Transcultural society

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The transcultural society is a social concept or a culture in which everyone participates, regardless of which national culture they originally come from. The social concept was published in 1997 by the philosopher Wolfgang Welsch in an essay of the same name.

Welsch's approach has been methodically criticized.

The term transculturality was coined by the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz Fernández in the 1940s to denote the reciprocity of the cultural contacts between Europe and Latin America and their creative potential. The ethnologists Clyde Kluckhohn and Frank L. Strodtbeck also dealt with the topic .

Theory of transculturality according to Welsch

Transculturality

At Welsch, the term transculturality means that the encounter between two different or even opposing cultural areas / cultures can lead to a blurring of the boundaries, but possibly also to the abolition of these boundaries. However, from the separate individual cultures of the classical concept of culture, no global culture, no uniform world culture, but rather individuals and societies that contain transcultural elements. The combination of different vertical and horizontal elements of different origins makes each individual transcultural.

What is important for Welsch in this context is the recognition of the "foreign" elements in oneself. The own identity consists to a large extent of "foreign" elements; only when one is aware of this strangeness can one also recognize the similarities with external strangeness.

The approach for such a culture is the exchange of different ways of life, values ​​and world views. This type of “encounter” would create new forms of cultural connections that are interwoven in a kind of network.

Communication media such as the Internet or television , through which reports and news from all over the world arrive daily, contribute to contacts and mixes, as do modern means of transport. Nowadays, in a single day, a person who has access to them could learn more about the customs and traditions of other cultures than was previously possible within weeks or even months.

From a cultural point of view, people of the same nationality could be more different from one another than ever before, which in turn could mean that they are more sociable internationally.

Differentiation from multiculturalism and interculturality

In his theory, Welsch contrasts the interwoven model of transculturality with the spherical model of multiculturalism and interculturality . He follows Herder's notion of culture , who viewed cultures as self-contained and homogeneous spherical systems. Accordingly, cultures, like spheres, are incapable of communication, but "can only push each other". With this view an individual must not deviate from his culture; "You mustn't be a stranger in your group." In this way, it closes encounters or even mixtures with outside cultures, i.e. H. Bullets, out.

“Multiculturalism” describes a society in which many cultures exist side by side in spherical form, like the Germans, the Turks, the Chinese etc. in one country. The culture of a country thus appears as a mosaic or collage of many different cultures.

“Interculturality”, on the other hand, arises when this pure coexistence of cultures is broken through and a dialogue or exchange between them is achieved. But interculturality, too, with the “danger” of maintaining cultural differences, lags behind a mixture in the sense of “transculturality”, since it still remains attached to the concept of spheres.

Due to the problems caused by the idea of ​​culture as a sphere, Welsch sees both multiculturalism and interculturality theoretically without any success, since - as he himself says - "can only misunderstand each other." Such an incommensurability of cultures can also be found in other theories, such as the hermeneutics of Gadamer (in it communication is only possible between cultures of the same origin (e.g. between a Bavarian and a Thuringian), but not beyond that (e.g. a German and a Chinese)).

Furthermore, in his theory of transculturality, Welsch explains the concept of culture according to the spherical model as historically wrong, since mixtures have always existed (e.g. Albrecht Dürer or GF Handel ). Each individual has his “own inner transculturality. [...] Every culture is hybrid. ”The idea of ​​cultures as demarcated spheres only arose towards the end of the 18th century and was attempted to radically implement them in a normative manner during National Socialism.

Seyran Ateş took up the term

The concept of transculturality was taken up by Seyran Ateş in 2007 . In her book "Der Multikulti-Errtum", published in 2007, she outlined the vision of a transcultural society. By this she understands a society in which immigrants are at home in at least two cultures: In their culture of origin, but also in the culture of their host society. If there are irreconcilable differences between the two cultures, the culture of the host society takes precedence. That is why Seyran Ateş advocates the uncompromising enforcement of human rights among immigrants. Ateş calls for a "European guiding culture ".

As the title of her book indicates, Seyran Ateş sharply demarcates her vision of a transcultural society from the idea of multiculturalism . Seyran Ateş accuses the - quote - "primeval German multicultural fanatics" of "serious guilt". They showed tolerance for human rights violations, let women and girls down and instead of working together they contributed to coexistence and opposition in society.

