Rapporto tra identità e cultura, una coordinata essenziale per «comprendere l’altro» nella prospettiva dell’intercultura

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between identity and culture. This constitutes a necessary choice for “understanding the other person”, and allows one to indicate specific paths for formation to enable each individual to constructively internalize the “otherness” with its diversity, especially in its cultural dimension. There is a need for reconsidering the issue of the relationship between culture and the individual’s identity, particularly its formation and educational implications. This comes from the understanding that, in order to carry out the correct intercultural educational processes which begin with learning in order to understand the other person, is necessary to outline ways for a critical and continuous re-elaboration of one’s own identity, and being able to assume those cultural signs that are part of one’s roots.
Intercultural education must create conditions for people to learn to assume to decentralize themselves from their ethnocentric attitude, to change their perceptions and cognitive schemes which they generally perceive as representation of the other, especially those 'foreign' or 'different', thereby overcoming stereotyping and prejudices.