Dear Jinan,
In my note yesterday, I should have mentioned that several fields and disciplines has specific single words in English for the certain kinds of cultural distortion.
You wrote, “... in Sanskrit there is a word for cultural distortion. That is Prakruti meaning Nature, Sanskruti meaning Culture and vikruti to indicate cultural distortion. I wonder why there is no equivalent for Vikruti in English. Does that mean that there is no cultural distortion? Is anyone aware of an equivalent word in any other language?”
Cultural distortions of different kinds are relevant to different fields.
In history and historiography, for example, the term “presentism” refers to a time-bound cultural distortion, in which an historian analyses past events through the lens of present-day attitudes and experiences, using modern values and concepts to interpret the past.
In hermeneutics, exegetics, and textual interpretation, the term “eisegesis” refers to the problem of reading an utterance or a text in the limiting case of one’s own experience rather than doing the research required to understand the text in terms of its own contents and context. Exegesis often requires that we distinguish between several subtly different interpretive strategies for a single utterance or text — what the original speaker or writer meant, what the original hearers or readers would have understood in the context of their time and culture. In some cases, this also requires considering what others might have understood from the same speech or text at different times, places, and cultures. This kind of hermeneutical unfolding is very common in most literary disciplines when scholars attempt to understand a passage of Shakespeare as a London audience of 1594 might have received it, or Aeschylus as an Athenian would have heard it in 475 BC. There are good reasons for successive translations of the Greek classics: several may be brilliant, and all may be correct in different ways.
Many fields have a rich array of research methods intended to address and overcome the problems of cultural distortion, whether or not those fields use a single word to describe the problem.
Research methods in ethnography and ethnology address this problem, both in describing and comparing cultures, and in the attempt to make cultures understandable to people of other cultures. This is also a crucial issue in kinesics.
Such specialist fields as ethnomathematics must consider cultural distortion carefully. To understand the mathematical concepts and activities of various cultural groups, one must be able to see how any group understands and performs its own mathematics in the context of its own considerations.
It occurred to me this morning that I did not address these issues in my post yesterday. There are indeed specific English-language words that represent the concept of cultural distortion, but many of these are used within a specific context. If you were to define “vikruti” and to describe the context within which different kinds of people use it, there might be distinctions that shed light on its meaning. It may be that not everyone who uses the word uses it in the same way or means the same thing in using it. Every language has single words with many meanings, and every language has multiple terms that mean the same thing. Many languages also have multiple terms that roughly mean the same thing while providing distinctions and nuances.
To understand the ways that different fields consider the problem of cultural distortion and the words they use to describe the phenomenon (or phenomena) would be a useful study in its own right. The starting point would be a careful glossary. To create such a glossary, one would have to conduct a study among people in a wide variety of fields to understand the language, methods, and practices around the concept of cultural distortion. If you were to create a glossary and information graphic to represent the overlapping and differing terms and concepts, I suspect you’d see interesting patterns.
At any rate, I hope that the post yesterday and this post answer your question. There are equivalent words and phrases for “vikruti” in English, sometimes a single word, other times a phrase. The concept does exist, and many fields have a rich array of methods that have been created to guard against cultural distortion. This does not always lead to the desired outcome, but it does demonstrate an awareness of the problem and an effort to correct for it.
If there are words and phrases for “vikruti” in English, there must also be similar words and phrases for people who practice the same disciplines in other languages. A German ethnomathematician, a Chinese social psychologist, or a Spanish exegete must be able to do their work in their own language.
I hope this helps.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, Ph.D., D.Sc. (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/ <http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/>
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| Email [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman <http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman> | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn <http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn/>
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Ken Friedman, Ph.D., D.Sc. (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
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