Culture Impact Journal

Defining Culture – Impacting Our World

 

Premier Issue

1st February 2022

Edited By Huib Wursten

Publishers: 

Huib Wursten, huibwursten@gmail.com

Eric Alexander DeGroot,  eric.alexander.degroot@gmail.com

Editorial Board

Anton Carpinschi, Ph D Romania. Professor Emeritus, „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași, Romania

Drissia Chouit, Ph.D  Professor Université Moulay Ismail Meknès. Morocco. Linguist and Communication Scholar; Member, UNESCO-UNAOC University Network on Media and Information Literacy and Intercultural Dialogue; Former Consultant to UNESCO.

Fernando Lanzer Pereira de Souza CEO of LCO Partners BV Brazil/ Netherlands. Author of several books on Culture and an independent consultant working internationally.

Chika Miyamori Japan. Culture expert

Wim Koevermans Dutch Deputy Technical Director / Head of Coach Education at The Asian Football Confederation (AFC)

Sjaak Pappe Netherlands Expert in Innovation And Culture Management. Associate partner of Hofstede Insights Group.

Erika Visser Australia Director, Operational Excellence at CSI Medical Research Pte Ltd. Editor of The 7 Mental Images of National Culture

Mikael Søndergaard, Ph.D Associate Professor, University of Aarhus, Denmark

Hamid Doost Mohammadian, Germany, Professor for International Sustainability & Senior Futurist at University of Applied Sciences (FHM), Theoretician of the 5th Wave Theory, Author, Keynote Speaker & Consultant, Germany

Editorial

We are excited to present the first edition of the Culture Impact Journal. The publishers aim at showing how culture is impacting societal and political policies. We believe that culture is underestimated as a driver for the behavior we see around us. National culture acts like a gravitational field that socializes individuals towards the nation’s central value tendencies. This gravitation influences all major policy subjects. Examples: economy, education, democracy, the preferred approach for climate change, the dominant approach to Art, approaches to international cooperation, and diplomacy, etc.. The platform we create on this website will focus mainly on cultural diversity’s societal and political consequences. One of the means we use to do so is the Culture Impact Journal with “special editions”.

Four subjects are already in the pipeline for the “specials” in 2022:

February:         “Culture and Identity,”

June:                “Culture and Nation-building,”

September:      “Culture and Sports“,

December:       “Culture and Education“.

The content of this special is presented in two ways:

  1. Compact access. A description of the content for each paper and a PDF file for the article concerned.
  2. All articles in Journal format.

Compact Version

Short description

This special edition of the Culture-Impact Journal is about “Culture and Identity.”

The contributions range from very personal to very reflexive. Two of the papers are very personal.

Koijen Ramos

Koijen Ramos writes about individual Identity after the loss of her husband. She says: Identity is what you believe that you believe in. What words you use to describe yourself will define you. And the likelihood of proving yourself right is enormous because the human brain needs consistency.
After the passing to the divine of Peter, on 31 July 2021, I realized how much I was changed and I got in touch with a very new me. It was a me that I had never seen before, even in facing grief in the past. It was very different, very hurtful, painful and beautiful, pure and magical. And I’m not only talking about the emotional part but the physical aspect too. My physiology changed; my eyes and body changed. And the love was much bigger than me, and became gigantic; the same love that Peter didn’t want to let go of and always wanted to remember. The changes that happened created a new identity or maybe took me to the real Identity of all of us, LOVE. Love is in pain and in joy in a very similar way. In any context that I can remember, there is love. Birth, death, and everything in between are about love.
Could it be that our Identity is love, which is our most basic form and needs? Could it be that all the other words are just to make love more descriptive and real, just because love feels so intangible? Could it be that we are made of love? To all these questions, my answer is yes.

Click Here for the full article: Love and identity by Ligia Koijen Ramos

Gabbay

Gabbay relates to her life journey and reflects on the various cultural experiences she has been exposed to. She says: This happened at a time when the world was confronted with the pandemic of COVID19, each country proceeding differently according to its vision and sets of rules. It made me wonder what directs these reactions, what is common to all, what is different. So it seemed it was the right time to reflect on how cultures generally influence our behavior and understanding of life, particularly how it has impacted my life journey. To which extent did these cultures influence my Identity? How do I see myself, and how do others see me? Like many others, I always wanted to give meaning to my existence. Reflecting today on past experiences, the joy, and the pain, I would like this paper to be more than a simple testimony. I know that it could have been told in many different ways and probably in a different style, but the important thing is to touch the truth and relate the many episodes of my quest in a candid way. In this essay, I want to try and identify the challenging difficulties I have encountered when trying to adapt to the various cultures.

Click here for the full article: Culture and Identity. A life’s journey by Eliane Gabbay

Carpinschi

Carpinschi makes a difference between objective, impersonal research on globalization and multiculturalism and life narratives and personal experiences. He writes: “In a complementary way to the objective, impersonal research on globalization and multiculturalism, the self-reflexive-therapeutic approach conceptualizes, for therapeutic reasons, life narratives and personal experiences lived in the multicultural world of globalization.”

