Inter Cultural Dailogue
SN Balagangadhara
On the Very Idea of an Intercultural Dialogue
ABSTRACT
It is commonly believed that, to a degree at least, violence in society has something to do with misunderstanding between different human communities. Thus, the belief is that an intercultural dialogue, if it occurs, wouldclear-up the misapprehensions between cultures. This gives birth to the hope that a dialogue between cultures would pave the way for a slightly less violent encounter between people from different cultures. Is this ideatrue? Isthe hope justified? The paper investigates this problematic and excavates the issues that come to the fore in an intercultural dialogue. It turns out that both questions receive negative answer.
It is also argued that our notions about a rational, critical discussion as an alternative to violence do not hold water. In the case of intercultural dialogues, in fact, just the oppositeis true: instead of reducing violence,rational, critical discussion actually engenders it.
Keywords: Intercultural Dialogue, non-western cultures, argumentation theories, violence
In today’s world, the presence of a plurality of cultures and religions has become an estab- lished fact. Consequently, many insist on a dialogue between different cultures. It is, of course, one thing to demand a dialoguebut quite another to bring it about. One reason for the hiatus lies in the lack of clarity in the demand itself: what does an intercultural dialogue mean? What is required for an intercultural dialogue to succeed and whendoes such a dialogue take place? What can one achieve through this dialogue and what should its purposes be? What are the limits of such a dialogue, and how are they related to a demand for living together byaccepting cultural differences?
The request for intercultural dialogue also recognises the fact that these dialogues, though desirable, are not self-evident. That is to say, in human history, such dialogues have been few and far-between. If true,why has this been the case? Is a dialogue between cultures really praiseworthy? If yes, what makes it difficult for us to achieve this meritorious goal? How much of the difficulty has to do with what cultures are,and to our understanding of what dialogue is?
To some extent, a few of these questions are answered by the following idea, which is more of an intuition than a clearly articulated belief: to a degree at least, violence in society has something to do withmisunderstanding between different human communities. Thus, the belief is that a dialogue, if it occurs, would clearup the misapprehensions between cultures. This gives birth to the hope that a dialogue betweencultures would pave the way for a slightly less violent encounter between people from different cultures. Is this belief or intuition true? Is the hope justified? The paper investigates this issue.
The Structure of the Paper
This paper will completely ignore the massive number of micro and macro studies on intercultural communication. For the most part, despite brilliant insights here and there, these studies do not answer the kind of questions I raise. Even though ethno-linguistic studies and a few anthropologists have addressed some of these concerns, I have chosen to ignore them. It is my hope that the paper itself will explain why.
Before we consider what a dialogue is, let us look at what it is supposed to do. Among other
things, it is seen as a means to arrive at intercultural understanding. Though the no- tion of
understanding itself is unclear, one could say that ‘cultural understanding’ entails at least the
following: one should be able to establish a semantic or logical relation between the beliefs (and
practices) of some culture, and the beliefs one has about the world. From this, it follows that some
minimal conditions must hold before some verbal activity be- comes a dialogue. That is to say,
dialogue will at least involve the activity of relating beliefs (or their verbal expressions) to each other
either semantically or logically. Of course, what constitutes a semantic relation depends on the content of the verbal expressions; similarly, what constitutes a logical relation depends upon the type and kind of logicone uses in the dialogue. In this sense, the minimal condition that one is talking about is structural in na- ture. Much modification is not necessary to generalise this structure across different kinds of verbalactivities:conversation, communication and negotiation.
In broad terms, dialogue is a verbal activity involving the logical roles of proponents and opponents, who try to arrive at a consensus through rational discussion. A discussion evolves through different phases and allows for different kinds of interventions: challenges, requests for information, clarifications, exclamations of surprise, puzzlement, and so on. The field of argumentation theories has generated the most theorising about the nature and structure of dialogues. (A very good overview of the field is to be found in van Eemeren, Grootendorst and Henkemans, et. al., 1996.) In this paper, I have chosen to focus on thepragma-dialectical approach to argumentation as developed by Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst in this article. This choice is easy to justify since theirs is simply the best and the most comprehensivetheory in the field. Their theory incorporates the insights that formal theories of dialogue provide us with without losing sight of the fact that a dialogue is a rational critical discussion, which is also determined bypragmatic considerations. They draw as much from philosophy of science as they do from theories of speech and communication. More important than these is the theory’s epistemic property: it is lucid;it iscriticisable and, therefore, improvable.
Having outlined the above notion of dialogue in the first part, I go on to look at some his- torical examples of dialogues drawn from different cultures in the second part: the ancient Roman, the African, and theIndian. Reflections on these dialogues in the third part help us identify some of the issues involved in intercultural dialogue, when dialogue is con- ceived as a rational, critical discussion. These issues addressthe intuition we have about the reduction of cultural misunderstanding through dialogues