Complexity of Difference-ISR12英文文献资料.pdfVIP

INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, Vol. 35 No. 3–4, 2010, 341–52 The Complexity of Difference: Individual, Cultural, and Cross-Cultural* Zhang Longxi City University of Hong Kong Difference is a basic fact in life and in our understanding of life. As individual human beings, we are all different from one another in genetic makeup as well as in physiognomic traits. Take a walk in the bustling streets of a city like Hong Kong, where I now live, you have human diversity thrust upon you as you find yourself in a motley crowd of Cantonese-speaking locals, Mandarin-speaking mainlanders, European expatriates, Filipinos, Thais, Indians and other south or southeast Asians, visitors or tourists from all corners of the earth, uttering a polyphonic heteroglossia or a spate of English of diverse accents. Such variety and marked differences make each of us identifiable as a person with distinctly personal characteristics as unique as our DNA sequences or our fingerprints. And yet, as social groups, communities, and nations, individual identities coalesce and people display certain in-group features that are common and shared by members of the same group while differentiating them from those of other groups. Language and ethnicity are examples of such socially constituted features, which become markers of collective identities; and as the study of collective identities often has more weight than that of individuals (for even the study of an individual, say, biography as a genre, must examine the individual in a collective or social context), group features, or differences on the collective level, are most likely to become the centre of activities in academic research, particularly in social sciences and the humanities. In other words, critical attention in scholarly discourse tends to focus on cultural differences, culture being the term for a communityís collective ways of living, the form of life in a particular society. As a result, cultural differ