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Abstract

The term “interculturality,” understood as the relations that exist between culturally diverse human groups in a given society, is a complex one currently used to refer to the relations that exist within society between diverse majority and minority constellations defined in terms not only of culture but also of ethnicity, language, religious denomination, and/or nationality. This entry defines interculturality and classifies it according to its descriptive versus prescriptive usage and its underlying, implicit assumption of a static versus a dynamic notion of culture. It then typologically analyzes interculturality with regard to the main underlying social scientific paradigms of inequality, difference, and diversity. The three main Anglo‐Saxon, Continental European, and Latin American sources of the contemporary debate on interculturality, as well as its applications both in anthropology and in related disciplines and interdisciplinary fields, are detailed before the latest trends in Northern and Southern debates on interculturality, intersectionality, and decoloniality are briefly sketched.
Interculturality
GUNTHER DIETZ
Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico
e relations that exist between the culturally diverse human groups that comprise a
given society are increasingly referred to using the notion of interculturality. While the
term was originally coined to refer to a rather static and reied conception of culture
as the sum of relations between cultures, “interculturality” as it is currently used is
a more complex term that refers to the relations that exist within society between
diverse majority and minority constellations that are dened in terms not only of
culture but also of ethnicity, language, religious denomination, and/or nationality.
erefore, the empirical referent of each of these constellations is highly contex-
tual: in some societies interculturality is used with reference to migration-induced
diversity, whereas in other societies the same notion is applied to indigenous–settler
interactions.
In broad terms, interculturality is dened and classied in anthropological and social
science literature according to three dierent but complementary semantical axes:
(1) the distinction between interculturality as a descriptive rather than as a prescrip-
tive concept; (2) the underlying, implicit assumption of a static versus a dynamic
notion of culture; and (3) the rather functionalist application of the concept of
interculturality for analyzing the status quo of a given society versus its critical and
emancipatory application for identifying inherent conicts and sources of societal
transformations.
ese three axes will be dened in the rst of the following sections. In the second
section, interculturality is typologically analyzed with regard to the main underlying
social scientic paradigms of inequality, dierence, and diversity. ird, the three main
Anglo-Saxon, Continental European, and Latin American sources of the contemporary
debate on interculturality and its adjacent notions will be sketched, before the fourth
section identies the broader theoretical frame into which these debates are inserted
and which relates back to nationalism, ethnicity, and multiculturalism. e h
section sums up the main empirical applications of the notion of interculturality in
both anthropology and related disciplines, as well as in interdisciplinary elds. Finally,
the latest trends in Northern and Southern debates on interculturality are briey
sketched in the last section.
e International Encyclopedia of Anthropology.EditedbyHilaryCallan.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea1629
2INTERCULTU RALIT Y
Defining axes of interculturality
The descriptive and prescriptive nature of interculturality as a concept
When it is used as a descriptive and analytical tool, interculturality is dened as the
ensemble of interrelations that structure a given society in terms of culture, ethnicity,
language, religious denomination, and/or nationality, an ensemble that is perceived
through the articulation of dierent “us” versus “them” groups that interact in oen
changing majority–minority constellations. ese relations are frequently asymmetri-
cal with regard to political and socioeconomic power, and they oen reect historically
rooted ways of showing or hiding, of emphasizing or denying diversity, of stigmatizing
otherness, and of discriminating against particular groups (Dietz 2009).
In contrast to the alternative concept of multiculturality, the emphasis in intercul-
turality as a descriptive tool relies not so much on the internally diverse composition
of society and its segmentation into dierent groups as a multicultural approach would
suggest. In fact, the intercultural perspective does not emphasize group composition
but the kind and quality of intergroup relations within society. erefore, minority and
majority are not distinguished here in demographic, numerical terms but in terms of
power—the power to dene who belongs to a majority and who is stigmatized as a
minority. As will be detailed later, the historical rootedness of these processes of inclu-
sion and exclusion is part of an intercultural analysis of society (Dietz and Mateos
Cortés 2011).
Because of this critical potential of the concept of interculturality, the term is
also and rather oen used in prescriptive ways as a normative notion. In this sense,
interculturality is sometimes coined as interculturalism (Gundara 2000), a trans-
formative program aimed at making contemporary societies more conscious about
their internal diversities and more inclusive and symmetrical with regard to their
so-called minorities. Again, while multiculturalism develops armative action and
positive discrimination measures to “empower” particular groups inside society,
interculturalism emphasizes changes in the nature of the relations between these
groups, which implies not only empowering certain groups but also altering majority
perceptions and promoting reciprocal processes of identication between groups that
have been historically privileged and groups that have been historically excluded—that
is,“betweenthosewhodonotwanttorememberandthosewhocannotforget
(Santos 2010, 131).
The underlying static and dynamic notions of culture
Since its origins in functionalist applied anthropology, the promotion or establishment
of “intercultural” or “interethnic” relations has developed on the basis of a rather static
concept of culture. In this tradition, relations between cultures occur between groups
of people with dierent cultures, expressed through dierent elements, patterns, or
institutions that are considered to be dening features of their respective groups and
cultures. Both European structural–functionalist explanations of cultural diversity
and the North American culture-area approach have inuenced a rst generation of
INTERCULTU RALIT Y 3
Latin American interculturality approaches, which still regard culture traits, patterns,
or institutions as “objective” expressions of cultural dierence and, accordingly, as the
basisofinterculturalrelations.
ese rather mechanical explanations of interculturality, which frequently fuse
spatial geographic distance, historically divergent evolution, and contemporary
“acculturating” impacts of modernity into a xed model of intercultural exchanges,
have been problematized and substituted within anthropology by more dynamic and
complex notions of culture. However, other social sciences have enthusiastically and
sometimes acritically inherited these static notions of culture and interculturality.
Both anthropology and cultural studies have moved toward denitions of culture as
symbolical interpretations, as routinized praxis, as collective resources, and so on,
which imply that there is no simple space “between” cultures but rather a complex
articulation of inter-, intra-, and transcultural processes of self-adscription and
external adscription, of identifying, and of othering within society. erefore, intercul-
turality nowadays relies on a much more hybrid, processual, and contextual notion of
culture.
Functional and critical interculturality
Finally, the uses of descriptive as well as prescriptive interculturality and their under-
lying static or dynamic notions of culture may lead to broader implications for social
scientic analyses of contemporary societies. In the literature produced in both Euro-
pean and Latin American contexts a tension is increasingly perceivable between, on the
one hand, an understanding of interculturality as a programmatic, political–educational
strategy for smoothing over, soening, or mitigating relations and, on the other hand, a
view of interculturality as a transformative strategy to unveil, question, and change his-
torically rooted inequalities within society. In the rst case, intercultural competences
are dened as functional tools and resources for increasing tolerance for, mutual under-
standing with, and empathy with others, whereas in the second case these intercultural
capacities are interpreted and/or acquired in terms of anti-discrimination, conscious-
ness raising, and dealing with conict.
e underlying model of society is rather dierent in each case. Interculturality as a
functional resource to improve social relations tends to acknowledge acritically the cur-
rent status quo by identifying individual features—lack of competencies, lack of com-
munication skills, lack of human capital, and so on—as causes for exclusion, discrimi-
nation, and persisting asymmetrical relations. Intercultural competences will therefore
provide excluded minority members with the necessary tools for competing in con-
temporary national or international labor markets, for qualifying their claims in terms
of the existing political system, for communicating in cosmopolitical terms beyond
borders, and so on. Critical interculturality (Walsh 2003), on the contrary, deepens
ourunderstandingofthehistoricalandstructuralnatureof(e.g.,imperial,colonial)
inequalities that shape current cultural diversity and identies collective actors that may
transform asymmetrical relations, not individually but systemically, by developing new
channels of participation, new legal frameworks for recognition, and new postcolonial
institutions and/or identications.
