What a controversial quote!

Photo by Lisa Marie Knitter | www.youthphotos.eu

And definitely a statement to trigger very interesting discussions at trainings. Bringing in controversial cases—with themes ranging from violence against women, exploitation of welfare systems, or explaining terrorism or school performance with Islamic culture—and controversial statements such as the one of Nasim Karim often leads to heated discussions, to great frustration with getting the terms right, and eventually to relief—both from participants with majority and minority background—when, at the end, a consensus is reached about what should be named culture and what should definitely not be named culture.

The title of this article might be rather provoking for some, as we have been raised to think that cultural awareness is the way to create tolerance. But we fail when confronted with the above examples:

If violence against women is a cultural expression, should we then accept and respect it? And if doing so, wouldn’t we be feeding the extreme right with arguments against multicultural societies? And if we should not respect it, does it then mean that certain cultures are bad, primitive, and cannot be integrated?

Of course not! But there is no doubt that youth workers and trainers are confronted with such dilemmas. Let’s look at a concrete example: During trainings on multicultural teamwork, we use Forum Theatre [3] to explore conflicts that might arise in multicultural settings. The participants, using cases from their daily youth and social work, put escalations of conflicts on stage, eventually asking the spectators to intervene.

A Forum Theatre Scene | Photo by Nuno da Silva

One group once put a young guy with ethnic minority background—played by a participant with ethnic minority background—as the oppressor of a female teacher and the school director, whom he accused of racism. The play started and the guy, who called himself Mohammed, entered the fictive computer-room, where his two friends were receiving classes from the female teacher. Mohammed and his friends were joking and ignoring the woman, and the teacher got upset about the disturbance of her class. Mohammed was therefore invited to a talk with the director, and this very fast escalated into open conflict, where Mohammed accused everyone of being racist. The play created lots of discussion on two-sided oppression and different tools for communicating and interacting with each other in respectful ways.

At first, we were rather surprised as a more “political correct” way of showing the scene would have been to put the teacher and the school director as oppressors of the ethnic minority guys. However, the play was touching upon exactly this dilemma: What to do when somebody explains or excuses negative behaviour with culture? Should we respect and accept their behaviour? Should we conclude that the culture is violent or bad?

My answer is another question: Do these happenings have anything to do with the thing called culture? The cause of the dilemma is to our belief that culture is not a concrete thing, but rather a concept that is used in many different ways. One example is the way that the extreme right in European societies has taken over the concept of culture: they are aware of and respect cultural differences – as long as they are practiced somewhere else! Change the notion of culture with race in the sentence – and feel the shivering! Another example is persons with ethnic minority background justifying violence against women by drawing on their culture.

Of course the way that the extreme right and some ethnic minorities use the concept of culture is very different from the way that it is used within youth work, anti-racism work etc (or is it?). But that is exactly the point: “Culture” is used to cover everything – and thus nothing. Basically the concept of culture is used by almost everyone to argue for their own point of view: being it the extreme right to explain the conflicts in current European societies (including terrorism) and to justify heavy discrimination, or some ethnic minorities themselves to justify what could otherwise be seen as transgressions towards e.g. women or homosexuals.

Everyone seems to be “aware of cultural differences” (even extremists on both sides) – and it quickly gets very difficult to see how more of such awareness—as is the goal of much intercultural learning—can actually contribute as a frame for the encounter between majority and minority and foster mutual respect and understanding.

We are, as the recognised (though controversial) Norwegian anthropologist Unni Wikan (2002) observes, turning culture into a new concept of race, as it becomes a term for the exotic, which we mainly apply to “them”, but not to ourselves.

Where majority youth is seen as having agency, will and opinion of their own, minority youth is often seen as “products of their culture” – defined by the nation where their parents or grandparents once lived. Minority youth committing a crime must therefore be caused by their culture – whereas it is caused by mental or social problems when a majority youngster does something similar. We thus mainly explain “the other’s” negative behaviour with culture, but don’t apply the term when they behave just like “us”.

What we observe is that the discourse of culture is becoming a new “discourse of exclusion”, where most people agree that we should appreciate and respect cultural differences, though at the same time use these cultural differences to explain high delinquency rates among minority youth, exploitation of the social welfare system, failure on the labour market, and even terrorism etc.

Just reading the newspaper on any other day, you will most probably encounter an article exemplifying this. What is lost is thus the critical social analysis of what defines these young people’s realities – apart from culture – namely (a lack of) access to education, and work, and spaces where decisions are taken, and much more. The concept of culture can thus be said to disempower us by hiding the real causes of behaviour and leaving us with no tools for meaningful integration.

What we need is not more awareness of cultural differences, but to beware of the way “culture” can be misused to argue for the wrong things. We furthermore need an alternative explanation of societal problems, and alternative means to deal with the challenges in order to truly include everyone.

