Keywords 关键词

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
这些关键字是机器添加的,而不是作者添加的。这个过程是实验性的,关键字可能会随着学习算法的改进而更新。

Like any contemporary phenomenon, interculturality is a narrative that contains many imaginaries. In this section I have selected five myths that are often heard in relation to interculturality in educational contexts. One of the objectives of intercultural education should be to discuss and revise these myths.
与任何当代现象一样,跨文化性是一种包含许多想象的叙事。在本节中,我选择了五个经常听到的与教育背景下的跨文化性相关的神话。跨文化教育的目标之一应该是讨论和修正这些神话。

Let me start this section with a short discussion about the concept of imaginary which has been dealt with by many scholars and thinkers. They all start from the argument that sociality is not just based on the modern ideal of reason but also on imagination. In his work on religion as a social phenomenon, the father of sociology, Emile Durkheim (1912/1995) suggested that societies exist thanks to the sharing of symbolic forms that enable people to form collectivities. He also argued (ibid.) that this leads to ‘collective effervescence’ which serves to endorse social bonds. Although he did not refer to the word imaginary, I feel that these forms and especially collective effervescence correspond to the concept. In the 2010s imaginaries are glocal (global + local) rather than local.
让我在本节开始时对许多学者和思想家已经讨论过的虚数概念进行简短的讨论。它们都是从这样的论点开始的:社会性不仅基于现代理性理想,而且还基于想象力。社会学之父埃米尔·涂尔干(Emile Durkheim,1912/ 1995 )在其关于宗教作为一种社会现象的著作中提出,社会的存在得益于符号形式的共享,这些符号形式使人们能够形成集体。他还认为(同上)这会导致“集体兴奋”,从而有助于支持社会纽带。尽管他没有提到“想象”这个词,但我觉得这些形式,尤其是集体的兴奋与这个概念相对应。在 2010 年代,想象是全球本地化(全球 + 本地)而不是本地化。

Definitions of the imaginary tend to share similarities. For Cornelius Castoriadis (1987), the imaginary corresponds to common and unifying core conceptions. In a similar vein, Charles Taylor (2004) sees imaginaries as widely shared implicit cognitive schemas. He defines them as ‘the ways that people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’ (ibid.: 32). The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1977) added an interesting dimension to the imaginary: He sees it as a fantasy created in response to psychological needs. Thus, while imaginaries tend to be ‘conditioning’, ‘discursive structures’, or ‘templates’ that ‘generate(s) a sense of identity and inclusiveness between the members of a community’ for some scholars (González-Vélez 2002: 349), for others, imaginaries represent the oxymoron of a ‘dynamic substrate’, that is, background imaginaries that are constantly changing (Maffesoli 1993). Salazar’s (2012: 865) conceptualization of imaginaries is most useful in defining imaginaries. For the anthropologist, they are ‘socially transmitted representational assemblages that interact with people’s personal imaginings and are used as meaning-making and world-shaping devices’. Imaginaries are thus constructed, expressed and negotiated between self and other—they are thus both stable and unstable. Although I agree with Rivzi (2011: 228) that the imaginary ‘describes a social phenomenon that is tacit and unconscious, and is adhered to by a group of people in an unreflexive manner’ in some contexts, people can be hyper-reflexive and critical about their own imaginaries.
想象的定义往往有相似之处。对于 Cornelius Castoriadis ( 1987 ) 来说,想象对应于共同且统一的核心概念。同样,查尔斯·泰勒(Charles Taylor, 2004 )将想象视为广泛共享的隐性认知图式。他将它们定义为“人们想象自己社会存在的方式,他们如何与他人相处,他们与同伴之间的事情如何进行,通常会得到满足的期望,以及这些期望背后更深层次的规范概念和形象” (同上:32)。精神分析学家雅克·拉康(Jacques Lacan, 1977 )为想象添加了一个有趣的维度:他认为这是为了回应心理需求而创造的幻想。因此,对于一些学者来说,想象往往是“条件”、“话语结构”或“模板”,“在社区成员之间产生一种认同感和包容性”(González-Vélez 2002 :349) ,对于其他人来说,虚数代表了“动态基底”的矛盾修辞,即不断变化的背景虚数(Maffesoli 1993 )。萨拉查(Salazar, 2012 :865)的虚数概念化对于定义虚数最为有用。对于人类学家来说,它们是“社会传播的表征组合,与人们的个人想象相互作用,并被用作意义创造和塑造世界的工具”。想象就这样在自我和他人之间构建、表达和协商——因此它们既稳定又不稳定。 尽管我同意里夫兹(Rivzi, 2011 :228)的观点,即想象在某些情况下“描述了一种默契和无意识的社会现象,并被一群人以不自觉的方式所遵循”,但人们可能会过度反思和批判关于他们自己的想象。

Globalization is Not New 全球化并不新鲜

This first subsection interrogates the idea of globalization and discusses the fruitful concept of glocalization (local + global). The section argues that globalization is far from new and that the kind of globalization that we are currently experiencing derives directly from other historical waves of globalization. For Amselle (2001: 35) all societies have always interacted with each other (even when they refused to). Often, people talk about globalization as if it is a particularity of our era. Many historians and anthropologists show otherwise (Subrahmanyam 2011). J. N. Pieterse (2004) gives the following historical examples:
第一小节探讨了全球化的概念,并讨论了富有成果的全球本地化(本地+全球)概念。本节认为,全球化远非新鲜事,我们目前正在经历的全球化直接源于其他历史性的全球化浪潮。对于阿姆塞尔(Amselle, 2001 :35)来说,所有社会总是相互互动(即使他们拒绝这样做)。人们常常谈论全球化,就好像它是我们这个时代的特殊性一样。许多历史学家和人类学家的看法并非如此(Subrahmanyam 2011 )。 JN Pieterse( 2004 )给出了以下历史例子:

  • The ancient population movements across and between continents.