4INTERCULTU RALIT Y
Interculturality as inequality, as difference, and as diversity
e kinds of denitions of interculturality that result from the combinations of these
three conceptual axes reveal in their divergences deeply rooted dierences with regard
to the anthropological and, broader speaking, the social scientic paradigms as well
as to the visions of society to which each author and his or her academic community
subscribe. In this connection, the uses of interculturality have to be analyzed in their
multilayered dimensions and in close relation to the corresponding vision of contem-
porary society favored by a specic notion of interculturality.
For the purpose of clarity, three paradigms are briey sketched which may be identi-
edasimplicitlogicsthatinboththeglobalNorthandtheglobalSouthshapethenotion
of interculturality when it is employed as an analytic tool in debates on multicultural-
ism, identity politics, recognition, integration, and/or autonomy rights. Each of these
paradigms is oen used in monocausal explanations by particular authors or commu-
nities,butwhentheyarecombinedtheyensureamuchricher,deeper,morenuanced,
and multidimensional analysis of identities and diversities through the combination of
the paradigmatic concepts of inequality, dierence, and diversity.
Historically, the paradigm of inequality focuses on a vertical analysis of particular
socioeconomic structurations (as in the case of Marxist theories of classes and class
conicts) but also includes gendered inequalities (such as in the Northern, dominant
feminist critique of patriarchy) and persistent caste-like, racialized colonial asymme-
tries. Interculturality through the lens of this paradigm has nurtured compensatory and
oen assimilationist institutional responses, which identied a given minority’s lacks
and/or handicaps as sources of inequality, in order to make equal the unequal. is
represents a universalist approach, deeply rooted both theoretically and programmat-
ically in a monocultural habitus, which is presented and defended as a transcultural
feature of any given society beyond cultural or ethnic dierences. Such a claim is the
classical product of the Western nation-state and its hegemonic way of conceiving the
social sciences.
e paradigm of dierence, in contrast, has been formulated, achieved, and spread
both in Northern and in Southern contexts by new social movements and their par-
ticular identity politics. It promotes a horizontal analysis of ethnic, cultural, religious,
gender-based, age, generation, and sexual orientation as well as diverse dierences
related to capabilities. is dierentiation process is achieved through group-specic,
segregated empowerment strategies for each of the concerned minorities. Intracultural
features and strategic delimitations toward other groups (us vs. them) trigger a politics
of identity which mostly relies on discourse rather than on praxis. e corresponding
approach privileges particularist and multiculturalist responses, which frequently
ignore, invisibilize, or downplay socioeconomic inequalities and broader structural
conditions.
Finally, the diversity paradigm is formulated through the critique of both assimila-
tionist monoculturalism and essentializing multiculturalism. In contrast to the other
two paradigms, this approach starts from the plural, multisituated, contextual, and
therefore necessarily hybrid character of any cultural, ethnic, religious, or class- or
gender-based identity. ese diverse identities are articulated both individually and
INTERCULTU RALIT Y 5
collectively not so much through discourses but through the praxis of interactions
between heterogeneous actors in hybrid, interstitial, shared spaces. Accordingly, the
resultingstrategyofanalysistendstobeinterculturalinthesenseoflookingfor
relational, cross-cutting, and intersectional features of interaction.
In their triadic combination, inequality, dierence, and diversity together constitute
the methodological point of departure for an intercultural analysis of constellations
of lifeworld diversities and of their normative diversity treatment or management.
roughthistriadickindofanalysis,whichisnotlimitedtotheobservablesurface
of intercultural interaction patterns or to the content of collective ethnic identity
discourses, interculturality and diversity become visible and analyzable as complex
phenomena. Including its underlying institutional structurations, the phenomenon of
interculturality is thus to be localized in the very structure of contemporary society
as a contextual and case-specic translation of a shared, underlying “grammar of
diversities” (Dietz 2009).
Anglo-Saxon, Continental European, and Latin American
contexts of origin
As an academic discourse, interculturality does not only reveal relatedness to specic
social science research paradigms but may also be tracked to dierent regional societal
sources. e use of the adjective “intercultural” in dierent anthropological publica-
tions may be traced back to Latin American applied anthropology since the 1950s. Both
Venezuelan and Mexican anthropologists started referring to “intercultural education
and “intercultural health” as new spheres of interaction between state-led, nonindige-
nous initiatives of national integration and local indigenous cultures (Mateos Cortés
2011). Nevertheless, these Latin American usages of interculturality returned at the
end of the twentieth century only aer interacting with North American and Euro-
pean notions of interculturality, oen reintroduced in the region through development
cooperation agencies.
Particularly inuential has been interculturality’s close interaction with Anglo-Saxon
multiculturalism and multicultural education (Dietz and Mateos Cortés 2011). Mul-
ticultural discourse, which had originally emerged in societies self-dened as settler
countries of immigration located mostly in North America and Oceania, has since
become the principal ideological point of reference for notions of interculturality. Poli-
cies of multicultural education have been applied since the 1980s in these postsettler
societies, particularly foreign, nonnative, immigrated minorities. As the long-standing
tradition of indigenismo illustrates, however, in the Latin American context and under
nationalist, homogenizing, and non-multiculturalist premises, very similar policies of
dierential education have historically targeted indigenous minorities and not immi-
grated ones.
erefore, when multiculturalist discourses start migrating from one context to
another, their original points of departure—a particular matrix of identity politics
and their underlying institutional frames—oen end up being blended, confused, and
supposedly neutralized in their power to shape educational “solutions” in the new
6INTERCULTU RALIT Y
contexts. A critical anthropological deconstruction of these migrating models must
start by examining their rather dierent origins and contexts, which in both North
American and British Commonwealth societies are related to new collective actors
questioning mainstream society’s false and oen racist promises of a “color-blind
“melting pot” and striving therefore to empower minority students distinctively in
oen severely racialized postsegregation and/or postcolonial school environments.
Multicultural education in such societies is accordingly formulated as a program of
both political recognition and dierential treatment for these minoritized groups.
By contrast, in Continental European countries intercultural, not multicultural, edu-
cation has been developed, and it is conceived not as a minority claim targeting col-
lective actors but as an individualized “integration” of immigrated minority students in
postwar Fordist labor environments. ese integration measures slowly evolved from
assimilationist and compensatory approaches toward interaction-oriented “solutions
that crosscut minority/majority divisions through an emphasis on developing individ-
ual intercultural competencies (Gundara 2000).
In Latin America, intercultural education reemerged in the last decade of the
twentieth century as a post-indigenismo discourse and as a means of redening
the relationship between nation-states and indigenous peoples by parallel or even
exclusively “indigenous” educational programs. Here, “intercultural and bilingual
education” shis between collective-oriented community empowerment, on the one
hand, and school-access provision for individual students, on the other (López and
Küper 2000).
us,theeldofdiversiededucationalpoliciesisparticularlysuitableforillustrat-
ing the three dierential treatments given to interculturality. While there is a tendency
toward an empowering education aimed at the minorities in the United States and the
United Kingdom, Continental Europe is opting for an education that cuts across the
promotion of intercultural skills or competences both for excluded minorities and,
above all, for the excluding majorities. In Latin America, however, intercultural educa-
tion appears in a post-indigenismo phase that is redening the relations between the
state and the indigenous peoples. Here, the notion of interculturality has reappeared in
education with the desire to overcome both the political and the pedagogical limitations
of the previous indigenous bilingual and bicultural education, but it maintains a strong
tendency toward the preferential treatment of ethnic–indigenous issues. us, the old
“Indian problem,” the pending, self-imposed task of the Latin American nation-state
to fully “integrate” indigenous peoples into the broader national society, continues
to shape the nucleus of the identity concerns of these nation-states; this is even
more so under the impact of the new indigenous movements and their demands for
autonomy.
