Cultural Significance
Part of the attraction of the balikbayan box is its economic value as it affords the sender cheaper bulk shipment of items versus sending each individually or in smaller boxes through postal services. The tradeoff though is longer transit time by container ship, which typically lasts several weeks, and the lack of a solid delivery date.
Important is the balikbayan boxes' role in the practice of pasalubong, where returnees are culturally expected to bring home gifts to family, friends and colleagues in the Philippines.
Read more about this topic: Balikbayan Box
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“All cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categories. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur merely because spirit has changed its categories in order to understand and examine what belongs to it, in order to possess and grasp itself in a truer, deeper, more intimate and unified manner.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
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