Intercultural polyphonies against the ‘death of multiculturalism’: Concepts, practices and dialogues

Abstract

This chapter approaches intercultural competence and the concept of interculturalism as movement, communication, dynamics, with the purpose of discussing their pragmatic consequences in academia and society. I propose to examine the motivations, strategies and regulations of cultural interactions, in their perpetual movement, devoid of spatial or temporal borders, in a dangerous but stimulating indefinition of limits.In contemporary cultural diversity, past and present, global and local, converge in the analysis of concepts and objects closely related to ongoing political, economic, social and cultural transformations. Scientific research is also an area of intersections, of permanent cultural translation, that is, of reinterpretation, of repositioning of symbols and signs within existing hierarchies. This reflection on intercultural competence favours contextualized interpretations that, in their uncertainty, are likely to produce new hypotheses, theories and explanations.The concept of interculturalism is compared to the concept of multiculturalism, frequently analysed under an ontological approach, as an existing or desired social reality, and widely subjected to a political-ideological study. Conversely, interculturalism is a hermeneutic option, an epistemological approach. There are political implications when distinguishing multiculturalism from interculturalism, which undermine the essentialist tendency of multiculturalism, by building a perception of connection, interaction and hybridism.Intercultural competence is to be practised both ‘at home’ and abroad, since its scope may encompass the relations between geographically distant cultures, as much as between marginal and mainstream, youth and senior, rich and poor, erudite and popular cultures, all within the same society. It is then possible to understand the diversity of human experience as well as the risk it faces of-due to the limits and exclusions imposed by isolated areas of knowledge-wasting fundamental experience. The concept of interculturalism used here is a palimpsest, an intertextuality with other discourses and texts from the past and the present, that will, in turn, be used in future discourses and texts, in permanent translation.