Interculturality with regard to culture, ethnicity,
and nationalism
What conceptual relation is to be established between interculturality and nationalism
and ethnicity? As ethnicity theory has shown since the 1980s, neither the phenomena
INTERCULTU RALIT Y 7
of ethnic and/or national delimitation nor the cultural dierences to which this
delimitation resorts are explainable as immutable essences. However, it has also
become clear that the apparent range of possibilities for “inventing traditions” and
for selecting diacritical cultural features is subject to the multiple power relations that
link a particular group with certain socioeconomic strata and with nation-state power
(see Dietz 2009). In order to address the specic role played by interculturality, the
relationship that exists between the concepts of culture and ethnicity and/or national-
ism has to be specied without falling back into either primordialist reductionisms or
constructivist extremes.
Culture and ethnicity as defining lines for interculturality
e social actors, members of a specic ethnic group, and bearers of a particular cul-
tural legacy do not reinvent their culture daily, nor do they constantly change their
group identity. Cultural reproduction, both intra- and intergenerationally, drives—by
means of daily praxis—processes of what Giddens (1984) called “routinization,” which
in turn structure this praxis. is routinization allows the social actor to manage his or
her continuity, both in objectied aspects of culture (institutions, rituals, and preestab-
lished meanings) and in subjectied aspects of culture (concrete knowledge of practices
and representations on the part of the members of the group in question). e per-
manent conuence and interaction of both aspects of culture, its institutional objec-
tication (which can be analyzed on the etic level) and its individual subjectication
(which can be captured only from an emic perspective) generate a canon of cultur-
ally specic practices and representations, a distinctive habitus, in Bourdieu’s (1990)
terms.
is praxeological approach to culture in social theory not only contributes to
overcoming the old debate between cultural objectivism and subjectivism, of structure
versus agency dichotomies but at the same time helps to distinguish between processes
of cultural reproduction and processes of ethnic identication. While the reproduc-
tion and/or transformation of inherited culture is carried out by updating and/or
modifying ritualized symbolic practices, ethnic identication with a certain set of
social actors and the delimitation of this set from another, larger, set of actors implies
a discursive—conscious, although later internalized—act of comparing, selecting, and
giving meaning to certain cultural practices and representations as contrast markers in
intercultural situations.
The intracultural and the intercultural
is is why ethnicity is not an arbitrary event: the selection and assignment of meaning
on the discursive level of emblems or “ethnic markers” is limited according to the
distinctive habitus of the groups involved, that is, according to their cultural praxis.
Ethnicity is, then, an epiphenomenon of an intercultural contact that, in turn, struc-
tures the interaction of this contact by selecting certain contrast markers as opposed
to others. As a formal mechanism of delimitation, a particular group’s identity politics,
8INTERCULTU RALIT Y
understood to be a politics of recognition, mediates the relations between what is
considered intracultural and what is intercultural. Depending on the kind of contrast
chosen, models of interaction are broadened or restricted by means of specic stereo-
types about us versus them. roughout this intercultural process, ethnicity, however,
not only structures the intercultural relation but also modies the intracultural
structures, objectifying certain cultural elements and instrumentalizing them as ethnic
markers.
Nationalism and its impact on interculturality
e arbitrary selection of one dialect variant and its institutionalization as the national
language generates—through its intergenerational transmission—a hegemonic habitus
in the majority of national societies, expressed in an assumed common sense about
the “normalness” and “naturalness” of focusing education on this standardized lan-
guage. In consequence, dialects and linguistic diversity are considered “school prob-
lems.” Similarly, the constant and recurring use of biological stereotypes by a dominant
group throughout its models of intercultural communication with a nonhegemonic
group will stabilize pseudobiological cultural distinctions by means of racialized topoi
of perception.
e selective symbolization that is inherent to both ethnicity and nationalism rei-
es dierences; routinized, habitual culture becomes an identity resource for delimiting
groups,withtheobjectiveofdrivingprocessesofethnogenesis:whatwasroutinepraxis
before becomes part of an explicit identity policy. In this sense, culture and ethnicity
are two closely and intimately related concepts that, in their interaction with identity
discourse and cultural praxis, create both intercultural and intracultural relations and
delimitations.
How,then,aretheseconceptsofculture,ethnicity,andinterculturalitylinkedto
questions of nationalism? Apart from dierences in the ways in which a nation-state is
sought aer or is claimed by nationalist movements, nationalist strategies do not dier
structurally from those employed by ethnic movements with regard to identity politics.
Bothcanbeclassiedandcomparedthroughthedistinctionofthree“hegemonicstrate-
gies” (Alonso 1994; Smith 1996). First, territorialization transforms space into territory,
oen even into “sacred territory” (Smith 1996), converting the overlapping, liminal
spaces of interaction between groups into clear frontiers that separate them. It is the
hegemonic group that bears the national project that denes the center of the nation
and the subnational peripheries. Second, substantialization reinterprets social relations
in a biologizing manner in order to confer an immutable, quasi-natural appearance on
the emerging and still fragile national entity, oen based on a “myth of ethnic choice”
(Smith 1996). Starting from the self-denition of the group that bears the nationalizing
project, the nation-state thus invents national society. And, third, temporalization con-
sists in the nation-state imposing a single version of the multiple “invented traditions,”
reinterpreting this version as the primordial past of the national project, as the shared
golden age” (Smith 1996). anks to this kind of canonization of history, not only is
“authorized memory” institutionalized but so too is “collective amnesia,” the equally
sanctioned “forgetting” of all the other traditions.
INTERCULTU RALIT Y 9
Nation-state building homogenizes inwards, establishing an inclusive citizenship
that is thought of as a civic nation, while at the same time delimiting outwards,
distinguishing according to nationality. is duality illustrates what Habermas (1998)
callsthe“Janusface”oftheconceptofnation.Inspiteofthedistinctivematrixesthat
the specic combination of this duality creates within each nation-state, the ideological
nucleusisidentical.Nationalismgeneratesthenation-state;onceitisestablished,the
group that promoted the state project converts it into a “nationalizing nationalism”
(Brubaker 1996), a homogenizing project that redenes the relationships that exist
between the group and the rest of the populace according to their place in this
nationalizing project. Consequently, the formation of this ideal nation-state is never
a closed chapter: the constant reemergence and recovery of diverging interpretations
by the nonhegemonic or counterhegemonic groups forces the state to implement new
institutional strategies constantly in order to achieve its original desire of homog-
enizing and integrating the groups, thus turning nationalist ction into national
reality.
erefore, an intrinsic conict persists between state nationalism and ethnicity. e
terms under which the dialectical relationship that arises between the nationalizing
nationalism and the particularizing ethnicity develop are dened by the power of the
state. e hegemonic capacity of the state’s national project conditions the nonhege-
monic ethnic projects’ room for maneuver. e redening of intercultural as against
intracultural relations is, accordingly, part of a hegemonic national project and, at the
same time, of a counterhegemonic ethnicity project by nonnationalized, subaltern
groups. is is the reason why interculturality quickly turns to become an arena or
even a battleground of, on the one hand, functional, reproductionist approaches from
above and, on the other hand, critical, transformative approaches from below.
The importance of (national) education for interculturality
Considering these interlinkages between culture, ethnicity, interculturality, and nation-
alism,anessentialtaskofanthropologyconsistsincriticallypickingapartthediscourses
about multiculturality and interculturality (Meer and Modood 2012), as well as the
relationship that exists between these discourses and their respective practices as they
materialize in supposedly intercultural education. e dierential treatment—whether
directed toward assimilation, integration, or segregation—provided by ocial national
education systems and aimed at certain “minority” groups is an integral part of the
nation-state’s identity politics. e perception of otherness is simultaneously the prod-
uct and the producer of identity. Not only is this close interrelationship between the
conception of “us” and “them” evident in the classic nineteenth-century pedagogies of
nationalizing nationalism, but the new pedagogies of multiculturalism and intercultur-
alism must also be analyzed not as simple responses to the classrooms internal diversi-
cation but as contemporary expressions of the national identity project. Interculturality
from the hegemonic, state perspective implies an ocial pedagogy of otherness, of deal-
ing with those nonnational others.
