ABSTRACT
Culture is something shared but not shared by all: culture has boundaries and negotiating and dialoguing across those boundaries between cultures is often the stuff of everyday life. Cultures also overlap and people occupy multiple cultural worlds, navigating the differences between them. A mark of sophistication in developing a reflexive attitude to culture is not just recognising cultural difference and its negotiation but the internal contradictions of a culture, which are nevertheless often brought out by an encounter with at least partial difference. The doing and meaning relationship poses a theoretical problem because getting the relationship between social being and culture right has been and is so extraordinarily difficult. Emergence refers to ‘new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships’. Emergent cultures have variable relations with the dominant order and no fixed political value can be associated with the emergent.