  • Long-distance, cross-cultural trade.

  • The ‘world religions’ (Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam).

  • The diffusion of technologies (military technologies, numeracy, literacy, sciences, and the invention of ‘new’ technologies).

What differs today is of course the speed at which globalization is taking place and how it influences systematically the local—hence the word glocalization, which is sometimes used instead of globalization. Instead of being binominals, the local and the global are two sides of the same coin. McDowell (1996) uses the phrase global localism to refer to this aspect. He writes (ibid.: 38): ‘For all people… whether geographically stable or mobile, most social relations take place locally, in a place, but a place which is open to ideas and messages, to visitors and migrants, to tastes, foods, goods and experiences to a previously unprecedented extent.’

The famous idea of ‘the clash of civilizations’ as put forward by S. Huntington (1996) has been harshly criticized for ignoring this aspect of globalization. In his book entitled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, the political scientist argues that cultures and religions would be the main source of conflict after the Cold War. In the book, the author divided the world into neatly arranged civilizations (Western, Latin American, Orthodox, Eastern, Muslim, and so on). Scholars and thinkers such as Edward Said and Amartya Sen have issued responses to Huntington’s work. In his article ‘The Clash of Ignorance’ (2001) Said explains that Huntington’s thesis is ridiculous as it does not take into account the interdependency and interaction of different cultures (see also Appadurai 2006: 164). In a later article he even goes so far as to accuse him of being a racist and a proponent of ‘a sort of parody of Hitlerian science directed today against Arabs and Muslims’ (Said 2004: 293). For Sen (2005) the idea of a Clash of Civilizations is a dangerous intellectual simplifier. He explains:

In his famous book, The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington places India firmly in the category of ‘the Hindu civilization’. In taking this peculiar reductionist view, Huntington’s perspective has to downplay the fact that India has many more Muslims (more than 140 million – larger than the entire British and French populations put together) than any other country in the world with the exception of Indonesia and, marginally Pakistan, and that nearly every country in Huntington’s definition of the ‘Islamic civilization’ has fewer Muslims than India has. Something goes wrong here with the number-based assessment. But perhaps the difficulties in using the statistical argument lie in the nature of the argument itself.

The different waves of globalization that our world has witnessed have led to resource inequalities and power disparities (Moghaddam 2008). Today’s world is not different, and today’s glocalization plays an important role in relation to interculturality: Some people have more symbolic power than others (the Centre vs. Periphery), and so do the languages they speak (native speakers of English vs. speakers of Malay), their religion, and worldview (Protestants/Catholics vs. Muslims), and so on.

Desperately Seeking Diversity

The world is diverse, but it is not equally diverse. de Sousa Santos (2012: 241)

The word diversity (in the singular form) has been quite popular in education during the last decade, promoted by many ‘diversilogues’, ‘diversidacts’, and ‘diversicrats’ (Wood 2003: 16). Diversity has even started to contribute to imagineer (or engineer/construct imaginaries about) the world and our schools. In the Nordic countries, for example, the word is used to refer implicitly to people of certain races and religions who do not look like the imagined majority (white Christians). It is thus a politically correct notion that straitjackets some people ‘as if, without a tag, they wouldn’t be human’ (Kureishi 2005). According to Wood (2003: 2), in education, diversity refers to ‘facts’ (different skin colours, different religions, different languages) but also to hopes or wishes.

While the concept is reserved for certain strata of the population (migrants, ethnic, and religious minorities), representatives of the ‘elite’ who travel from one place to another, are labelled ‘citizens of the world’, ‘multinationals’, or even ‘cosmopolitans’. How often do we hear teachers label a refugee kid as a ‘cosmopolitan’? Probably never. How come some labels are reserved for some people? This questions the very notion of diversity: Who is diverse? What does it mean? Who is included or not in the label? Who has the power to be included or not in the label? Who has the right to reject the label for themselves? Who decides? What hides really behind the word diversity (ideologies)?

Wood (2003: 48) has already offered some answers to these questions. The word diversity is often used as:

A euphemism for one or more unnamed categories of people.

A shorthand way to refer to cultural diversity in general.

Diversity is what’s left over after specifying all the groups that have come to mind.

Cultural diversity can also be used as a compressed statement for the broader banality that the world is a big place, full of human variety.