In this sense, it is striking that in the Continental European context the presence of
native minorities and their claims for recognition in the educational arena have not
10 INTERCULTU RALIT Y
triggered any interculturalization eorts. Instead, either openly assimilatory or explic-
itly segregatory eorts have been the programmatic answer to ethnic claims from Nor-
way (by the Sami) and Denmark (the ethnic Groenlaenders), through Germany (the
Sorbs) and France (the Normans, Occitans, and Corses) down to Italy (the southern
Tiroles),Greece(thePontiansandMacedonians),andseveralEasternEuropeancoun-
tries. In all of these contexts, intercultural solutions to school problems have been imple-
mented only once immigrated minorities (Turks, Arabs, eastern European Roma, etc.)
have been made visible and problematized at school (Dietz 2009).
e Spanish case is particularly illustrative of the national bias in interculturality dis-
courses.Fordecades,collectiverightsforautochthonousgroupshavebeenstrongly
and polemically discussed under nationalist, not multiculturalist nor interculturalist,
premises, whereas intercultural solutions are sought for with regard to Maghrebian and
Latin American immigrated minorities. Up to the present day, Catalan, Basque, Gali-
cian, and even Andalusian nationalisms have employed ethnicizing, self-assimilatory
discourses for their own nationalist claims while resorting to sometimes intercultural,
sometimes segregatory, discourses for the treatment of newly immigrated communities.
roughout these dividing lines, historically rooted and dichotomously dened iden-
tities of the other—stigmatized as the historically external “enemy,” the Moor, or the
historically internal “enemy,” the Gypsy or Roma—reemerge when multicultural mod-
els and discourses are imported and adopted by contemporary mainstream society and
policy making.
Disciplinary points of departure and interdisciplinary
convergences
is section considers the dierent translations that the notion of interculturality is
undergoing in diverse disciplinary and interdisciplinary constellations.
Intercultural pedagogy and the anthropology of education
Interculturality in education has not been promoted only by ocial state-led policies;
the mentioned normative, prescriptive potential that has characterized the concept
ever since it became part of social movement agendas—by migrant communities
in Europe, African American and/or Chicano communities in North America,
indigenous communities in Latin America and Oceania—has contributed to the
emergence of a new (sub)discipline of intercultural pedagogy and/or intercultural
education (Dietz and Mateos Cortés 2011). It is in this context that an encounter
of pedagogy with anthropology occurs. is encounter is not limited to the inter-
culturality discourse. At least since North American anthropologists created the
Council on Anthropology and Education in 1968, the anthropology of education
has been characterized by its integration of ethnographic and comparative research
about the intergenerational acquisition of the culturally specic mechanisms of
interaction—and of cognition—with general theorization about the concepts of culture
and identity.
INTERCULTU RALIT Y 11
is subdiscipline’s analytic and comparative orientation contrasts not only with
interculturaleducationsnormativeloadbutalsowiththeoenimmediatezealfor
pedagogical intervention. As a result, a gradual distancing can be perceived between
the anthropology of education as a subdiscipline of anthropology, on the one hand,
and pedagogical anthropology, on the other, which goes back to María Montessori’s
original “scientic” interest but broadens its questions and thus comes closer to
philosophy and especially to ethics.
Inthecontextoftheemerginginterculturalpedagogy,apredominantlyauxil-
iary interpretation of anthropological knowledge has generated a terminological–
conceptual reductionism, which has had a negative impact on the very strategy of
interculturalizing the educational sphere. Reecting a deeply rooted tendency in
pedagogy to problematize the existence of cultural diversity in the classroom, basic
concepts from anthropology such as culture, ethnic group, and ethnicity are applied
and operationalized which resorts to nineteenth-century denitions in the best of
cases.Apartfromtherecurringuseofracializations,forexample,culturaldierences
are oen ethnicized by reifying their bearers.
Not only is intergroup dierence oen essentialized in so-called intercultural
education, but individual and group phenomena are also mixed up: emic and etic
perspectives are indiscriminately mixed. Dissimilar notions as culture, ethnicity,
phenotypic dierences, and demographic situations such as being a minority are
confused, and nally the historical stereotypes of the Western other, the topoi of the
“Gypsy,” the “Muslim,” and so on are resorted to. In these kinds of terminological
shortcuts, the practical consequences of the strategy of problematizing cultural
diversity, promoted both by the classic tasks of pedagogy and by dierential mul-
ticulturalism, become evident. Once the politics of dierence is transferred to the
classroom, otherness becomes a problem and its solution is culturalized by reinter-
preting the socioeconomic, legal, and/or political inequalities as supposed cultural
dierences.
In a disencounter with these tendencies in intercultural education, a particularly
anthropological task consists of decoding this kind of culturalist pedagogical discourse
and of deculturalizing its culturalist-biased interpretations. One example is the
aforementioned analysis of school performance by students from migratory and/or
minority contexts. When the school “successes” and “failures” of immigrant students
are contrasted with the school performance of native students, a large part of the
so-called pedagogical problem created by the presence of children from migratory
and/or minority contexts is shown to be explainable in the classic terms of social
stratication.
Intercultural studies
e term “intercultural studies” was coined to designate an emerging eld of transdisci-
plinary preoccupations regarding the contacts and relations that, on both the individual
and the collective levels, are articulated in contexts of cultural diversity and heterogene-
ity. is cultural diversity, conceived of as the product of the presence of ethnic and/or
cultural minorities or of the establishment of new migrant communities in the heart of
12 INTERCULTU RALIT Y
contemporary societies, is studied in school and extra-school contexts, in situations of
discrimination that reect xenophobia and racism in the dierent spheres of ever more
diverse societies.
ese studies reect the conuence of dierent factors that indicate profound trans-
formations in academia itself. Ethnic studies, developed particularly in North Amer-
ican higher education, seek to overcome their initial phase of self-isolation as niches
of self-study by members of the same minority. Simultaneously, under the inuence of
critical theory, cultural studies recover theoretical approaches to the conicts that exist
in contemporary societies, generating a new intercultural dimension. And within the
classic disciplines of the social sciences, the study of cultural diversity with its emphasis
on relationships between minorities and majorities as well as between migrants and
nonmigrants, favors an interdisciplinary movement toward the intercultural. At the
same time, new subdisciplines such as intercultural pedagogy, psychology, linguistics,
andphilosophytendtodevelopatransdisciplinaryresearchdynamicthatallowsthem
to bring their respective objects of study closer together. Similarly, disciplines that are
traditionally not closely related to the theme of cultural diversity, such as economics
and the business sciences as well as political science, discover interculturality when they
internationalize their sphere of study.
In this way, the nascent intercultural studies reects the success achieved by multi-
culturalism in its strategy of visualizing and thematizing cultural diversity in all spheres
of contemporary society. e polyphonic and many-folded character of the phenomena
classied as multicultural or intercultural makes any attempt to cover them all from a
monodisciplinary perspective impossible. is aects, rst of all, the anthropological
perspective and its loss of the monopoly on the concept of culture, as the emergence
of cultural studies has already exemplied. Because of the aforementioned frequent use
of essentialized and mechanical denitions of culture, when the concept migrates from
one discipline to the other, a critical anthropological analysis of culture and related con-
cepts is still needed.
Intercultural business and organizational studies
In the highly successful and popular economic and business studies of cultural and
intercultural themes, inaugurated by Hofstede’s (1994) pioneering approach, a static
and oen harmonizing notion of culture, which is directly traceable to the anthropolog-
ical functionalism of the mid-twentieth century, persists. e identication of cultural
dierences with norms and values that are supposedly characteristic of the correspond-
ing nationalities from which the leading management of a given multinational company
stems generates conclusions whose simplicity is worrying. e resulting classication of
cultures according to their degree of individualism versus collectivism or of masculin-
ity versus femininity is so stereotyped and ethnocentric that it can hardly contribute to
the study of intracultural and intercultural dynamics.