Specifically, the “reflexive” filtering of intercultural experiences in different socio-cultural contexts and life situations. First, the “narrative identity” is outlined. The concept of narrative Identity is perceived as “a person’s internalized and evolving life story, integrating the reconstructed past and imagined future to provide life with some degree of unity and purpose.” Reconstructing the autobiographical past, synthesizing episodic but significant memories, provides a coherent account of cultural identity over time. Carpinschi says: “In this way, living my own reflexive experiences in the world of globalization and cultural interactions, I can filter my feelings through the conceptual-experiential structures that encapsulate experiential-reflexive states with existential-therapeutic potential.”

Click here for the full article: Is the Culture of Recognition still Possible in the Multicultural World of Globalization? by Prof. Anton Carpinschi, PhD

Kaneva

Kaneva, in her paper, looks at the concept of Identity through the cultural lens of several countries which in recent history were part of the Soviet / Socialist / ‘Eastern’ bloc. She compares many of the concepts used in contemporary discussions about Identity with the experiences of people like herself who have lived under totalitarian rule. Her thesis is an attempt to show how concepts like Identity acquire quite different interpretations in the light of cultural and historical experiences. She also explores the potential of Identity and Identity Wars to replace the discourse of universal human and democratic values with social fragmentation and limitation of essential freedom.

Click here for the full article: Identity in the perspective of so-called Eastern Europe by Daniela Kaneva

Finuras

Finuras looks at Identity from an evolutionary perspective. He says: “Many behavioral scientists believe that the phenomenon of Identity can be analyzed from two perspectives. On the one hand, from an individual point of view, Identity serves to characterize and distinguish each person, having natural and socially constructed elements and that its main characteristics are continuity and contrast, both functioning as symbolic signs.” But, he continues: “On the other hand, as an evolutionary species, humans have always been dependent on groups for survival. It is proposed that social Identity evolved from the tribal social instinct and the relationships between individuals, which became the main element that promotes social trust and affiliation. In his article, he reflects on the isomorphism of the identity concept in its various applications in general and its consequences for the construction of trust and social navigation in the context of human evolution.

Click here for full article: Identity and Trust: an evolutionary perspective by Paulo Finuras, PhD

Wursten

Wursten contributes two papers. In the first one, he writes: We are in an identity crisis due to globalization. Because of the frequent confrontation with other cultures, we ask ourselves: where do I come from, who am I, what role does my culture play? Many of the answers go back to national Identity. This is not strange because most people feel a special connection with the immediate concrete environment: the place of birth, the language spoken, and the food. Usually, this gives a positive emotion of feeling at home.

Moreover, it also creates a positive sense of “mastering” the surrounding community’s expectations and frequently subconscious “rules of the game.” What is underestimated is the influence of national culture on other aspects of human life. According to Appiah, 5C’s are influencing Identity: Creed, Country, Culture, Class, Color. In his paper, Wursten shows Country culture has a “gravitational” influence on all other C’s

In a second paper, the focus is on the consequence that Identity politics divides “societies into ever smaller, self-regarding groups.” This leads to a tendency to incite the resentments of minorities while doing nothing to build a feeling of urgency for cooperation to cope with the challenges of a shared future. Diversity as a societal issue can be a constructive force only if diverse peoples focus on a rightful fight for equal rights and additionally on a motivation to cope with all societal challenges together. A new inclusive definition of “shared” Identity is necessary to do so. We need to balance individual needs and rights to focus on a shared future.

We need broader identities rather than narrow ones. Fukuyama (2018) says: “We need to promote creedal national identities built around the foundational ideas of modern liberal democracy and use public policies to assimilate newcomers to those identities deliberately.” Wursten discusses this idea of a shared future.

Click here for the full article: Identity and the gravitational influence of national culture

Click here for the full article: A shared future, a need for broader and more integrative identities

Opel

Opel analyzes the Identity of a unified Germany. With the convergence of national politics towards a European compromise and the visible increase of immigrants due to unrest in the Middle East, the focus on traditions and culture has become a popular topic on various agendas: Is true integration and assimilation possible? What are the national values that we should share with the newly arrived neighbors? In the recent election campaigns, the national identity has become very visible if you know how to identify the various aspects and cultural dimensions. The same is true for the way Germans deal with Corona and the vaccination program. The article explains the German identity and the characteristics of the well-oiled machine cluster that Huib Wursten in the light of recent developments.

Click here for the full article: German Culture by Brigitte Opel

Lanzer

Lanzer writes: Countless psychologists have written about forming identity and ego development as a section within Developmental Psychology. Similarly, many anthropologists and intercultural authors have written about cultural Identity. However, few authors have approached the topic bringing together both the psychological and the anthropological perspectives. This paper aims to emphasize this integrative perspective: personality development is a universal psychological process that happens within the cultural environment of an individual. Therefore, it is always influenced by culture in practice and should not be treated as universal. Instead, it needs to incorporate the specific cultural values that influence individual development as part of Developmental Psychology. Wursten’s seven Mental Images, as a synthesis of Geert Hofstede’s cultural values framework, are a vital reference for understanding personality development in individuals since they can also be used to create a valuable typology of superegos.

Click here for the full article: The psychology of Identity by Fernando Lanzer

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