Like the concept of culture (see Chapter 2) diversity is such a strong word that it is often made to stand for human beings. We talk about diversity in education, classroom diversity is good for children, the benefits of diversity in the classroom, and so on. But who are we talking about? Depending on the context, diversity might refer to and substitute the words immigrants, refugees, Muslims, Africans, and so on. This diversity is often at the mercy of our institutions which decide about their (level of) foreignness/strangeness, their culture, and their (heritage) language. For instance, a child whose parents were born in Taiwan but moved to the USA, and who was himself born in America, may be labelled Confucian or Asian because of his origins. The idea of diversity can thus easily lead to different kinds of problematic -isms such as West–east-ism, culturalism, linguism, religiousism, whereby the children are boxed into solid and static categories. Wood argues that diversity then leads to ‘pinning down and labelling’ (ibid.: 38).

I believe, like Peter Wood (2003), that the way we usually conceptualize diversity in education is artificial, imaginary, and concocted. Let me share an example from daily life (one could easily find similar examples in schools around the world). One day, while waiting for a flight back home to Finland, I found myself in an overcrowded waiting area full of ‘white people’ (most of them Finns?) ready to show their boarding passes to get access to the plane. On one of the walls of the room a very large piece of art depicted a group of people from around the world holding hands in harmony, with a rainbow and planet earth in the background. Typical of a multicultural patchwork of different ‘skin colours’ and ‘worldviews’ symbolizing peace and harmony, the piece of art seemed to represent a fascinating contrast to the apparent homogeneity of the crowd gathered in the waiting area. This representation of diversity is of course not recent, as it has been used in advertising, for example, since the 1990s. I started to examine the people around me: There were people of different genders, potentially straight, gay, and bisexual, rich and less rich, old and young, blondes, brunettes, purple-haired, tanned and white-skinned, quiet and noisy, healthy-looking and unhealthy-looking, and so on. Weren’t these diverse people too? How come their bodies were not then reified as signs of diversity in the piece of art like the people from India, China, or Africa in the painting? Why was diversity in the context of an airport presenting a hierarchy between skin colours/worldviews and the aforementioned markers of diversity? The contrast represented by the work of art at the airport, and its false assurance of diversity from a mostly racial and religious perspective, leads us to ask several questions: How many of the Finns present in the waiting area would actually consider themselves to be very similar to their Finnish compatriots? Would they really have much in common? Would they feel contented if one claimed that they were just ‘normal’ and ‘typical’ Finns? Would they vote for the same politicians? Would they really share the same values? The reified images of the ‘diverse’ individuals on the wall reified at the same time those waiting to board the plane… The other is said to be diverse but not the self.

I believe that by separating diversities, and fighting different battles, such hierarchies can lead to frustration, ignorance, patronizing attitudes, and disinterest in others. Diversity needs to become diversities. There are several reasons for making this apparently rebellious suggestion. We all need to fight to be recognized, to construct respect, to face some form of rejection and discrimination, to fight against essentialism, and so on. It is of course much easier for some than others. But, in times like ours, even the powerful can find themselves in powerless positions because of some of their identities, changes in life circumstances, illnesses, and so on. Our duty is then to discuss these different forms of diversities together rather than separately. I believe this could help us thinkers, researchers, practitioners, and decision makers to sympathize and identify with these different (but yet potentially similar) diversities.

The way the very idea of diversity is approached today is thus highly problematic and biased. While the word diversity should refer to multiplicity, it often means difference and ‘oneness’. While the other is often imprisoned in the straitjackets of a homogenized ‘diversity’, the majority can freely claim to be ‘normal’, ‘not visible’ and thus not needing special attention. I agree with Wood that ‘(such conception of) diversity is a form of systematic injustice and it makes us accomplices to injustices. To treat people as objects, as though they are the residuum of their race, class, gender and other such superficialities, and not individuals who define themselves through their ideas and creative acts—that is injustice’ (2003: 4). Let me take three examples to illustrate. The first example is taken from observation notes of one of my international student teachers in Finland. She was observing a language lesson during which the teacher introduced the words for different fruit:

A lot of fruit was rather exotic—at least to a northern country—there were many food items on the word list that originated in Asia and Africa: mango, papaya and so on. What the teacher did then was to ask one of her black pupils what some of the fruit, specifically from her home country—tasted like. (…)

As a ‘good’ teacher, the educator wanted to take ‘diverse’ students into consideration in order to empower them (as she had probably been told in teacher education). The choice of the black pupil was very unfortunate. Frustrated, she told the teacher that she was born in Finland, had never been to Africa, and knew nothing about the sort of fruit that they eat ‘there’. Singling out a student was in this case—as in many cases, a biased and unjust act from the teacher.

My other example, similar to the previous one, is borrowed from Hanif Kureishi (2011: 3), a British writer, whose father was from Pakistan. He remembers this scene from his childhood:

When I was nine or ten a teacher purposefully placed some pictures of Indian peasants in mud huts in front of me and said to the class: ‘Hanif comes from India.’ I wondered: Did my uncles ride on camels? Surely not in their suits? Did my cousins, so like me in other ways, squat down in the sand like little Mowglis, half-naked and eating with their fingers?

Again, my assumption is that the teacher did what she did to ‘infuse’ some diversity into the classroom by revealing Hanif’s ‘origins’. Kureishi explains that because of this essentializing episode, he rejected his Indian background and felt ashamed of not being like the majority, white.