Despite this simplifying singularization of individual identity versus group identity,
Hofstede’s intercultural model continues to be applied not only in economic sciences
and business administration but even in supposedly intercultural education. As a result,
this kind of intercultural study tends to spread and to deepen national stereotypes. e
INTERCULTU RALIT Y 13
approach that analyzes the organizational cultures that prevail within certain institu-
tions, according to their degree of integration, dierentiation, and fragmentation, also
contributes to similar simplications. is attempt to internationalize or intercultural-
ize the business sciences relativizes the centrality of national cultures, contrasting them
with the inuence that dierent industrial, institutional, and professional cultures have
on the shape of a business or administrative organization as a whole. e intercultural
dimension is, once again, the result of a merely additive notion of the sum of dierent
cultures that are discernible and classiable as objectied entities.
Intercultural psychology and communication
In contrast to this kind of theorization about what is intercultural, so-called inter-
cultural psychology and its fruitful and prolonged exchange with linguistics and
psychopedagogy have developed theories of the intercultural that are much less
schematic. eir starting point is similar to that of business studies. e encounter
between individuals from two dierent cultures generates a mutual recourse to recip-
rocal stereotypes as a reaction to cultural ambiguities. erefore, the communicative
aspect is considered essential for redirecting this initially invigorated ethnocentrism
toward an encounter with the other.
As an interdisciplinary eld in which psychological, linguistic, anthropological, and
pedagogical approaches converge, intercultural communication studies this kind of
experience of surprise, understanding, and identication. e main contribution of
anthropology consists of distinguishing between the emic and etic perspectives when
analyzing the communicative act, while linguistics and foreign-language teaching
systematize the notion of communicational competence and transfer it to the inter-
cultural sphere. Beyond the cognitive prerequisites of knowledge about the other,
the intercultural situation requires the skills of empathy, sociability, and mediation
within heterogeneous contexts. ese kinds of competences are acquired only through
interaction.
ese communication models oen contrast with many real communication
situations, which are characterized by asymmetrical power relations between the
participants in the communicative event. Even in intercultural activities that are
programmed to be explicitly intercultural, such as so-called cultural encounters,
the persistence of ethnocentric and universalist criteria limits the possibility of real
dialogue beyond cultural dierences. e limits of this focus become quite obvious
whenitspracticalmethodsandrecommendationsgobeyondtheirpeculiarcontexts
of origin to more conictive social situations. Intercultural communication has been
developed that resorts to a reduced number of articially ideal communicational
situations: ongoing training for employees in multinational companies; encounters
between European youth of dierent nationalities in summer camps and explicitly
intercultural retreats; foreign-language teaching, especially to university students
in international exchange programs; diplomatic or commercial negotiations at the
international level; and tourism.
Even the so-called training for intercultural mediators represents a privileged situa-
tion, given the externally induced character of the encounter, which is favored through
14 INTERCULTU RALIT Y
the training activity. is becomes evident if we contrast these oen articially har-
moniousprototypesofinterculturalcommunicationwiththemodelsofcompetence,
interaction, and communication displayed in strongly ethnicized and racialized post-
colonial contexts, such as in the case of communication between “whites” and “blacks”
both in the United States and in Europe. Accordingly, the main problem of this approach
lies in its tendency to personalize and individualize the communicative dimension, thus
underestimating the persistent inuence of group ideologies in the very act of commu-
nication between two individuals.
Intercultural philosophy, theology, and hermeneutics
In contrast to these empirical attempts to analyze the communicative mechanisms
that function within intercultural processes, nascent intercultural philosophies and
theologies start out with the need to overcome the ethnocentric legacy of Western
thought—canonized as the one and only philosophy—through the progressive inter-
culturalization of philosophical activity. Dierent conceptual proposals have been
developed to interculturalize Western philosophy and/or theology.
For instance, starting from the contrastive analysis of the Hindu and Christian reli-
gious and cosmological systems, Panikkar (1990) and others propose the development
of a comparative science of philosophy, analogous to the model of “interreligious dia-
logue,” in which the intercultural dimension arises from the harmonious and dialogical
exchange between languages, religions, and cultures. Furthermore, the Latin Ameri-
can tradition of theology and philosophy of liberation (e.g., Raúl Fornet-Betancourt,
Enrique Dussel, León Olivé), with its critical, emancipatory, and transforming dimen-
sion, in particular, is contributing to the development of a new philosophy that is poly-
phonic, potentially utopian, and enculturated in its dierent contexts. In order to criti-
cize and deconstruct the Western notion of human rights as well as its “epistimecidical”
attitude toward other cultural traditions, Santos (2010) opts for a “diatopic hermeneu-
tics,” a transcultural dialogue that transcends the commonplaces of each culture by
raising the consciousness of reciprocal incompleteness by engaging in dialogue.
Beyond the dierent nuances drawn by each contribution in aspects such as the
type of dialogue and the transforming and/or dissident character of the thought
under discussion, the common element of these highly normative proposals lies in the
step-by-step emergence of a new kind of intercultural rationality, conceived of as the
product of a transrationalization of the dierent philosophical models. In spite of the
emphasistheseauthorshaveplacedonthetransformablecharacterofintercultural
relations, a static, singularized, and oen mentalist notion of culture subsumes what is
intercultural in metaphors of encounter and dialogue between discrete, never hybrid,
entities.
In recent years, through the contribution of the linguistic and philological perspec-
tive of intercultural communication, an attempt to abandon the reductionism and
the schematic aspect that are still inherent in the notions of interculturality analyzed
up to this point can be discerned. It is, above all, a result of the encounter between
foreign-language teaching, interpretive anthropology, and the persistent hermeneutic
tradition that the rst interdisciplinary theoretical–methodological program with
INTERCULTU RALIT Y 15
regard to what is intercultural is formulated. is intercultural hermeneutics (Stagl
1993) conceives of itself as an extension and systematization of the classic transcen-
dental hermeneutics that—with evident Kantian echoes—reects on the conditions
that make Ver s t e h en (comprehension, understanding) and communication between
human beings possible. Within this paradigm, all acts of Verst e h e n are understood to
be tentative, approximational, and necessarily circular procedures of the Gadamerian
“fusion of horizons.” e result of this contrastive, interpretive operation is to generate
an intersubjective meaning.
In the anthropology dedicated to interculturality, as well as in the nascent inter-
cultural philologies, this hermeneutic notion is broadened, resorting to the originally
Schützian, phenomenological concept of lifeworld. e plurality of lifeworlds, shaped as
self-referential wholes that give meaning to their members, requires the pluralization of
comprehensional models. e possibilities of intercultural comprehension, which seeks
to translate between these lifeworlds, depends not only on linguistic competence and
skills, as intercultural communication suggests, but also on the development of reexive
dialogues.
Interculturality between intersectional diversities
and decoloniality
Apart from these disciplinary and interdisciplinary developments, which illustrate the
emergence of subelds of academic specialization, in more general terms the latest
anthropological and social science debates on interculturality reveal once more a persis-
tent division between Northern and Southern academic stances and priorities. Broadly
speaking, whereas in Northern contexts interculturality is increasingly embedded in a
larger constructivist, anti-essentialist, and intersectional notion of diversity, Southern
denitions of interculturality emphasize its close link to subaltern, emancipatory social
movements aiming at decolonizing asymmetrical knowledge systems, memories, and
state–society relations.
Diversity and intersectionality
Since the 1990s, and particularly since the turn of the century, interculturality is
increasinglydiscussed,perceivedandproblematizedintheglobalNorthintermsof
diversity and particularly of cultural diversity (Dietz 2009). e former, aforemen-
tioned (over)emphasis on dierence faces the problem of how to include other gender-,
migration-, or disability-related sources of dierence and how to address possible
intersections between these sources of dierence. erefore, the concept of dierence,
which suggests the possibility of neatly distinguishing between its respective traits
or markers, is being gradually replaced by the notion of diversity, which in contrast
emphasizes the multiplicity, overlapping, and crossing between sources of human
variability. In this sense, cultural diversity is increasingly being employed and dened
in relation to social and cultural variability in the same way as biodiversity is being
used when referring to biological and ecological variations, habitats, and ecosystems.
