Ana Marta González and Ines Olza, Academic Leaders of the Experts Meeting “Accessing the Public Space through Intercultural Mediation: Challenges in a Changing World,” expand on the meeting’s purpose and the manner in which each presentation contributed to a comprehensive understanding of the relevant issues.
At the origin of this workshop is the idea of exploring ways to address the challenges of social integration posed by cultural diversity. Specifically, we chose to focus on unequal access to public space for people from diverse cultures; under that umbrella, we sought to analyze the circumstances in which the use of intercultural mediation makes a significant difference for these people’s achievement of fully operationalized knowledge, habits and opportunities associated with the exercise of citizenship.
Addressing this specific objective, however, requires reflection on the nature of cultural differences and their role in social dynamics, both at the personal and the institutional levels. Such reflection becomes particularly urgent when the dynamics of conflict seem to be installed in the public sphere.
As Shapira points out, culture represents a dimension of every human encounter, not just the ones associated with conflict; in fact, not all conflicts involving culturally diverse individuals deserve to be classified as cultural conflicts. While cultural diversity can cause poor mutual understanding, very often the source of the conflict lies elsewhere, for example, in opposing material interests.
Nevertheless, in certain circumstances and when involving different groups that make identity claims, the cultural factor may be the root cause of an ordinary conflict of interests that escalates to the wider socio-political level. This possibility increases if communication in the public sphere is dominated by a dynamic of conflict and mistrust. In different ways, Kurilla and Yasmin have pointed to the problems raised by media communication in this polarized milieu.
It is in this precise context that resort to mediation acquires particular relevance. Indeed, although, as Marques suggests, there is a risk that the very practice of inter-cultural mediation may contribute to the consolidation of the cultural other’s otherness, there is also a significantly large risk that, in absence of a true mediation that helps to dispel possible misunderstandings and to facilitate human encounters, social media and other platforms for mainstream communication will keep nurturing a simplistic dynamic of “us vs. them” through the perpetuation of cultural stereotypes. In Shapira’s words, “Inter-cultural mediators must strive to help parties to a conflict see each other as they are, rather than as members or representatives of a group.”
Indeed, recognizing the cultural dimension of human life, both at the individual and the social levels, is different from making people a simple part of a more or less idealized “cultural whole.” The reality proper to each person is not exhausted with mere cultural categories, or with any sociological category for that matter. Doing justice to each person’s irreducible character requires avoiding what Margaret S. Archer calls the “myth of cultural integration.”1
On the other hand, focus on communication processes should not obscure the fact that the social structure might elicit or foster some cultural conflicts. As Kurilla points out, online media platforms are not the only medium that may be designed to encourage conflictive interactions; even legislation, as Seligman notes, may be framed or interpreted in such a way that, while claiming to protect individual rights, actually provokes the alienation of entire groups. The tension he depicts between abstract approaches to human rights and the need for cultural belonging represents an ethical challenge that cannot be resolved in the abstract; rather, it requires the specific involvement of committed individuals able to walk a mediating path between the universal requirements of reason conveyed in abstract formulations and the embodied realization of humanity in light of particular cultural traditions. This is also what Yasmin claims when pointing to the need to develop alternate modes of public communication centered on cultural understanding and pro-active collaboration.
Yet, the challenge is not just an intellectual one. By choosing the word “magnanimity” to describe the effort to create more inclusive societies, Madsen anticipates its intrinsic moral dimension: reaching out to the other will never be the result of a “business as usual” mentality, but rather involves deliberate acts of generosity.
As a personal response, generosity is a moral quality rather than the privilege of a specific culture. People from very different backgrounds can find in their respective traditions the ethical resources to meaningfully articulate that moral regard for the other: embedded in every culture’s symbols and stories there are sufficient resources to reach out to the socially and culturally other and develop significant and practical responses to the human need for social integration.
Interested as they are in facilitating meaningful social integration, such responses do not abstract from actual social reality: they take the modern division of work into account, and respect the social role of science and politics in our world, even if they take a critical approach to existing institutions and practices. Such critique should not come as a surprise. After all, implicit in those magnanimous responses is the fact that merely legalistic or institutional approaches are entirely insufficient to deal with the truly moral challenge that neighboring others present to us.
Yet, the social critique implicit in magnanimous behavior is not only nor mainly a negative one. By going beyond what is legally required, by facilitating truly human encounters, magnanimous people not only point to the need to expand our ordinary ethical landscape beyond routine and conventional assumptions, they also show how tradition may become a source of ethical progress and cultural innovation. As endowed with reason, and thus, as intrinsically moral beings, “human beings do not merely enact or reproduce existing cultural norms, but interpret them, negotiate with them, recreate them, whenever confronted with different situations.” In doing so, they show that the vitality of any culture lies in its “ability to inspire spontaneous cultural change from within… and make sense of the world at hand.”2
The meeting sessions gave us the opportunity to discuss each participant’s contribution, as well as to broaden, or even significantly correct, the picture that we have attempted to paint here. The published volume, due out by the summer of 2023 from Routledge Focus, will reflect this interdisciplinary debate.
———–
1 Archer, M. S. Culture and Agency. The place of culture in social theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988
2 González, A. M. “Cultural exclusión and civil society,” in Pierpaolo Donati (ed.) Towards a Participatory Society: New Roads to Social and Cultural Integration. The Proceedings of the 21th Plenary Session 28 April – 2 May 2017, Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2018, 177-200.
