ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the positive side of underlying universal cultural processes can be used to counter and undo the negative side. Constructivism underpins the disciplines and is a key part of the postmodern paradigm in its understanding that ideology, discourses and narratives are all socially constructed. Discourses and grand and personal narratives need to be considered in working out the methodology for investigating culture. Several factors may therefore inhibit understanding when encountering unfamiliar cultural environments. The centred approach can be associated with stereotyping or national cultural profiling. Thick description is closely related to the belief that there are connections within the complexity of things which make it possible to find links to previous experience. For a reflective activity, it is therefore useful to consider the proposition that once people become involved in the detail of culturally foreign places they stop thinking of them as foreign.
