Challenging the dichotomy of (anti-)essentialism
Résumé
“Western” scholarship on intercultural communication appears, in the past 25 years, to have incompletely transitioned from essentialism to anti-essentialism, alternatively highlighting regularities in - or emergent context-bound aspects of - interpersonal communication involving multiple cultures and identities. The chapter proposes that in order to break this down, multiple perspectives can be employed. It outlines how, in a learning context, this can be approached in 3 steps, focusing on: (a) coming to terms with group-level regularities, (b) criticising essentialism and understanding cultural fluidity and performed or negotiated cultural traits in interpersonal interactions, and (c) adopting a critical posture by reinjecting essentialist visions as discursive constructs in intersubjective power games.