Modes of Being Across and Between Cultures: Opportunities for Understanding the Pluriverse

Abstract

My encounter with ‘interculturality’ was partly occasioned by the fact of being born in Belgium at a period in time where growing up with multilinguality was a matter of normality and partly by then living and working in eight countries across all continents. Working in local communities and later in academic contexts sharpened my awareness about the importance of language in the transference of knowledge and interlinguistic exchanges of knowledges. Especially knowledges pertaining to the underlying ontological and epistemological differences and shadings of meanings and that require contextual understanding of these meanings are at the core of the chapter. The regular mistranslations occurring from social science texts originally written in other-than-English languages caused original meanings to get lost in translation. Some of the consequences of such mistranslations are examined, focussing on education and possible futures in our ‘pluriverse’, especially in the present epoch where global conversations are ever more important to address our predicaments, facing ecological disaster, extinction and the potential un-liveability for humans and so many other species of the earth. Including the non-human in our relational considerations for a possible future enlarges the need for new and interculturally understandable knowledge systems and the positivist and other epistemological inclinations in the dominant West will not make this any easier considering our rather sad record during the past four centuries.

Citation

Boulet, J. (2021), "Modes of Being Across and Between Cultures: Opportunities for Understanding the Pluriverse", Kumar, M. and Welikala, T. (Ed.) Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: The Context of Being, Interculturality and New Knowledge Systems, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 95-108. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80043-006-820211006