La rilevanza delle narrazioni e dei posizionamenti nello studio dell’interculturale

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to contribute to the study of the intercultural by associating the intercultural with the concepts of narrative and positioning. In the last decades, the analysis of intercultural communication has privileged an essentialist understanding of culture, iden-tity and cultural differences. Following a non-essentialist approach, this paper focuses on the intercultural rather than the more common label of ‘intercultural communication’ in or-der to pull away from an established perspective which sees individuals as guided, in their behaviour and choices, by their national and cultural belonging. By doing this, the concepts of narratives and positionings become extremely relevant as they permit to observe interac-tions as contingent events where individuals make choices on the basis of contextual inter-actional elements and personal needs. Moreover, these concepts permit to look at culture as a set of meanings under ongoing changes and which are related to the negotiations occur-ring between participants in a specific social event. In these negotiations, the agency of par-ticipants is a key element for the (inter)cultural everyday creativity