If we are talking about dialogue, the first thing that comes into our mind is verbal, oral dialogue. And a good example of this in contemporary cultural context is translation. However, this is fairly new form of communication and the three much earlier and older ones are: war, love and trade.

At first sight they seem to be rather different, but in fact they have a lot of common features and in real life are closely linked together. A good illustration for this is marriage, which clearly belongs to the love-discourse. But it also involves trade (the widespread tradition of "selling" brides, dowry) and war (kidnapping brides).

As I already mentioned, war is the one of the oldest and most developed forms of a dialogue between cultures. We know that in its earlier stage of development Culture does not acknowledge others beside it. At that stage Culture is...