My final example, again in the context of a classroom, is taken from a novel called The Life of a Banana (PP Wong 2014). The banana here symbolizes an Asian-looking girl who lives in the West (white inside but yellow from the outside). The main character, whose family is from Singapore, was born in the UK. In the following excerpt she talks about her first day at school and how her ‘diversity’ was put on the table by her teacher—to her surprise (ibid.: 28):

Good morning class

Good morning Mrs Wilkins

Class, before we begin, I would like to announce we have a newcomer all the way from china

(I was born in hackney)

Her name is…

These examples show the danger of making assumptions about others based on what they look like, but also of ‘diversifying’ certain people while treating the rest of the class as if they were all transparent, ‘robot-like’ pupils. Interculturality in this book rejects this limited and limiting approach to diversity. I argue that diversity touches us all and that educators should start treating everyone from a position of ‘diversities for all’ in order to put an end to these examples of concocted, façade diversity. I saw recently a Twitter account description that said: ‘Diversity excites her.’ The motto for interculturality in education should be (everyone’s) diversities excite us.

Where Are You Really From?

Questions of origins are central in intercultural education, although they can be problematic. The questions ‘where are you from?’ or ‘where are you really from?’ are omnipresent in education, especially when dealing with ‘diverse’ students. This section explains why these questions might be a thing of the past and why they can easily create a single story and power imbalance between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. Spector (2012) reminds us that ‘while we are readily biased by the colour of someone’s skin when predicting their physical or intellectual abilities, surprisingly skin colour is controlled by just a handful of genes, and is a poor guide to the other 25,000 underneath. Indeed, there is more genetic diversity in one small area of Africa than there is in the whole of Europe.’

Although our world is said to be postmodern (the era of multiple identities), global, and cosmopolitan, the idea of origins still seems to matter tremendously, sometimes for all, other times for the powerless. Let me start with an anecdote. At the beginning of a summer school on intercultural communication education that I had organized in Finland, I explained that, as is my practice, I would not ask each student to introduce themselves and to tell the group about where they came from, their interests, and so on. I preferred that they got to know each other in a less formal and somewhat less tedious way during class activities or over coffee or tea. I introduced my work but said nothing about my own life story: where I was born (my ‘origin’), where I had lived and worked, the languages I spoke, and so on. At the end of the first lecture, a student came to see me and said: ‘you didn’t tell us where you come from; now you have to tell me’. Asking the lecturer about his origins at the beginning of a course on interculturality could appear to be ‘normal’ and a way to get to know him/her. Yet I got somewhat irritated by the tone of the student (‘you have to…’) and answered that it was irrelevant and that I would prefer not to mention my ‘complex origins’ as they would most certainly become obvious during the month-long course. The student then told me about both his ‘ethnic’ and ‘religious’ identities and said that he was very proud of them. I replied that it was his right to ‘expose’ his origins—and to feel proud of them—but that I did not want to go through this about myself in a few seconds at the end of a lecture. Surprised (and probably annoyed), the student then asked me if I had something to hide about my origins or if I was ashamed of them… By refusing to declare my origins I shared Foucault’s views (1982): I didn’t feel that it was necessary to know who I was. Although I reacted in a certain way in this specific situation, in another context I might have felt confident about ‘revealing’ and discussing my origins. For example, when I go to the barber’s, the question of my origins often pops up. Depending on my mood and the atmosphere of the place (many or few people, my impressions of the barber, and so on), I might single out one of my identities and place it on the table, invent a national identity (Japanese), or simply try to avoid having to answer the question.
尽管我们的世界被认为是后现代(多重身份时代)、全球性和国际化的世界,但起源的概念似乎仍然非常重要,有时对所有人来说,有时对弱者来说。让我从一个轶事开始。在我在芬兰组织的跨文化交流教育暑期学校开始时,我解释说,按照我的做法,我不会要求每个学生自我介绍并告诉小组他们来自哪里,他们的兴趣,等等。我更喜欢他们在课堂活动中或喝咖啡或茶时以一种不那么正式、不那么乏味的方式相互了解。我介绍了我的作品,但没有提及我自己的生活故事:我出生的地方(我的“起源”)、我生活和工作的地方、我说的语言等等。第一堂课结束时,一个学生来找我说:‘你没有告诉我们你来自哪里;你没有告诉我们你从哪里来。现在你必须告诉我”。在跨文化课程开始时询问讲师他的出身似乎是“正常”的,也是了解他/她的一种方式。然而,我对学生的语气感到有些恼火(“你必须……”),并回答说这无关紧要,我不想提及我的“复杂的起源”,因为它们肯定会在长达一个月的时间里变得显而易见。课程。然后,该学生告诉我他的“种族”和“宗教”身份,并说他为他们感到非常自豪。我回答说,他有权“揭露”自己的出身,并为此感到自豪,但我不想在讲座结束时的几秒钟内讲述自己的情况。 学生感到惊讶(也可能是恼火),然后问我是否有什么需要隐瞒自己的出身的事情,或者我是否为自己的出身感到羞耻……通过拒绝公开我的出身,我同意了福柯的观点( 1982 ):我不觉得它有必要知道我是谁。尽管我在这种特定情况下以某种方式做出反应,但在另一种情况下,我可能对“揭示”和讨论我的起源充满信心。例如,当我去理发店时,经常会出现关于我的出身的问题。根据我的心情和这个地方的气氛(人多或少,我对理发师的印象等等),我可能会挑出我的一个身份并将其放在桌子上,发明一个国家身份(日语),或者只是试图避免回答这个问题。

