The importance of going abroad to study/work

The students who travel abroad to learn a new language and new culture, this deprivation and/or alteration of the self comes as with the shock of using the second language. The learner’s self becomes trapped behind the communication barrier that results, and only an altered picture of the self, one filtered through this new, incomplete language, is projected by the learner. Moreover, the cultural frame of the new environment causes the presented self to be reinterpreted through yet another filter of meaning. Learners become disadvantaged in their ability to assimilate new information, develop their social networks and present their self, when their own frame of reference becomes marginalized by the prominent frame of the new culture.

From Pellegrino Aveni, V (2005) Study Abroad and Second language Use Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 9-16

In Intercultural Communication: Identity by Holliday A, Hyde M and Kullman J, p.121

Are we all in pursue to acquire high statuses, to impress people around ourselves and to self advertising when we travel through cultures and religions of the world?

"Despite these structures, there is often the effort to bring into one's social world what Pierre Bourdieu terms 'cultural capital': knowledge from the cultural supermarket that one can display to one's social credit, justifying and bolstering one's social position. One's interest, at least within some segments of American society, in Indian ragas as apposed to top 40 hits, or in Tibetian Buddhist writings as opposed to evangelical Christian tracts, is a way of advertising cosmopolitan discernment: my far-flung tastes may well be the servant of my local strategy of impressing the people around me. The matter of what from the cultural supermarket can provide status in a given social milieu is highly complex. Each social milieu has its rating system for information and identities from the cultural supermarket; individuals seek to attain maximum credit and credibility, not only through consumption within the existing cultural rating system, but also through bringing in new information and identities, whose high status they seek to establish. The criteria for the establishment of such status are thus highly specific and flexible. Individuals play the game with an extraordinary acute sense of its implicit rules and strategies.

But all this is not to claim that there is absolutely no room for individual choice from the cultural supermarket. Why does one person thrill to Bach, another to juju? Why does one person become a Christian, another a Buddhist? Why does one person revel in their ethnicity, while another spurns that ethnicity? Why does one person travel the world while another stays at home? Much can be predicted about our choices by considering such factors as social class, educational level, income, gender, and age, as well as personal histories, but not everything can be predicted. We are not slaves to the world around us, but have (in a social if not philosophical sense) a certain degree of freedom in choosing who we are. This freedom may be highly limited, but it cannot be altogether denied.

From Intercultural Communication: Identity by Holliday A, Hyde M and Kullman J, p.99

Horizon of expectations

In the speech, Khruschev once claimed that communism was already visible on the horizon. When a listener asked, 'Comrade Khruschev, what does "horizon" mean?', the leader advised him to consult a dictionary. There, the listener found the following entry: 'Horizon, an apparent line that separates the earth from the sky and disappears as you approach it.'

The 'horizon of expectations' is only partly structured by experience; events do not always coincide with expectations, although those expectations are, of course, strongly influenced by their prehistory in the 'space of experience.' In the modern world, this tension between experience and expectation evokes a different experience of history. Partly because of the disintegration of the Christian concept of the Judgement Day, the 'horizon of expectation' moves up, and the future becomes 'less attached' to the past. At the same time, an eventual improvement of one's fate is less likely 'in the hereafter' and more likely 'in the present,' an experience that manifests itself in the emerging use of the concept of 'progress'.

From Art in Progress by Maarten Doorman p.24

Pictures, like words, are what we are made on.

"I am an inquisitive and chaotic traveler. I like discovering places haphazardly, through whatever images they might have to offer: landscapes and buildings, postcards and monuments, museums and galleries that house the iconographic memory of a place. Much as I love reading words, I love reading pictures, and I enjoy finding the stories explicitly or secretly woven into all kinds of works of art – without, however, having to resort to arcane or esoteric vocabularies. … I am guided not by any theory of art but merely by curiosity."

Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better the problem is solved. Henry James, Guy de Maupassant

"Pictures, like stories, inform us. Aristotle suggested that every thought process required them. “Now, for the thinking soul, images take the place of direct perceptions; and when the soul asserts or denies that these images are good or bad, it either avoids or pursues them. Hence the soul never thinks without a mental image.” … existence takes place in an unfurling scroll of pictures captured by sight and enhanced or tempered by the other senses, pictures whose meaning (or presumption of meaning) varies constantly, building up a language made of pictures translated into words and words translated into pictures, through which we try to grasp and understand our very existence. The pictures that make up our world are symbols, signs, messages and allegories. Or perhaps they are merely empty presences that we fill with our desire, experience, questioning and regret. Whatever the case might be, pictures, like words, are the stuff we are made on."

From Reading Pictures by Alberto Manguel