Tzvetan Todorov has a literary theory on "knowing the other." (I'm translating this from Spanish to English.) This is an abstract of his theory.
Understanding a foreign culture, or another person (or a literary text) remits to a simple question, how do we understand the other?
This other can be different from us in different ways:
in time - so knowing the other means understanding history
in space - we use comparative analysis (different cultures)
or the other can be just someone you know
Todorov's solution on how to know the other deals with several successive phases of the same act, although this movement means you have to retrocede in order to advance.
First phase) Assimilate the other to oneself. "I'm a literary critic, all the works I speak of only let one voice be heard: mine." I feel like foreign cultures are structured like mine. The historian only encounters a pre-figuration of the present when he studies the past. There is a perception of the other, but I convert it into a reproduction of myself. There is only one identity, mine.
Second phase) Understanding consists in the disappearance of myself in benefit of the other. "I become more Persian than the Persians: I learn their history and their present, I accustom myself to perceiving the world through their eyes, and I repress manifestations of my original identity."
I'm proud to make the writer I’m reading speak. I renounce myself to fuse with the other. Again, there is one identity, but it is the other's.
Third phase) I re-take my identity, after doing all I could to know the other. My temporal-spatial, cultural surroundings are no longer a curse; in fact they produce new knowledge, this time in the qualitative since, rather than quantative. An ethnologist, I no longer try to make others speak, but to establish a dialogue between them and me; I perceive my own categories as just as relative as theirs. I no longer try not to have prejudices. I pre-judge necessarily and always, but that is the interesting part of my interpretation, since my prejudices are as different as theirs.
Fourth phase) I again separate from myself, but in a different way. I no longer want to or can identify with the other, but not with myself either. (This phase sometimes sends you here.) My knowledge about the other depends on my own identity. This knowledge of the other also determines my knowledge about myself. Knowledge about the self transforms the self's identity, and the whole process can start again, until infinity. The movement never has an end, but moves in a precise direction towards an ideal.
I've had these experiences; I imagine most people have, though I think people living abroad are way more aware of it. I'm sure there are many adaptations you could add to this theory, but in its core I find it quite accurate.
