ABSTRACT
Culture is often understood in two different ways: “Culture as the folk-spirit having a unique identity, and culture as cultivation of inwardness of free individuality”, have prevailed in Western context until recently (Velkley, 2002, p. 13). The former meaning has been used as an extension of colonial power. Its ideological reproduction has been made through binary oppositions of cultural representation. It is a thematically fixing approach to a (non-white) culture as an epistemological object that determines “a true or proper or scientific sense of culture” (Nowotny, 2006, para. 4). As argued in the previous part of this study, such an approach has a critical metaphysical problem – that is, to conceal or ignore the ontological equality of cultures and the axiological interaction between cultures – and as a result, authentic intercultural interaction does not occur in the learning environment. In this sense, the concept of culture needs to be open to metaphysical discussions by posing a question: How does a culture form a particular individuality? This metaphysical question not only tackles binary oppositions of cultural representation by assuming the ontological equality of all cultures but also opens up possibilities for teachers to design intercultural interaction. As argued in the introduction chapter, culture, as a mode of being, enables human beings to hold a particular cultural framework to understand the world, and a culture, as a particular metaphysical framework, enables human beings to hold a unique collective worldview and value system. Thus intercultural interaction in the learning environment refers to the mutual interaction of different worldviews that is inevitably metaphysical. A culturally bound value system or framework would be a worldview that determines individuals’ cultural identity in social contexts, and its power, deeply embedded in one’s unconscious mind, is persistent.
