Page 261 - Contribution To Phenomenology

254 DON IHDE

steeply sloping beaches, there is also always an undercurrent. That
undercurrent is the other, the other cultures, which today, in the form of
pluriculture, reaches back and into the dominant movement which went
out from the Euro-American. The result is a chaotic mix of dominant
and recessive tidal rips which sometimes take the shape of cultural
revenge.

II. Crossculturality

The pluricultural is simply a late modern form of an often underrated
ancient history of crossculturality. The "others" have always been a more
important element in our own histories than we give them credit for:
A. Cross cultural exchange has always been a powerful historical
"motor." One cannot ignore this, particularly in Rome, where the waves
of Etruscan, Hellenic, Roman, Latin, and Italian cultures shaped this part
of our history. Our wars have often been cross cultural: In Europe our
occluded "other" has often been Islamic. The Moors, the Ottomans, and,
with Iraq, today again our attention cannot help but return to this often
surpressed history. This same history even played a vital role in the rise
of technoscience itself! Had it not been for the Arabic scholars who
preserved, studied, and developed classical Greek science—especially
Aristotle and the atomists—while our northern "barbarians," we of
Germanic descent, ignored and destroyed those same culture fragments,
our modern science originating in the Renaissance might not have
happened at all.
Nor should we forget that the origins of technoscience followed by
over a century, another landmark in cross cultural history—the voyages
of discovery which we locate with Columbus and Vasco da Gama. 1992,
was both the celebration of a more united Europe and also the quintra-
centennial of the Euro-American beginning.
B. Cross cultural exchange is also material exchange. Poor Columbus
died thinking he had reached the Orient. He did not know that the
Conquistadors who first dominated in South America and the North
American south and west, were to transform Europe itself with the
material culture of the New World. Gold and silver, passionately
collected, were melted down and reformed into European artifacts—but
the culinary revolution which followed in the wake of potatoes, tomatoes,
tobacco, corn, coffee, so totally transformed the European diet that today
we almost take this result as indigineous. Nor should we forget that the