Conceptions of the body in multi and intercultural contexts

Abstract

This article reviews the conceptual constraints that weigh on multiculturalism and interculturality, in general, as forms of pluralism that manifest themselves from the cultural diversity observed in the cultural processes of contemporary reality. Interculturality is analyzed, based on diversity, understood as a cognitive scenario where intercultural conflicts are arbitrated. Be part of the multiculturalism approach to understand how the diversities are dynamized from their social and political connotations, and then reach interculturality, as another approach but now of cultural interaction and dialogue that tries to overcome the schematic view of the multiple condition of societies, to move to a situation of construction of intercultural processes as forms of encounters and disputes for inclusion. To analyze these processes, three major fields of intercultural reflection are indicated: the philosophical, the model and the dialogical, which situates the concept as part of a transversal perspective that can address different cultural problems and, at the same time, proposes interculturality as a field of study of such importance for the understanding of current realities from that point of view. Finally, we try to conceptualize the body to point out its commitment as an emergent cultural process, which is built on the conflict and collects the difference in the coexistence between cultures. The importance of multiculturalism and interculturality in the analysis of cultural diversity, social inclusion, and collective identities is enhanced in order to make them visible in the body as an authentic material and symbolic intercultural creator, the place of the intersection of flows, tensions and contradictions of the intercultural process, always precarious.