16 INTERCULTU RALIT Y
In the Northern contexts of interculturality discourses, diversity tends to be epit-
omized as cultural diversity, as the diversity of lifeworlds, lifestyles, and identities,
which in an increasingly glocalized and superdiverse society cannot be separated from,
but end up mixing and hybridizing, each other. Moreover, the discourse on diversity
tends to include not only a descriptive dimension—how cultures, groups, and societies
are diversely structured and how they deal with heterogeneity—but also a strongly
prescriptive dimension—stating how cultures, groups, and societies should interact
within themselves and with each other.
In this connection, the recognition of diversity becomes a political postulate, a claim
articulated by minority organizations and movements that struggle to enter the hege-
monic, supposedly homogeneous, public domain of Western societies (Ribeiro 2007).
In dierent European nation-states there are rather diverse forms of collective actions
and claims-making procedures, through which ethnic, cultural, national, religious, and
sexual minorities are entering the public sphere. Whereas in the European Union this
redenition of the political and educational domains by new minority actors is still a
rather new phenomenon, the Anglo-Saxon and particularly US and Canadian contexts
already show long traditions of diversity management as ocial reactions to minority
claimsmaking.Dierentlevelsofcourtrulingsestablishingarmativeactionandequal
employment opportunity schemes in public institutions, organizations, and enterprises
have forced both public and private actors to introduce diversity mechanisms into their
particular organizational contexts. As a consequence, the whole discourse of diversity,
diversity recognition, and diversity management is turning into an ideology that polit-
ically and even legally promotes the perception of certain traits and features—gender,
ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation, for example—to the detriment of others, such as
social class.
Diversity is therefore to be conceived of not as a mechanical summing up of
dierences but as a multidimensional and multiperspectivist approach to the study
of identities, identity markers, and discriminatory practices. It is the intersections
between diverse and contradictory discourses and practices, and not the essence of
given identity discourses, that will thus constitute the main object of the diversity
approach. e notion of intersectionality, which originally stems from the feminist
and multiculturalist debates on the racialization of women from African American,
Latino/a, or other minority backgrounds, leads the discourse of interculturality
to focus on the oen cross-cutting reinforcements of discriminatory attitudes and
activities and their impact on an individual’s identity formation and transformation
processes.
Intersectionality may be viewed both from the perspective of identity formation
and from the perception of discrimination, two aspects that tend to combine in
particular situations, which reect an actor’s identity choices according to the dierent
levels and types of identities to which he or she has access but also to the particular
visibility of a given source of identity with regard to its stigmatized or nonstigmatized
connotations, intersections are to be traced between multiple, high versus low salient,
as well as between positively versus negatively connotated, dimensions of identity.
Complementing these distinctions, the power dierentials inherent in each of the oen
dichotomous identity dimensions have to be considered throughout the analysis.
INTERCULTU RALIT Y 17
Decolonial interculturality and intercultural citizenship
e intersectional, cross-cutting, and hybrid notion of diversity and interculturality
developed particularly in Northern academic and societal contexts contrasts sharply
with the social and political movement of Southern collective actors such as indige-
nous movements in the Andes and in other Latin American regions who redene
interculturality in terms of recognizing the colonial nature and origin of intergroup
relations in contemporary postcolonial nation-states (Aman 2015). e coloniality of
social relations, which persists as a form of racialized dominance and still structures
the perception of diversity (Quijano 2007), needs to be replaced by an explicitly
decolonial interculturality, an academic and political program that replaces externally
imposed, Eurocentric binarities and dichotomies with regional and local actors’ own,
intracultural cosmologies, worldviews, and denitions of buen vivir,ofsumak kawsay,
of “good living.”
Drawingbothfrompostcolonialacademicdiscourseandfromindigenousmove-
ments’ claims making, this Southern concept of interculturality is much more explicitly
political and transformative in its normative stance (Walsh 2003). It shares with its
Northern counterpart a constructivist concern with all too simple essentializations of
identity and dierence, but decolonial interculturality rejects a postmodern celebration
of hybridity for its own sake. Instead, the recognition of colonial and postcolonial
asymmetries motivates its protagonists to reconstruct collective actors, to remember
historical grievances, to regain spheres of autonomous decision making, and to force
the nation-state and its governing elites to redene the relationship between state
and society as well as between dominant social groups and historically excluded
indigenous, mestizo, and Afro-descendant communities.
erefore, interculturality is conceived in Latin American power constellations
as both conictual and dialogical: the conictive, oen violent nature of intergroup
relations needs to be acknowledged before a dialogue on the future of intercultural
relations may be conducted between all members and groups of contemporary
society. For this purpose, inward-directed intracultural reconstruction of indigene-
ity and of autonomy among the colonized communities is as much a prerequisite as
outward-directed intercultural exchange with the descendants of the colonizers (Rivera
Cusicanqui 2010). In some nation-states, intercultural dialogues that engage with all
groups of society are beginning to transform postcolonial power relations, to redene
majority–minority constellations by recognizing the plurinational composition of
society. is recognition translates into the emergence of an “intercultural citizenship
(Alfaro, Ansión, and Tubino 2008), a citizenship regime that is based on intraculturally
specic and interculturally negotiated capacities to exercise human rights in situations
of persistent, historically rooted inequalities and asymmetries.
Acknowledgments
Parts of this entry have been revised and updated from two earlier publications: Dietz
(2009) and Dietz and Mateos Cortés (2011). A shorter, preliminary version of this article
was published in the journal Perles Educativos 39 (156) in 2017.
18 INTERCULTU RALIT Y
SEE ALSO: Anthropology of Education, Anthropology in Education, and Anthro-
pology for Education; Chile, Anthropology in; Citizenship; Coloniality of Power;
Cultural Brokers; Cultural Transmission; Culture, Concept of; Diaspora; Empow-
erment and Community Participation; Essentialism; Ethnicity in Anthropology;
Ethnicity, Multiculturalism, and Transnationalism; Ethnology; Gender, Nationalism,
and Ethnicity; Gender and Race, Intersectionality eory of; Habitus; Hybridity;
Identity in Anthropology; Indigeneity in Anthropology; Indigenous Peoples and
Higher Education; Indigenous eory; Jazz; Literacy Practices across Cultures and
Sectors; Migration; Multiculturalism; Nationalism; Philosophical Anthropology;
Policy, Anthropology and; Politics of Recognition; Postcolonialism; Postcoloniality;
Rights; Social Movements; Transnationalism
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... The notion of "interculturality" is polysemic in literature, as its definition varies with researchers' different viewpoints (Jin, 2016). For example, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has generalised interculturality as "the existence and equitable interaction of diverse cultures and the possibility of generating shared cultural expressions through dialogue and mutual respect" (UNESCO, 2005, p. 8), while Dietz (2018) defined the term as the relations existing between culturally diverse human groups in a given society. ...
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We are very happy to publish this issue of the International Journal of Learning, Teaching and Educational Research. The International Journal of Learning, Teaching and Educational Research is a peer-reviewed open-access journal committed to publishing high-quality articles in the field of education. Submissions may include full-length articles, case studies and innovative solutions to problems faced by students, educators and directors of educational organisations. To learn more about this journal, please visit the website http://www.ijlter.org. We are grateful to the editor-in-chief, members of the Editorial Board and the reviewers for accepting only high quality articles in this issue. We seize this opportunity to thank them for their great collaboration. The Editorial Board is composed of renowned people from across the world. Each paper is reviewed by at least two blind reviewers. We will endeavour to ensure the reputation and quality of this journal with this issue.
... This shapes how concepts of culture and difference are broadly understood and serves as a reference point for the interculturalcommonly taken as being about an ambiguously identified cultural other (Gorski, 2008;Gunew, 2004;Walton et al., 2013Walton et al., , 2018. A more productive conceptualisation of the intercultural, however is the spaces between diverse cultural groups (Dietz, 2018;Guilherme, 2015). As taken up in education, this conceptualisation positions intercultural education as understanding the relational spaces between diverse cultural groups and the conditions that constitute these relations (cf. ...