Pedagogical Approaches: Transcultural Education

In addition to the descriptive and normative sense as a social concept, transculturality can also be understood in the practical and operational sense as an educational concept. According to its advocates , an education conceived in this way takes into account the challenges of an immigration society developing into a transcultural society . The first approaches to a transcultural education go back to the 1980s. Welsch's theoretical considerations during the 1990s and the debates it triggered in the social and cultural sciences were followed by attempts to make the concept of transculturality productive for educational practice as well. Transcultural education takes Welsch's criticism of the concept of interculturality seriously and thus represents an alternative to intercultural education . In this respect, transcultural approaches find it difficult to find their way into the practice of intercultural education .

In his book We Are Like Tree Trunks in Snow , which was published in 2012, Arata Takeda pleads for an education that should help overcome the culturalism currently prevailing in politics and society , and suggests a thorough rethinking in the direction of transcultural education. The not always visible, but certainly existing mobility of cultural identities in space and time is expressed programmatically by the Kafka quote reproduced in the title . Takeda draws attention to the fact that the approaches of intercultural pedagogy are based on concepts of intercultural communication and methods of intercultural learning , which primarily focus on improving international business communication and are therefore not very suitable for teaching people how to live together in an immigrant society. The central task of transcultural education is to convey cultures not as characteristics of difference, but as opportunities for participation .

Since 2005, the literary scholar Michael Fisch has been in charge of a series of publications entitled Contributions to Transcultural Science at Weidler Buchverlag Berlin . This book series presents transcultural ideas, contexts and phenomena in literary and textual studies, in philology and philosophy, both from a historical-critical perspective and individually and collectively. The title refers to the discussion about the concept of a transculturality , which was discussed in the early 1960s by the American cultural anthropologists Florence Kluckhohn and Fred Strodtbeck in their book "Variations in Value Orientations" (1961). Thirty-six years later, Wolfgang Welsch presented this term in his text "What is actually transculturality?" (1997) as a social concept.

University degree

The following courses of study with a focus on transculturality are offered in German-speaking countries:

Bachelor of Arts:

Master of Arts:

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Juneja, Monica; Falser, Michael: cultural heritage - monument preservation: transcultural. An introduction. In this. (Ed.): Cultural heritage and monument preservation transcultural. Boundaries between theory and practice. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013, 17-34. ( ISBN 978-3-8376-2091-7 )
  2. ↑ a b c d e f legs must not become clubfoot. Wolfgang Welsch in conversation about a transculturally oriented society - and how music can bring people together , Musikforum, 8th year, issue 1 January-March 2010.
  3. ↑ a b transartis art mediation, Susanne Buckesfeld, in: Intercultural Art and Culture Management, Module 2: Theory-Practice Discourse.
  4. ↑ Cf. Traugott Schöfthaler: Multicultural and transcultural education: Two ways to cosmopolitan cultural identities, in: International Review of Education XXX (1984), pp. 11–24
  5. ↑ See e.g. B. Michael Göhlich, Hans-Walter Leonhard, Eckart Liebau, Jörg Zirfas (Eds.): Transculturality and Pedagogy. Interdisciplinary approaches to a cultural studies concept and its educational relevance , Weinheim / Munich: Juventa, 2006.
  6. ↑ See Kathrin Hauenschild: Transculturality - a challenge for schools and teacher training, in: www.widerstreit-sachunterricht.de 5 (2005) (PDF; 162 kB)
  7. ↑ Arata Takeda: We are like tree trunks in the snow. A plea for transcultural education , Münster: Waxmann, 2012. p. 84.
  8. ↑ http://www.weidler-verlag.de/Reihen/BZTW/bztw.html .
  9. ^ University of Düsseldorf: Information course. Retrieved May 8, 2019 .
  10. ↑ Contact 4students-Studien Info Service Teaching and Study Services Harrachgasse 28: Transcultural Communication Bachelor. Retrieved May 8, 2019 .
  11. ↑ Bachelor's degree in transcultural communication on the website of the University of Vienna
  12. ↑ Transcultural Studies (Master of Arts) - University of Bremen - Bremen. Retrieved May 8, 2019 .
  13. ↑ Transcultural Studies. Literatures and language contacts in the francophone area (Master of Arts) - Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg - Heidelberg. Retrieved May 8, 2019 .
  14. ↑ Transcultural Theater Studies - History, Theory, Practice (Master of Arts) - University of Leipzig - Leipzig. Retrieved May 8, 2019 .

literature

Web links

See also