Origins seem to matter to some people, while they appear to be irrelevant for some others. At some point in one’s life, origins can be perceived as rosy, positive, and something to boast about, and sometimes they can also be very personal, political, and distressing. Our sense of origins is thus relative, depending amongst other things, on our roles, emotions, interlocutors, and the contexts of encounters. Most people use the idea of origins as if it was an evident and transparent notion (‘we all have roots’), without always realizing that questions of origins can be unstable, highly sensitive, and problematic, and that origins are very much dependent on issues of power. The etymology of the word derives from the Latin word originem (nom. origo) ‘rise, beginning, source’, and from the stem of oriri ‘to rise, become visible, appear’. The idea of origins, which has been central in global education where people have been ‘made’ to belong to nation-states/ethnicities, has been criticized for being both an ‘intellectual simplifier’ (Sen 2005) and an ‘anthropomorphic concept’, which seems to take real and concrete persons and rid them of their agency (Heinich 2009: 39; see Chapter 2). Although the word has been around in many languages for many centuries and used, abused, and overused in modernity to determine ‘who is in’ and ‘who is out’ in nationalistic discourses and actions, talking about origins is a very postmodern subject, too. As such, even though we live in ‘liquid times’ (Bauman 2004), where identities are said to be unstable, hybrid, and plural, and opportunities for altering the self are unlimited, sticking to, being relegated to, or attempting to find one’s origins are thriving. The renewed interest in genealogy in many countries, the revival of certain languages and traditions from the past, the unearthing of one’s ‘heritage’, and so on, all contribute to re-create and sometimes reimagine origins in order to deal with the pressures of postmodernity and globalization. According to the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2004: 20), such endeavours, which are very much related to identity seeking, are ‘born out of the effort (…) to bridge the gap between the “ought” and the “is”’. Liquidity unsettles, amongst others, national identities and ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1983) but also origins.
出身对某些人来说似乎很重要,而对另一些人来说似乎无关紧要。在一个人生命中的某个时刻,出身可能被认为是美好的、积极的、值得夸耀的,有时它们也可能是非常个人化的、政治性的和令人痛苦的。因此,我们的起源感是相对的,取决于我们的角色、情感、对话者和遭遇的背景。大多数人使用起源的概念,就好像它是一个明显而透明的概念(“我们都有根源”),而不总是意识到起源问题可能是不稳定的、高度敏感的和有问题的,而且起源在很大程度上取决于权力问题。该词的词源源自拉丁语originemnom.origo )“兴起、开始、来源”,以及oriri的词干“兴起、变得可见、出现”。起源观念一直是全球教育的核心,人们被“塑造”为属于民族国家/种族,但它被批评为“智力简化者”(Sen 2005 )和“拟人化概念”。这似乎让真实而具体的人摆脱了他们的能动性(Heinich 2009 :39;见第二章)。尽管这个词在许多语言中已经存在了许多个世纪,并且在现代性中被使用滥用过度使用来确定民族主义话语和行动中的“谁在”和“谁在外”,但谈论起源也是一个非常后现代的话题。 。 因此,即使我们生活在“流动时代”(Bauman 2004 ),身份被认为是不稳定的、混合的和多元的,改变自我的机会是无限的,坚持、被降级或试图寻找一个人的起源正在蓬勃发展。许多国家对家谱学的重新兴趣、过去某些语言和传统的复兴、一个人“遗产”的发掘等等,都有助于重新创造,有时甚至重新构想起源,以应对来自不同国家的压力。后现代性和全球化。根据社会学家齐格蒙特·鲍曼(Zygmunt Bauman, 2004 :20)的说法,这种与身份寻求密切相关的努力“源于(……)弥合“应该”与“是”之间差距的努力”。流动性不仅会扰乱国家身份和“想象的社区”(Anderson 1983 ),还会扰乱起源。

But let us not be entirely negative about origins: It is undeniable that origins, be they national, social, or regional, can help people to feel good about who they are. This is why people should be entitled to identify their own origins as they wish—as long as they do not denigrate others. For people who have migrated to another part of the world, origins can serve as a way of reassuring themselves when they feel threatened or marginalized as minorities in a host society. Globalization and the feeling of emptiness and threat that it can trigger can lead to a wish for origins. The legal remnants of modernity, for example, the passport, also promote the importance of (good/bad) origins: Not everybody has the power to cross the same borders. Certain accents when speaking a language can also tell about one’s origins and have an impact on how one is perceived and treated. This is why, sometimes, some migrants want to either keep or get rid of their accents in the majority language.

