Any culture is, basically, multicultural and builds itself thanks to the contact between various communities of life which bring their ways of thinking, to feel and act. It is obvious that the cultural exchanges do not produce all the same effects nor consequences, but it is starting from these contacts that the cultural interbreeding and cultural hybridization will occur... .
A culture can evolve/move only thanks to the contact with other cultures, but this last can be considered in various ways. The bet for Interculturality it is the bet for the meeting and the respect. Interculturality, indeed, supposes the existence of a relation between the people who belong to the various cultural groups, it is a concept fuller than the simple fact “multicultural”. However, speech of intercultural relations is a redundancy: the interculturality implies, by definition, interaction.
There are not cultures better or worse than of others. In certain contexts, each one of cultures can to have impression to find in situation of discrimination, but if we accept that there is no hierarchy between them, we recognize that all the cultures are worthy deserve the respect of the others there, on the same level. That means, in addition, that the only manner of correctly including/understanding another culture, it is to interpret its demonstrations in agreement with its own cultural criteria.
That should not prevent us from exerting our right to criticism: it is good, however not to precipitate and try to include/understand all symbolic system complexity of many cultural practices. It is a question of trying to moderate the inevitable ethnocentrism which makes us interpret the cultural practices which are strange for us, starting from criteria of our own culture.
Fragments of text extracted from
La comunicación intercultural de Miquel Rodrigo Alsina
