcultural leaves open the possibility of wonder.  If one experiences the transcultural, one is no longer bound by a single, relatively closed culture.  On the contrary, one can fully participate in one’s own native culture as well as the other cultures one encounters, but at the same time, one is enabled to go beyond the bounds of any particular culture, into the space of simply being human.  This constitutes what can be understood as an emergent property of the sum total of one’s original native culture and subsequent encounters with other cultures.  In the transcultural space we are filled with a sense of wonder because it is then that we begin to see what being human really means.  And when we recognize ourselves in the ”mirror of the Other,” we have gone beyond the normal dichotomy of Subject and Object, the dichotomy which generally operates when two individuals are together.  It is then that we recognize the Self in the Other because we realize that the Other is a Self, too.  It is then that we experience a sense of being connected to the entire universe and can feel something of what was meant when the ancients spoke of how the microcosm was a mirror of the macrocosm.   Indeed, the microcosm is a mirror of the macrocosm.

Karen-Claire Voss

Fatih University, Istanbul