Beyond factual knowledge and symbolic competence: interculturality as transcultural intersubjectivity

Théophile Ambadiang Omengele

doi:10.21049/ccs.2010.20..295

The trend of globalization has sharpened the debate on interculturality, which scholars examine from different and often conflicting points of view (‘content’ vs. ‘practice’, ‘culture-specific’ vs. ‘universal’, ‘communication (meta)theory’ vs. ‘communication practice’, ‘individual’ vs. ‘collective’, etc.). Whereas all these approaches are necessary to describe the multiple dimensions of interculturality, their dichotomous nature does not help to account for its internal complexity, which cannot be dissociated from the connections that exist among all these dimensions. The difficulty posed by the essentialist interpretations that tend to result from these dichotomies is compounded by the fact that in postmodern debates priority has been given to approaches that emphasize individual or collective agency over structural constraints which have to do with political economy or with cultural and linguistic codes and traditions. This paper aims mainly at suggesting that the dissolution of the boundaries that exist between these approaches should be pursued in order to get a fuller and richer approach to their common object of study. After discussing, by way of illustration, content-based and practice-based perspectives, we suggest that one way of getting beyond these dichotomies consists in focusing on the ‘interactional’ dimension of interculturality, which means laying emphasis on intersubjectivity and, particularly, on the individual subjects considered as members of different cultural communities who strive to transcend their sociocultural boundaries in order to reach harmonious interactions in a world in which inequality and the de-territorialization of people and cultures are central features.

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* 2022년 이후 발행 논문의 참고문헌은 현재 구축 중입니다.

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