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This paper reports on Henri Lefebvre’s methodological approach of 'rhythmanalysis' as a productive tool to understand the complex social constructions of school spaces. Schooling is founded on relationships. These relationships exist in multi-directional and multi-layered ways between teachers, students, school leadership, parents and carers, the school and local community, and official Departments of Education; but also between education policy, official curriculum, and official assessment regimes; and between the material spaces of schools such as school buildings, classrooms and outdoor spaces. These relations are complex and multidimensional, and are characterised by movement. This paper reports on the methodological approach of a recent ethnographic study in a secondary school in suburban Melbourne, Australia that investigated the complex socio-spatial relations that shape teachers’ intercultural work at this school. This paper reports on the nature of relations in school spaces across three domains - conceived, perceived and lived space - and identifies the kinds of rhythms these produce. I argue that this approach enables education researchers to examine in close detail the complex and mobile nature of relations that shape teachers' work in local settings, and may better inform a situated approach to curriculum and policy development.
... The notion of "interculturality" is polysemic in literature, as its definition varies with researchers' different viewpoints (Jin, 2016). For example, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has generalised interculturality as "the existence and equitable interaction of diverse cultures and the possibility of generating shared cultural expressions through dialogue and mutual respect" (UNESCO, 2005, p. 8), while Dietz (2018) defined the term as the relations existing between culturally diverse human groups in a given society. Although it differs based on individual interpretation, interculturality generally involves the way people interact with "others" they perceive as having a different culture. ...
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Recent researchers and educators have suggested a renewed understanding for "culture" in order to transcend the essentialist perceptions that are deeply entrenched in intercultural education. This study adopted a critical, realistic liquid framework of interculturality to investigate how a group of foreign language teachers perceive and practise the content of culture and interculturality in a Chinese university. The study was conducted in a narrative inquiry style, in which interviews and journal entries were employed to collect data, and thematic and discourse analysis were combined to examine them. The data show that teachers’ understandings of cultures can be contradictory and manipulative, oscillating between simple and complex stances; despite some shortcomings, teachers are able to build a reflexivity in intercultural education classrooms, reflecting on issues related to diversity, equality and justice and taking actions in a socially responsible way. These results affirm the value of liquid interculturality as a framework for researchers to better examine teachers’ understandings in intercultural classrooms, and offer some feasible suggestions for educators to develop a critical awareness of cultural diversity and promote reflexive practices in the future.
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This study critically addresses key issues related to interculturality among young language learners, focusing on an international primary school in Shenzhen, China. Interculturality is framed from a non-essentialist perspective, emphasizing the dynamic and reciprocal negotiation of meaning between individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds. The research explores how intercultural understanding can be cultivated through interactive pedagogical strategies such as storytelling and storycrafting, which facilitate both language learning and cultural exchange. The study highlights the unique characteristics of young learners, noting that their innate curiosity and active engagement make them well-suited to these approaches. Additionally, it examines the practical challenges of integrating intercultural encounters into language education, including the need for specialized teacher training and the complexity of managing diverse linguistic backgrounds. The study concludes that fostering interculturality in young learners requires a shift from traditional cultural instruction to engaging students in authentic, interactive experiences. These approaches not only enhance language acquisition but also promote deeper intercultural understanding and prepare students for global citizenship.
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La crisis que enfrenta Venezuela ha provocado que miles de personas migren fuera del país, incluidos niños y adolescentes en edad escolar. Este artículo, desde el enfoque teórico de la integración y los imaginarios sociales, analiza los elementos que estudiantes venezolanos de primaria y secundaria en Colombia identifican como fundamentales para su integración en el ámbito educativo. Mediante un método cualitativo de tipo exploratorio, se realizaron ocho grupos focales con estudiantes de los colegios Orlando Higuita Rojas y San Cayetano de Bogotá y Camilo Daza de Cúcuta. La investigación permite identificar cómo a pesar de la discriminación que afecta la integración, el compromiso académico de los estudiantes persiste, en un escenario que requiere diálogos permanentes para asegurar la participación y los derechos de los estudiantes.
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In today’s rapidly changing multicultural world characterized by numerous challenges ranging from geopolitical tensions and interreligious conflicts to environmental degradation, it is imperative to have a paradigm of cultural interaction that promotes social and environmental sustainability. Interculturality has emerged as a relevant framework for addressing these challenges. This paper explores the potential of interculturality to contribute to a more sustainable future by integrating social and ecological dimensions embedded in the paradigm. Therefore, this paper sets out to address the following: (1) Present the concept of interculturality and its relevance to the contemporary milieu; (2) Discuss the contribution of interculturality to promoting social sustainability; (3) Discuss the relationship between culture and nature; and (4) Discuss the potential of interculturality to contribute to environmental sustainability. This paper contributes to ongoing discourse on interculturality by demonstrating not only its relevance to social sustainability but also its implications for environmental sustainability, including raising awareness about the impact of development on culturally significant natural areas, protecting indigenous communities’ rights, and valuing diverse cultural practices for biodiversity management, ultimately contributing to a more sustainable and inclusive society that values all cultures.
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Resumen. La migración es un fenómeno inherente a la especie humana, que en los últimos años se ha intensificado, producto de cambios demográficos, económicos y políticos, desencadenando desafíos sociales en diferentes ámbitos, siendo uno de ellos el educa-tivo. En una sociedad donde confluyen personas con diferentes referentes culturales, la reflexión apunta a como los profesores se preparan para atender y convivir en las aulas con esta diversidad cultural. Con el objeto de examinar la comprensión que tienen los formadores universitarios de profesores de Educación Física sobre la interculturalidad, se diseñó un estudio descriptivo/interpretativo, para indagar acerca de cómo comprenden la interculturalidad en la formación y cuáles son sus determinantes al momento de formar nuevos profesores. Se aplicó una entrevista semiestructurada a ocho académicos de una universidad del centro sur de Chile, que forma profesores de Educación Física hace más de 50 años. Se logra identificar que la formación inicial docente de estos profesores debe considerar el desarrollo de competencias interculturales individuales y relacionales, en donde se reconozca al otro en una interacción entre culturas, para lo cual se requiere una renovación paradigmática, reconocimiento y valoración de la diversidad, bajo ciertas con-diciones de implementación. La instalación de estos procesos requiere una adecuación cultural, más allá de manifestaciones folclóricas y culinarias. Se reconocen determinantes en líneas social, normativa, formativa y paradigmática. En conclusión, los formadores de profesores de Educación Física reconocen el potencial de la interculturalidad, la necesidad de incorporarla en la formación. Sin embargo , no se encuentran preparados para su implementación. Palabras clave: interculturalidad, educación física, claustro, formación inicial de profesores, migración Abstract. Migration is a permanent phenomenon in the human species, which in recent years, has intensified as a result of demographic , economic and political changes, triggering social challenges in different areas, one of them being education. In a society, where people with different cultural references converge, the reflection turns to how teachers are prepared to attend and coexist in the classroom with this cultural diversity. To examine the understanding that faculty members, who prepare future Physical Education teachers, have about interculturality, a descriptive/interpretative study was designed to inquire about how they understand intercul-turality and its determinants when training future teachers. A semi-structured interview was conducted to eight faculty members from a university in the south-central part of Chile, which has been training Physical Education teachers for more than 50 years. It is possible to identify that the initial teacher training process must consider individual and relational intercultural competences, where the other is recognized in an interaction between cultures. This requires paradigmatic renewal, recognition and appreciation of diversity under certain conditions of implementation. The installation of these processes requires a cultural adaptation, extending beyond folkloric and culinary manifestations. Determinants are recognized along social, normative, formative and paradigmatic lines. In conclusion, the Physical Education faculty recognizes the potential of