This is the fourth published article of our critical series on intercultural learning by Lene Mogensen from In Dialogue. [4] Start with The Derdians if you have missed the beginning.

_________
1. Nasim Karim, a Norwegian of Pakistani descent, was able to escape Pakistan after being forcibly married there. She was almost beaten to death because she tried to refuse the marriage. “She managed, against all odds,” Unni Wikan writes, “to make her way to the Norwegian embassy in Islamabad and, with the embassy’s help, to flee the country.” She had to go to court to have her marriage annulled. ↑
2. Wikan, Unni (2001) Generous Betrayal: Politics of Culture in the New Europe. University of Chicago Press. ↑
3. Forum Theatre is a drama method developed by Augusto Boal to explore oppression and empower people to take steps towards this oppression. ↑
4. It was originally written in 2006, and has lost none of its potency. ↑

It all started with the succint observation that

» tolerance is so yesterday

by Bastian at half past five in the damn early morning, after what apparantly was a night of working on an application for the lovely & beloved June 1 deadline. An hour and a half later Snezana signals agreement:

» tolerance is passé!

Another thirty minutes later Darek asks with lapidarity equivalent to, I guess and digress, electronically raised eyebrows:

» Is it? Why?

Whoosh! And off took the debate…

Photo by ~C4Chaos on flickr

Before you re-live the discussion and chip in with your own two cents, let me throw in some definitions of the English words that we discuss.

I am fully aware that, on the one hand, these definitions can be disagreed with; and they should not resolve the matter or stifle the debate. But, on the other hand, our discourse often originates from—and gets stuck in—the different meanings of words in our respective mother tongues as well as different socio-political spaces.

tol‧er‧ance

     the ability, willingness, or capacity to tolerate something.
     Origin: from Latin, tolerare (see tolerate).

tol‧er‧ate

     1. allow the existence or occurence of (something that one dislikes
         or disagrees with) without interference.
     2. endure (somone or something unpleasant) with forbearance.

Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th edition 2008.

To me, the problem seems at least partly caused by the attempt of the United Nations to instil a philosophical meaning into the word tolerance that it doesn’t seem to carry linguistically.

Take the Declaration on the Principles of Tolerance by UNESCO, which offers a philosophical definition of tolerance like so:

“Tolerance is respect, acceptance and appreciation of the rich diversity of our world’s cultures, our forms of expression and ways of being human. Tolerance is harmony in difference.”

Wikipedia, to refer at least once to everybody’s favourite dictionary of our times, describes tolerant as moderately respectful – and that is, as the Oxford Dictionary definitions from above, pretty different from the UN, I would say…

So, here comes the debate (as of June 2, 2009 at 17:00 hrs) — read it from the bottom up, as the most recent entries are on top [UPDATE: It seems that Twitter is not really able to sort conversations chronologically—please don't ask why—but you'll probably get the picture despite the confusing order...]!

What do you say?

In 2005, a discussion document on intercultural learning was published in follow-up to the Council of Europe’s Directorate of Youth and Sports Long Term Training Course “Intercultural Learning” — LTTC ICL (the paper is available here).

In this document, Dr Gavan Titley argues that, while intercultural learning has become a key work area in European youth training during the last fifteen years, approaches that have been consolidated and widely reproduced during this period are no longer adequate to the realities in which young people live and practice youth work.

At the occasion of the DYS seminar entitled «Intercultural learning – which ways forward?», Gavan was invited to revisit the paper and its main conclusions and bring it in relation to the current educational practice of intercultural learning. Again, we recorded his intervention as a podcast for the world out there.

Download the podcast below to find out why using culture as a concept is dangerous and often inherently racist, why Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay has an intercultural policy and what this means for intercultural learning in non-formal education (and probably elsewhere, too!).

standard version | mp3 version | Podcast Feed | iTunes Link

Enjoy listening, and stay tuned!

In case you need some help with what to do:

A podcast is nothing else than a digital recording of a radio broadcast or a similar programme which is then made available on the internet. While the name is coming from both broadcasting and iPod, a podcast is not restricted to an iPod or any other media player, in fact. You can listen to it easily, using one of many different ways.

If you wanna know more about podcasting, head over to Wikipedia.

The only thing that you need is a computer which can play mp3-files. Millions of programmes do that for you – Windows Media Player (or Jetaudio if you are on the outlook for a better and free alternative) on PC computers or Quicktime on MAC machines or iTunes on both.

Normally your computer knows very well what to do anyway, so just go ahead and download the mp3 file — your machine will take it from there, most likely. If not, ask a geeky character in your vicinity.

Just be aware that audio podcasts are usually not the smallest files (also true for ours: 21 Megabytes), so download might take a moment or two. The good news: It happens in the background, so you can continue to work away!

For you iTunes users out there, we have also included the iTunes link. For you nerdy friends of ours, we also have a more modern version of the soundfile available. And for all friends of RSS and feed readers, we also have a link especially for our podcasts.