The term multiculturalism describes a situation in which groups of people of different origins, traditions and cultures are present at the same time.
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote «Human beings begin their existence with the potential to live a thousand types of life, but end up, inexorably, having lived only one».
Living in a multicultural society is fascinating because it allows you to immerse yourself in some of the other 999 lives! The relationship with individuals from other cultures brings us into contact with other ways of being men and women, with other customs and languages, in other words it makes it possible to experience the enormous richness and variety of human cultures.
By being born and raised in a specific culture, human beings acquire particular habits.
They often end up considering their own culture natural, rational, better and the way in which others live irrational, barbaric and incomprehensible.
Anthropologists call this ethnocentrism, literally placing oneself and one's culture at the center of the world.
Ethnocentrism produces attitudes ranging from indifference to intolerance, up to extreme forms such as violence or the attempt to reject or eliminate others.
The policies of fusion or melting pot tend to encourage amalgamation, the mixing of various cultures, in order to produce an original society that arises precisely from the presence of a remarkable variety of groups.
Finally, as we have said, multicultural policies recognize the importance and dignity of the various communities present in the area.
Some scholars believe that the concept of interculturalism is now preferable to that of multiculturalism.
Talking about interculture means referring to a situation in which the various ethnic groups present in a territory are invited to dialogue, exchange, contamination of their languages, habits, cultures.
Interculturalism makes it possible to overcome some defects of multicultural policies, such as the tendency to keep the boundaries between the various groups fixed, to think that cultures are rigid entities that remain the same over time.
Even if it aims to give dignity to the various cultures, multiculturalism runs the risk of reinforcing differences and making dialogue between communities even more difficult.
On the contrary, an intercultural approach underlines the openness, the connections, the capacity for change that every culture possesses within itself.
Carmen Lorenzo
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