interculturality and the need to incorporate it into training. However, they are not prepared for its implementation. Introducción La Agenda 2030 para el Desarrollo Sostenible reconoce la necesidad de conducir hacia una migración que permita la inclusión y maximizar las oportunidades de movilidad social de todas y todos, destacando la contribución positiva de los migrantes a este desarrollo (Organización Internacional para las Migraciones [OIM], 2022). En esencia, los Objeti-vos para el Desarrollo Sostenible (ODS) estimulan y pro-mueven la búsqueda del bienestar común de todos los habi-tantes del planeta, independiente del origen, residencia y condición social. Complementariamente, desde la Organización para la Cooperación y el Desarrollo Económicos (OCDE) surge la necesidad de reconocer aquellas competencias que permi-tan a los profesionales la generación de prosperidad y la pro-moción de la inclusión social como ejes de desarrollo (Sch-leicher, 2019). El mismo autor establece que para esto, la profesión docente debe ser reforzada para idear entornos de aprendizaje innovadores y nutritivos, modificando y actua-lizando las prácticas pedagógicas, las que deben desarro-llarse desde la formación inicial docente. De acuerdo a los datos de la OIM (2022) existen 281 millones de migrantes internacionales. Chile no está ajeno a esta realidad migratoria, si bien ha recibido migración por siglos, es en los últimos años en que el fenómeno se inten-sifica (Sumonte et al., 2019; Médor et al., 2022; Carter-Thuillier et al., 2022). Lo anterior debido a que en unos pocos años subió de un 2,6% (Encuesta de Caracterización Socioeconómica Nacional [CASEN], 2016) a un 7,9% (Ins-tituto Nacional de Estadística y Departamento de Extranje-ría y Migración [INE-DEM], 2022). En relación a la Región del Maule, donde se realiza este estudio, los tres países que registran mayor presencia son Venezuela con un 36,3%, Haití 34,9% y Colombia 6,7%. El porcentaje de migrantes en esta región se encuentra en 5° lugar, con un 2,8%, 41.173 personas (INE-DEM, 2022). De ellos el 56,5% son hombres y el 43,5% mujeres. Se destaca de esta migración en el Maule que, el 64,4% tiene entre 25 y 44 años, el más
Chapter
This empirically based chapter investigates how higher education students from a Colombian university explore the meaning and construction of third spaces in the development of their intercultural awareness and competence. Based on a narrative, critical-incident approach, a group of 14 undergraduates analyzed their real intercultural encounters. These narratives and subsequent semi-structured interviews led to important findings. For the most part, when confronted with critical incidents, students opted for proactive participation and engagement in third spaces. Some frequent strategies addressed unveiling conflict, establishing dialogue, valuing knowledge co-production, propitiating active listening, (re)accommodating power relations, and revisiting how one's cultural identity and that of others are (re)shaped in a transitory relationship that could lead to the strengthening of intercultural competence. Students advocate for critical incident analysis and how it can be applied as extended knowledge in future intercultural encounters and in their own intercultural growth.
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In comparative education, words like ‘culture’ and ‘foreign’ are used often early on to determine issues, but they soon become subjected to individual national contexts. The world is then professionally sliced into bits of ‘area expertise’. Wonderment at the multiple cultures of the world diminishes. In the post-war reconstruction period especially after 1950, theoretical work in comparative education did not retain the potentials of ‘multiculturality’ and ‘interculturality’ as crucial concerns. Thus, the strategic theme of this article is an analysis of what we lost and why and what is being overlooked in the dominant agenda of attention in comparative education such as majority-minority power relations in the politics of representation, transnational space for diasporas, competing worldviews, and epistemological hegemony. Overall, we need to assess what it is we are not-seeing. We also need to reflect on the ethics of comparative education, lest we become satisfied with being routinely relevant for practical policy and delivering ‘robust and relevant research’. We should ask, relevant for whom and relevant to what?; and what might a closer relationship between comparative education and intercultural education imply for some ‘futures’ of ‘comparative education’?
Article
This article reviews issues of substance and perspective on global debates that have evolved from those evident at foundational, pre-IALIC foundational conferences in Leeds to those at the online IALIC 2021 Conference, organised by the Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá. Focusing mainly on the latter event, the article proceeds by analysing some of the perceptions of interculturality in South America while spotlighting the contributions of native communities in their evolving contexts. The author concludes by acknowledging that the ‘South’ is talking back and that the inter-epistemic exchange between plurilingual academics, including community researchers, stimulates global debates and addresses local challenges.
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This book examines the relationship between two policy approaches for managing the cultural diversity of contemporary societies: interculturalism and multiculturalism. The relationship between these two approaches has been a matter of intense debate in recent years. Some commentators argue that they represent two very different approaches, while others argue that interculturalism merely re-emphasises some of the core elements of present-day multiculturalism. The debate arises, in part, because multiculturalism can take a variety of different forms, which makes it difficult to identify its key features in order to compare it with interculturalism. The debate has gained added momentum from the backlash against multiculturalism in recent years, and from the Council of Europe’s prominent championing of interculturalism as an alternative approach. This book aims to clarify the concepts of interculturalism and multiculturalism, and to bring the various arguments together in a way that will assist politicians, policymakers, practitioners and interested lay people to understand the concerns that are driving the different orientations. The book is also intended to facilitate a comparison of the policy implications of interculturalism and multiculturalism. To this end, each chapter concludes with a concise statement of the implications for policy that follow from the viewpoint that has been expressed.
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Interculturality is a notion that has come to dominate the debate on cultural diversity among supranational bodies such as the European Union (EU) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in recent years. The EU goes so far as to identify interculturality as a key cultural and linguistic characteristic of a union which, it argues, acts as an inspiration to other parts of the world. At the same time, the very notion of interculturality is a core component of indigenous movements in the Andean region of Latin America in their struggles for decolonization. Every bit as contingent as any other concept, it is apparent that several translations of interculturality are simultaneously in play. Through interviews with students and teachers in a course on interculturality run by indigenous alliances, my aim in this essay is to study how the notion is translated in the sociopolitical context of the Andes. With reference points drawn from the works of Walter Mignolo and the concept of delinking, I will engage in a discussion about the potential for interculturality to break out of the prison-house of colonial vocabulary – modernization, progress and salvation – that lingers on in official memory. Engagement in such an interchange of experiences, memories and significations provides not only recognition of other forms of subjectivity, knowledge systems and visions of the future, but also a possible contribution to an understanding of how any attempt to invoke a universal reach for interculturality, as in the case of the EU and UNESCO, risks echoing the imperial order that the notion in another context attempts to overcome.
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The birthplace of the nation-state and modern nationalism at the end of the eighteenth century, Europe was supposed to be their graveyard at the end of the twentieth. Yet, far from moving beyond the nation-state, fin-de-siècle Europe has been moving back to the nation-state, most spectacularly with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia into a score of nationally defined successor states. This massive reorganisation of political space along national lines has engendered distinctive, dynamically interlocking, and in some cases explosive forms of nationalism. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu and the 'new institutionalist' sociology, and comparing contemporary nationalisms with those of interwar Europe, Rogers Brubaker provides a theoretically sophisticated and historically rich account of one of the most important problems facing the 'New Europe'.
Article
Contrary to liberal evolutionary expectations, the world has witnessed a resurgence of ethnic conflicts and nationalist movements since the end of the Cold War. Though it calls into question theories of the demise of nations and nationalism, this revival should not be interpreted as a throwback to earlier nationalisms or a passing phenomenon. Rather, it is one of many resurgences since the French Revolution and it demonstrates once again the power of the resources and trends which reproduce a world of nations and nationalism. These resources include: the uneven distribution of ethno-history and memories of golden ages; the politicization of myths of ethnic election and covenant which inspire peoples with a sense of renewal and glorious destiny; and the power of territorial attachments to ancestral homelands and sacred sites. Even ethnic categories and communities that lack some of these 'deep resources' are stimulated to rediscover or acquire them by the example of influential neighbours. Though the timing of the current ethnic revival is a function of social and geopolitical changes, their contents and intensities are largely determined by preexisting ethno-symbolic resources.