Once a border is crossed, origins can also serve the purpose of promoting the ‘other’. Certain origins are considered better than others. Some societies—in the ‘East’ and ‘West’—have resorted to positive discrimination to promote certain origins: For example, an individual can get a job thanks to her race, ethnicity, or religious background, and so on. Explicit or implicit positive discrimination can also ‘boost the ego’ of certain institutions and members of the majority: from ‘we have done so much to support the other’ to ‘we are so international; we have a large number of foreigners or speakers of other languages’. This is what could be labelled as origin as a token. Origins can be highly political.

Yet there is another side of the coin: Origins can easily serve the purpose of creating categories that are considered useful for, for example, administrative purposes or even for research to simplify complexity. This characteristic of origins contributes to the fact that today’s individual is, nolens volens, a homo hierarchicus. For de Singly (2003: 52) the ‘powerless’ have fewer opportunities to question their (imagined/projected/imposed) origins than those who do not need to discuss, defend, or present theirs. He sees a danger in what he calls the ‘myth of origins’ (ibid.: 58) since it easily creates unjustified hierarchies and comparisons which can be abused by the powerful. He even goes as far as calling the ‘origin-labelling’ of the powerless totalitarianism (ibid.: 91).

Just like the concept of culture, origins can be used for justifying some practices, behaviours, attitudes, discourses, opinions, and even values (e.g. I am from Italy and this is why I do this or . Many anthropologists and sociologists have noted the tendency for origins to emerge when people are faced with problems (in ‘the tumult of battle’, Bauman 2004) or when they need to explain what they do or think, through the use of words such as culture, identity, tradition, roots, community, and so on. They also highlight the dangers of putting origins at the forefront in some situations (putting people in ‘boxes’), especially when they contribute to injustice, prejudice, and even dreadful political acts (Wikan 2002; Sen 2005).

Finally, it is important to remember that behind every individual lies complex experiences, stories, and origins. This is where the concept of intersectionality matters immensely. Intersectionality represents the crossing of different identity markers or different systems of race, gender, social class, age, and so on, in order to analyse how origins are ‘practised’ in education. As asserted before, one essential feature of origins is that they are unstable, negotiable, and can change—in other words, they are not static. This is not a new idea, but it is important to state it again. Besides, origins are not just one (e.g. ethnicity), and as they intersect, they multiply. For example it is not the same to be, for example, a veiled Muslim woman at Harrods in London and a woman wearing a hijab in Southall, West London, UK. The same doors do not open for these individuals; the same encounters are not possible, and so on. Though they appear to share origins (for the ignorant: they are both Arabs and Muslims), ethnically, socially, economically, and so on, they probably differ much.

I believe that it is important that people are made aware of the instabilities of origins and of their political aspects, and that only they should be allowed to negotiate their origins in the way they want and create, instead, a sense of origins.

For Simmel (2013: 39) ‘education tends to be imperfect, because it has to serve two opposite tendencies with all of its acts: to liberate and to bind’. Origins are omnipresent in education—be they social, ethnic, cultural, and so on. On the one hand, they are considered useful for equality and equity and inclusion purposes. On the other, Bhatia (2010) argues that discourses on, for example, ‘minority students’, often based on nationalistic educational policies and curricula, can contribute to simple, unproblematized, and limited uses of the idea of origins and can easily lead to institutionalized racism and categorizing. Besides, these also can often create nolens volens hierarchies between people, in the sense that there sometimes hides implicit moralistic judgement behind discourses of origins, cultures, and identities (Holliday 2010).

It is of course easy to generalize about teachers from one literary example. Many educators do try to move away from such appalling behaviours. Yet through our experience we have also witnessed such ‘bad’ behaviours. We need to say that researchers themselves can also add to these painful experiences by starting from a solid indicator of origins such as national identity or social class in their work (Bauman 2004; Dervin 2011). Most of the time we are unaware of what we are doing to our research participants when we do research on their origins… This is why I believe, like E. Said (1993: 33), that

With regard to the consensus on group or national identity it is the intellectual’s task to show how the group is not a natural or a God-given entity but is a constructed, manufactured, even in some cases invented object, with a history of struggle and conquest behind it, that it is sometimes important to represent.

Furthermore, in agreement with de Singly (2003), I wish to promote an approach to origins which is ‘emancipating’: Students should be given the means and tools to appropriate a sense of origins, to refuse/reject/modify them and to feel, in some cases, ‘freed’ from solid and imposed origins. I also believe that they should be prepared to answer the question ‘where are you from?’ which liberates them from the hidden query ‘why are you here?’. We don’t believe that it is up to an institution or to one of its representatives to decide on someone’s origins and to ask them to play out origins, as can be the case in schools (see Niemi et al. 2014).

‘The Same Is Lame’

Education is somewhat paradoxical: On the one hand, it should help students to find their own specificities and their individualities (child-centred approaches), but on the other, education tries to create commonality between students. In this subsection I analyse the bias of difference in dealing with interculturality in education. While cultural difference is often celebrated in schools, similarities with the ‘other’ tend to be rejected and banished. This bias has an impact on how minority students get treated and on our assumptions about them.

