In the previous video, you mentioned the term cultural boundary. Could you go a little deeper into what it means and how that can lead to cultural innovations? Sure. The term cultural boundary is in fact an existing term in human geography and anthropology. Though I do not want to use in the exact same sense, but I will use it in a more permeable way. It is usually used to describe a geographic area where a group of people live under the shared culture, such as language, religion, and traditions, which is enforced through culture practice. However, as cultures continuously exchange and thus shift, you cannot chart these out on a geographical map, and more importantly, these cultural boundaries do not necessarily lie on a state or nation's borders. In fact, there may be multiple distinct cultures within a single nation or on the other hand, a broader over-arching culture spanning across a few countries. Now I got it. Culture boundaries are not necessarily the same as national borders. As the time change and nations redraw their borders, the cultures may not reflect the change in the same way. Exactly, however, it would also be wrong to say that national borders do not influence cultural boundaries at all either. The formation of nations and their unique national identity can lead to various changes in culture which begin to differentiate themselves from neighboring countries. Also, with globalization being so widespread today, you can see that cultural boundaries between two cultures do not have to be merely based on geography. Two countries that are almost on opposite ends of earth, like Korea and the US, can have culture exchange across their cultural boundaries. Interesting, so the definition for cultural boundary is broader than I expected and could I say that cultural boundaries are lines of conflict in that two distinct cultures are sort of struggling for culture dominance over a certain area? Yes, these conflicts don't always have to be aggressive. They are definitely key factors which breed innovation. I believe that these results in two main types of cultural innovation, adaptive, disruptive innovations. Adaptive innovation arises from a general idea of adopting an element from a culture beyond your own and adapting both the element in your own culture to assimilate them. In the previous video, I gave the example of Sungkyun, which we will talk about in depth later. It is important that there is an element of innovation involved however, for example, the acceptance of Buddhism from India to China and is later development into Chan Buddhism in pre-modern China, more commonly known as Zen, can also be considered more of adaptive innovation. It seems that without innovation, taking in some aspect of culture from another into your own can be seen as cultural assimilation, just borrowing or even appropriation. Of course, it is important that there is a modification of the cultural aspect to be an adaptive innovation. Whereas adaptive innovation assimilated foreign elements of culture, blurring the line between culture, disruptive innovation occurs when adaptive innovation reaches its critical point. When some part of culture is taken in and internalized, it is possible to innovate upon it such that it disrupts the existing culture of a society. This innovation creates something which takes on a new meaning. When this happen, it will be considered a disruptive innovation. This contributes to strengthening and sharpening the cultural boundaries by making one culture more distinct from another. However, this kind of innovation does not happen solely from adhering to a single culture but requires interaction with other cultures. Hangeul is one of the best examples of disruptive innovation. Hangeul, the Korean alphabet is grounded on the element of East Asian thought and eventually replaced the Chinese written script and disrupted existing conventions in Korean literature. I see, this means that Hangeul wasn't created from nothing, disruptive innovations aren't necessarily 100 percent novel or original, but instead, they reinforced or cultural boundaries between different cultures. Precisely I believe that cultural boundaries allow for a kind of innovation which a single culture will find difficult to achieve on its own. Adaptive innovation connects two cultures through continuous exchange of culture that was innovated open. Disruptive innovation strengthens the cultural boundaries between two cultures.
