Backpack Archetypes on Screen or Growing into Multiculturalism through Visual Culture and Perceptive Travel Seminars

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to focus, on one side, on the importance of visual culture and, on the other side, on the experience of perceptive travel seminars as powerful means to broaden multicultural awareness within higher education for intercultural dialogue and multiculturalism.

In my PhD research I developed the concept of inner screen and outer screen (Soares, 2003), within a model of perception between images projected on (outer) screens and images projected in the mind (inner screens). As an essence within this dynamic model we can find universal images, those that C.G. Jung called archetypes.

The first part of this paper aims at focusing on the relationship between visual culture (outer screen) and the inner perception of archetypes (universal images) that individuals of all cultures do share. As the essence of growing into multiculturalism consists in identifying which same roots humanity shares, those deep roots that are beyond the diversities of superficial appearance. The study of comparative mythology (C.G.Jung, Joseph Campbell), for example, reveals those analogies that exist among cultures coloured with local specificities and rituals. The aim is therefore the search for the global within the local as a starting point towards intercultural dialogue. In the second part of this paper we will focus our attention on perceptive travel seminars as innovative means of education in movement towards a gain of multicultural awareness. Traditionally higher education is centred indoors at the university. A means to develop intercultural dialogue is connected to a motivation towards getting to know other cultures, and that motivation can be conducted through perceptive travel seminars to be included into higher education in a regular basis.