I have labelled this obsession the differentialist bias, or an obsession with what makes us different from others, rather than considering the fact that we are different and share commonalities. This bias often denies interculturality beyond difference. The essentialization and marketization of the other, the ‘exotic’ other (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009), have insisted on how different s/he is. Anecdotally, in 2012, the influential American singer-songwriter, Pharrell Williams, created a capsule collection for a Japanese casual wear retailer entitled I am OTHER. One of his creations read: ‘The same is lame’, revealing the bias that I am describing in this section. Research and practice have not been immune to this incredibly resilient groupthink, often collecting lists of differences to either explain or facilitate intercultural encounters in education. For example, in their book Managing Cultural Differences, Harris et al. (2011) only dedicate 12 pages to ‘intercultural similarity’. Of course differences matter and people are different (across and within ‘cultures’) but they can also be quite similar in their values, ideas, behaviours, opinions, and so on. In many cases, two individuals from different ‘cultures’ might share more in common than people from the same country. The obsession with difference seems to relate to a fear of universalism and ethnocentrism.It also leads to ‘drowning’ the other in the self.

Hannah Arendt (1958: 155) made an important point in this regard when she said: ‘If people were not different, they would have nothing to say to each other. And if they were not the same, they would not understand each other.’ As explained before, the overemphasis on discourses of culture in relation to interculturality has led researchers and practitioners alike to think exclusively in terms of difference. For Jullien (2012: 29), the concept of difference is not adventurous enough: When we meet others, it is quite easy to make a list of differences between us based on our observations and (sometimes) quick discussions. Such attitudes to the other allow us to ‘allocate power, resources and rights’ (Hamid 2015: 24). On the other hand, if we take the time to examine the other through the lens of similarities, too, we might start finding things, ideas, and thoughts that we share. The use of the word ‘values’ is interesting in this sense. I often meet people who claim that their (national) values are different from others’—and who indirectly place themselves on a pedestal. For example: My cultural values are honesty, hard-work, and democracythese are of course values that most people share. Unni Wikan puts it nicely when she writes (2002: 84):

Talk of ‘culture’, and the picture that springs to mind is one of difference, divergence, and distance. Talk of ‘people’ or ‘persons’ instead, and the picture is one of humans who struggle with some of the same compelling concerns and who therefore—despite all difference—can resonate across time and place.

Some nationalities get more easily put in the box of extremely different alterity, like the Chinese in the ‘West’ (Dervin 2015). However China is also an extremely diverse country of 1.3 billion inhabitants, comprising very different social, ethnic, and linguistic groups. Students from Yining (northwest of China in the Mongolian Uplands), Qiqihar (in the northeastern part of the country) or Nanning (southern China) may have very little in common with each other, even though they share a passport. But one does not even need to change regions; in Beijing, for example, one can meet diverse people in a different district or even on a different street. So there is diversity amongst the Chinese but also commonalities with the ‘Western’ world. When my team and I collected data amongst international students at a university in Beijing, we were delighted to hear from some of them that: ‘There is not like the Chinese person, every Chinese person is different, every one is different, every city is different, so it depends who you know some are very international some are very traditional, you can also find more westernized people.’ Of course there are many things that could be questioned in this quote (what does it mean to be ‘more westernized’?) yet this student does not go with the flow of discourses such as ‘the Chinese are all this, the Chinese are all that’.

Many ‘victims’ of the differentialist bias would like to be considered from a perspective that also sees them as potentially similar to others. In the section about diversity, I mentioned how a character from the novel The Life of a Banana (PP Wong 2014) was otherized by her British teacher when she came to school for the first time (‘she is Chinese’ even though she was born in England). In the novel, the very same student also shares her annoyance at being constantly labelled ‘different’. She says (ibid.: 34):

I start to daydream about what it would be like to grow up in a country where I am not seen as different. Somewhere where I am popular and don’t have to explain my name or that I’m Chinese. It would be a really cool place where Asians and Jamaicans are just seen as doctors, schoolgirls and businesswomen. Not the ‘Chinese doctor’, ‘the Asian school girl’ or the ‘black businesswomen of the year’. It would be a country where I was not seen as ‘ethnic’ or ‘exotic’ but just ‘me’. That would be great!

This translates powerfully what many educators fail to do to many minority students by labelling and segregating them in their classrooms. We live in a world where the boundaries between ‘the normal and the abnormal, the expectable and the unexpected, the ordinary and the bizarre, domesticated and wild’ are blurred, as are those between ‘the familiar and the strange, “us” and the strangers’ (Bauman 1997: 25). This is why, in order to create intercultural practices that respect individuality, we need to accept that those who might look, sound, and behave differently might actually share many commonalities with us.

Starting critically and reflexively from similarities rather than differences might open up new vistas for both research and practice. The educationalist M. Abdallah-Pretceille (1986) shares the view that identifying similarities might be a more rewarding intellectual and relational exercise than identifying mere difference, as it requires spending quality time with people and in-depth discussions—which, in an increasingly busy world or even school contexts, often is lacking.

