Instead of trying to extract the internal dynamics resulting from them,modern scholarship has largely reduced the perceived asymmetry in the functionality of culturalor political features to an ‘objective’ asymmetry in power. This tendency has been mostprominently pronounced in postcolonial scholarship in the wake of Edward Said’s workOrientalism (1978).

This might be done in different ways, such as enhancing one’s own sports fitness, but ifthe entities involved are cultures or social bodies such as nations, this perception will result inasymmetrical exchanges with the counterpart, where one entity draws more and/or moreimportant features from the other than vice versa.

It is only by using a methodological transculturality as a default mode or heuristicconcept, i.e. by looking at the formative and transformative processes resulting in any givencultural manifestation, that we discover such cultural entanglements as a result of processes ofnegotiation,

. Enlightenment brought a religio naturalis, a ‘religion’ of reason, whichunderlies all religions and which endures all historical religions. Enlightenment also promotedthe idea of the universality of cultures and a Universalgeschichte of cultures (cf. Häfner 1994).Only through this ‘discovery’ of a unity in cultural diversity could disciplines such as culturalstudies emerge.

It is based on defining(and reifying) cultures – and disciplines – in accordance with the nation model of the nineteenthcentury.

These reductions make forcultural memory (Assmann and Hölscher 1988; A. Assmann 1993; J. Assmann 1997), out ofwhich history as a joint point of reference emerges.