Experiment with Culture

I've been thinking more about 17 Border Crossings and its relation to the imagination. It's not merely that we construct things like borders, but that we construct our perceptions of cultures. Of course, he experienced different cultures, but often, his interactions with the border crossing guards would be very similar. In fact, I I would be interested to see all of the dialogues translated into English so I could compare them. When he goes to the moon, it's all in his imagination. He seems to think that by travelling he'll find this grand difference between different places. It isn't just that the landscape is similar at a border, it's also that people aren't inherently different. When you impose something like various cultures into relationships, it's easy to distance yourself from someone and create "the other." But, this "other" is imagined.

It's an interesting experiment to think back on the play and separate each person from their prescribed culture. It shows us how 17 Border Crossings makes us test our social constructions and our imagination.