Gunther Dietz

Difference in diversity: multiple perspectives on multicultural, intercultural, and transcultural conceptual complexities

This text undertakes an analysis of three concepts, namely ‘multiculturalism,’ ‘interculturality,’ and ‘the transcultural,’ which are scrutinized and discussed in their potential for explaining the wider scope of inequality, difference, and diversity as developed in perspectives of different north-south conceptual frameworks. The discussion draws from recently published or other made public sources from different academic and cultural traditions and, therefore, it maps different perspectives and uses of these terms. They have lately been made ubiquitous in the academic and social discourse and are often used indiscriminately. In fact, it is impossible to establish fixed and stable lines between them since they form a complex web of meanings that, to some extent, may crisscross each other. However, it is feasible, for the purpose of deeper scientific accurateness, to identify layers and regions of meaning for each of one of them and this is what this article attempts to do, against a backdrop of different types of colonialism, both from the perspective of the colonized and the colonizers, as well as against a backdrop of a north/south-south/north metaphor. The conceptual discussion on which this article relies is based upon two large projects in Latin America involving various types of higher education institutions.

Hacia una etnografía doblemente reflexiva: Una propuesta desde la antropología de la interculturalidad

Partiendo del debate actual sobre la metodologia etnografica en antropologia, este trabajo analiza como en el proceso de interculturalizacion educativa surgen nuevas opciones metodologicas y como estas pueden retroalimentar, rejuvenecer y descolonizar la clasica etnografia antropologica. El contraste entre una antropologia postmoderna y de tendencia “academicista”, por un lado, y una etnografia activista y militante, por otro, revela posibilidades de complementar fructiferamente el compromiso social y politico con el canon clasico de la etnografia, lo cual aqui demostramos para el ambito de los estudios interculturales y lo que se esta dando por llamar la naciente antropologia de la interculturalidad. La resultante “etnografia doblemente reflexiva” completa la concatenacion de perspectivas emic y etic con una perspectiva dialectica y estructural emic-etic, que es particularmente aplicable al estudio de instituciones y organizaciones, cuyos actores co-refl exionan sobre el mismo proceso de investigacion junto con el/la antropologo/a. Esta propuesta desemboca por ultimo en un modelo heuristico tridimensional que concatena dimensiones semanticas, pragmaticas y sintacticas del quehacer etnografi co y que es particularmente util en contextos “inter-culturales”, “inter-lingues” e “inter-actorales”.

Diversity Regimes Beyond Multiculturalism? A Reflexive Ethnography of Intercultural Higher Education in Veracruz, Mexico

As part of the Mexican educational system, the subsystem of intercultural higher education seeks to provide a culturally sensitive academic formation for students defined as ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse. In practice, it focuses on students from indigenous areas, who have been historically excluded from formal education. Todays ‘intercultural universities’ represent a new kind of educational diversity regime. Examining the case of the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural (UVI), this paper shows that these new institutions, while still rooted in traditional indigenista orientations, are beginning to transcend them by targeting diversity in a more complex way that involves strategies to mainstream diversity, recognize difference and counter historically rooted inequalities and asymmetries. This study presents preliminary results of InterSaberes, an ethnographic research project that collects, compares and systematizes the diversity of knowledges and skills being generated in the teaching and non-teaching contexts of the UVI programs. Fieldwork materials are used to analyze how knowledge diversity and diverse ways of knowing are being constructed, managed, intertwined, exchanged and perceived, in the process of ‘interculturalizing’ higher education.

Under the shadow of Al‐Andalus? Spanish teenagers’ attitudes and experiences with religious diversity at school

Religious education (RE) is a persistently ‘hot topic’ in contemporary Spain. Although nominally Catholic, majority Spanish society tends to be sharply divided with regard to the issue of religion in education: more conservative and Church‐attending parents approve of the still overwhelming presence of Catholic teachers, trained and chosen by the Catholic Church, who teach (confessional Catholic) religion in both public and confessional primary and secondary schools. More liberal or progressive parents reject this ‘intrusion’ of the Church as reminiscent of ‘national Catholicism’ and favour a strict state–Church separation similar to the French laicité model. This bipolar conflict has become more complex recently. The current dynamics of pluralisation of confessional RE at school, which is currently being implemented in several pilot primary schools in districts with high percentages of Muslim (particularly Maghrebien) as well as Protestant (increasingly Latin American) immigrants, meets strong resistance, not only from the Catholic Church, but also from those who struggle for a completely ‘laicist’ solution. The following analysis of qualitative and quantitative questionnaire data designed and collected in the frame of the comparative REDCo project (‘Religion in Education: a contribution to Dialogue or a factor of Conflict in transforming societies of European Countries, sixth framework programme’) presents an approach to youngsters’ attitudes and experiences with confessional RE.

The Need for Comparison in Intercultural Education.

Intercultural education has arisen in the last two decades as an intersectional field of academic knowledge and professional development, located at the borders and in the confluence of the multicultural paradigm in the social sciences, the anthropology of education, and other interdisciplinary subfields commonly known as Intercultural Studies. As will be discussed throughout this article, the thematic range represented by the broad topos of interculturality-in-education is not limited to questions about minority groups, but is closely linked to core issues of national identity and broad societal identification processes. Therefore, in order to be able to critically engage in a fruitful, truly ‘intercultural’ dialog between multicultural theorists and activists, on the one hand, and between academic and practitioners’ knowledge on diversity, we need a particularly, and constantly, self-reflexive and mutually comparative hermeneutical approach. In this way, we can avoid the traps and bridge the biases of the underlying, but omnipresent, self-fulfilling, and self-essentializing identity discourses in broader national society as a whole.