Obsession with the Local

I am not the person people believe me to be. I went to a party once where I didn’t know anyone. It was raining so I was soaking wet. I was carrying a shopping bag and a scooter helmet. Someone mistook me for a sushi deliveryman. Some people congratulated me for my French, which was ‘without any accent’; someone even tried to please me by saying that I was ‘cute for a Chinese’. (My translation of Chau 2015: 22. Frédéric Chau is a Vietnam-born French actor of Chinese-Cambodian descent)

Since the birth of nation-states in the eighteenth century and the birth of the passport, nationality has prevailed as well as the dichotomy of the ‘local’ and the ‘non-local’. In most research on study abroad, for instance, during which students spend some time studying in another country as an exchange or degree student, scholars note that most of them are unwilling to meet people from their own country abroad and that they prefer to become friends and interact with ‘local’ people. The fear of being caught with the ‘same’ or ‘stuck’ with him/her (someone from the same country) is thus very common. We have managed to create a view of the world where crossing a national border signifies selecting those who are different, but especially from the locality, a ‘real local’. The problem with the word ‘local’ is related to criteria: Do we define a local by place of birth, nationality, or language, or by the simple fact that this person lives in a given place? There are many signs in our societies that we are obsessed with the local, the ‘authentic’ local.

Some years ago, a friend of mine visited Finland and wanted me to organize something ‘typically’ Finnish for her. Not really a believer in such things myself, I went to the tourist centre and asked if they had such activities. They gave me a brochure which contained different tours. On one page, two activities were advertised. The first one was to go to the Helsinki zoo to see ‘exotic’ animals. This was followed by a visit to someone’s home:

Have you ever met Finns on their own territory - at home? This is a special opportunity to get acquainted with the Finns and the local lifestyle.

Finns love to drink coffee with pastries. Now you can also take a seat at the coffee table and have a nice chat with native in Kruununhaka, one of the oldest parts of the city centre. During the home visit you have a chance to talk about current topics and Finnish culture in general.

The description of this tour (for which one had to pay) is quite interesting for the topic at hand. Why would a tourist pay to visit someone’s home, drink coffee, and discuss current affairs and culture? Is it because it is often difficult for a tourist to meet local people or because they are expected to meet them? The description of the tour seems to confirm the originality and exclusivity of what it offers. It is described as a ‘special opportunity’, ‘having a chance to’. The fact that it speaks of the local (referred to as the thorny word ‘native’ in the description) as ‘oneness’ (‘the local lifestyle’, ‘Finnish culture’) confirms many of the points that we made earlier about interculturality in its essentialistic and limited form. Finally, it is important to note that the part of the city where this is taking place is (1) in the city centre—and not in the suburbs, and (2) one of the wealthiest parts of Helsinki, the capital city of Finland. This is why the Finn who will be ‘performing’ Finnishness for the tourists could represent neither ‘the Finns’ nor ‘the local lifestyle’. The imaginary of ‘oneness’ that is being sold to tourists is potentially dangerous, as it will provide them with a single narrative about the diverse population of Finland—men/women/others, young/old, poor/rich/others, and so on

In a similar vein, some years ago, the Finnish Red Cross organized a course for those who wanted to learn how to become friends with ‘migrants’. The idea was to train people who could meet and help ‘refugees’ in Finland. I place migrants and refugees between inverted commas because they were used interchangeably by the organizers. I applied for the course but was rejected because I was not originally Finnish. They claimed that I would not be able to help them to navigate through Finnish culture and to help them to ‘integrate’. Having lived in the country for more than 20 years, I protested, saying that I felt as competent as any Finn to be a ‘friend’ with a ‘refugee’ and to show them the ropes. In one of the e-mails I received, my correspondent was telling me that they did not want the refugees to be disappointed by having a friend who was not a ‘real’ Finn. On the scale of desire, the local stands high. I felt offended and frustrated by this comment. Eventually, I was reluctantly accepted into the course.

Let me share one last example about the ‘local’. A friend of mine sent her children to Germany for three weeks in order for them to study the German language and ‘culture’. The children were to stay with a family. When the mother spoke to her children on the first night, she realized that the host family was not as she had imagined, as the parents were originally from Turkey. My friend immediately contacted the agent who had organized the stay (for which she had paid a fortune) and asked him to find a ‘real’ local German family and not (I quote) ‘an immigrant family’. The agent obliged and found a ‘typical’ white German family for her.

After all these examples, it is important for us to reflect on this issue: Who has the right to say who can serve as a ‘local’ or not? Can one discriminate on the basis of language, religion, and origins to decide? Why can’t we let people decide by themselves? If one was born abroad, can one not become a local one day? Is it sustainable to legitimate the hierarchy between ‘locals’ and ‘non-locals’?

In Finland, the ‘best new Finn’ is elected every year. The label refers to immigrants who have obtained Finnish nationality. I always wonder how long the label ‘new’ will stick to them and if they will be ever able to be elected the ‘best Finn’ of the year.

Questions

  1. 1.

    Can you give examples of globalization from the past?

  2. 2.

    What kind of imaginaries do people usually have about your country? What imaginaries do you have about other countries?

  3. 3.

    Think of someone you know from another country: Name five things that you have in common with her/him.

  4. 4.

    Do you know the different theories about where your country’s people come from originally, far back in history?

  5. 5.

    In this chapter, I claimed that everyone is diverse. How do you understand this? In what ways are you, yourself, diverse?