Transmigrant families: intercultural and bilingual competences development

This article presents the results of a research project concerned with analysing and identifying the discourses and related strategies used by Spanish–German trans‐migrant families to support and develop bilingual and intercultural competences stemming from their transmigratory experiences. Using the biographical‐narrative approach, we reconstruct the families’ migratory phases, emphasising shifting parental discourses on bilingual practices and intercultural competences in the home. After presenting the analysed empirical data, the results obtained are grouped into four broader intrepretative frameworks: bilingual practice, life‐world intercultural theories, social networks and ‘cosmopolitanism’.

A doubly reflexive ethnographic methodology for the study of religious diversity in education

The fruitful and intensive political, academic, and pedagogical debate on religious education in contexts of diversity seems, to suffer from an ostensible imbalance. On one hand, models, proposals, and programmes destined to face the ‘challenges’ and ‘problems’ generated by religious diversity in the classroom proliferate. On the other, in many countries and school systems there is a scarcity of empirical studies about intercultural and interreligious processes and relations as they occur in the school and extra-school educational spheres. This striking gap between the normative-prescriptive and the descriptive-empirical area is a feature of educational systems, which we are trying to close with comparative projects such as the REDCo project (Religion in Education: A Contribution to Dialogue or a Factor of Conflict Transforming Societies of European Countries, a European FP6 STRP project). In order for the distinctively anthropological attitude not to be limited to a criticism of the often essentialising and reifying conceptual and ideological uses of the concepts of ‘religion’, ‘culture’ and/or ‘identity’ in this domain, I hold that ethnography can contribute to overcoming this gap by empirically analysing the interwoven and often dialectic relationship between the discourses of the pedagogical-intellectual sphere and daily educational praxis. In the following pages, summarising experience gained particularly in the Spanish REDCo project contribution, I analyse, from a methodological point of view, ethnography’s possible contribution to the study of interreligious relations in school contexts. In order to do this, I present and discuss the elements required to develop a conceptual-methodological model that can integrate ‘syntactic’, ‘semantic’, and ‘pragmatic’ dimensions that will articulate this dialectic relationship between ethnic discourses and cultural practices.

Winds of the South: Intercultural university models for the 21st century

This issue of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education focuses on innovative initiatives which are emerging in different Latin-American university contexts as well as a few other experiments in traditionally established universities. Sometimes these initiatives are newly created higher education institutions that are rooted inside indigenous regions, in other cases conventional universities start to “interculturalize” their student population, their teaching staff, or even their curricular contents and methods. Despite certain criticisms, community leaders frequently claim and celebrate the appearance of these new higher education opportunities as part of a strategy of empowering ethnic actors of indigenous or afro-descendant origin. After an interview to Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Laura Selene Mateos Cortés, and Gunther Dietz, analyze the different ways in which the Mexican intercultural education subsystem conceives “interculturalidad.” The next article, by Guillermo Williamson, also “expresses interculturality polyphonically from the Latin-American perspective” and reports “the nature and condition of the academic reflection on interculturality carried out in universities, in supposedly intercultural contexts.” Then, Carlos Octavio Sandoval brings the focus back to Mexico and the Intercultural University of Veracruz; in the article that follows, Isabel Dulfano explores the relationship between antiglobalization, counterhegemonic discourse, and indigenous feminist alternative knowledge production. She bases her article on the autoethnographic writing of some Indigenous feminists from Latin America that questions the assumptions and presuppositions of Western development models and globalization, while asserting an identity as contemporary Indigenous activist academic women. Christine D. Beaule and Benito Quintana’s article adds to the topic of this special issue with the argument of interdisciplinarity bringing together both an archaeological and anthropological perspectives of indigeneity to the higher education classroom. And finally, Catherine Manathunga focuses on the issue of intercultural doctoral supervision.

Local resignifications of transnational discourses in intercultural higher education: The case of the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural in Mexico

Our main objective is to analyze the different ways in which people involved in the Mexican intercultural education subsystem conceive interculturality. This subsystem is still emerging and we refer to the specific case of Veracruz. We point out the discursive elements implied in the construction of definitions as well as the linguistic screens generated by actors and institutions. How are significations, translations and adaptations in intercultural education models changed when passing from a European “migrant” context to a Mexican indigenous one? Through an ethnography of intercultural discourses, we analyze the way in which Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural teachers of its campus Selvas produce alternative discourses, which are critical toward exogenous interculturality and focused on empowering local subaltern subjects.

Interview to Boaventura de Sousa Santos

In this interview, Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos addresses, on the one hand, the process of transnationalisation of universities and the neoliberalisation of the classical model of the European university. On the other hand, he stresses that the recognition of difference and internal pluralism of science, which have pervaded the universities during the last decades, is now losing steam. However, he believes that the emergence of the Epistemologies of the South he proposes may contribute to the re-foundation of a new university more suited to the ethos of the 21st century, since the reconstruction or reinvention of confrontational politics requires an epistemological transformation. Therefore, he proposes a new, polyphonic university (or better, pluriversity) as this epistemological transformation unfolds. This means that the political alliances of the future will have an epistemological dimension characterized by an articulation or combination of different and differently relevant kinds of knowledge.