Intercultural and International Understandings: Non-centric Knowledge and Curriculum in Asia
The experiences of many Asian countries indicate that culture has been a force for coexistence and for conflict. It has acted as a bridge making intercultural understandings possible as well as embodying a potential for dissonance. In many polities the ma
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Intercultural and International Understandings: Non-centric Knowledge and Curriculum in Asia Jagdish Gundara
Intercultural Dialogue and Education The experiences of many Asian countries indicate that culture has been a force for coexistence and for conflict. It has acted as a bridge making intercultural understandings possible as well as embodying a potential for dissonance. In many polities, the majority cultures have tended to control resources in areas where minority communities reside and isolate them from the social development of their communities and their markers of identity and cultural differences. In Southeast Asian contexts, there are significant internal cleavages based on ethnicity, race, and religion. With the collapse of the ideas of ‘modernisation’ and increasing neoliberal globalisation stronger communal identities have emerged. This is especially the case where the revolution of expectations in neoliberal economies cannot be met and there is a subsequent rise of ethno-nationalisms. There are numerous fault lines on ethnic and religious basis across the Asian continent and a few examples of those are: the Han versus the minority nationalities in China; Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar; Hindus and Muslims in India; Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka; and Shia and Sunnis in Pakistan. In many of these and states like Laos and Thailand, the governments purposively ‘misrecognise’ issues to deal with minorities and classify many of the smaller ‘indigienous’ people as being ‘backward’, and as threats to security. In Japan there is hardly any recognition of the issues of multiculturalism, especially as they relate to historical minorities like the Ainu, Burakumin, Okinawans, and This chapter is an abridged version of a much longer manuscript prepared originally as a keynote address delivered at the 2013 international conference of the Korean Association for Multicultural Education, Seoul, South Korea. J. Gundara (&) UCL Institute of Education, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 Y.-K. Cha et al. (eds.), Multicultural Education in Glocal Perspectives, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2222-7_5
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Koreans. These different situations and policies in different nation states necessitate intercultural policy measures at local, national, and regional levels. In Fiji, within the Pacific Ocean region, a very different situation exists, since the government is implementing multiculturalism by force to create a future state without racism and to eradicate the narrow identities of the diverse groups in Fiji (Naidu et al. 2013). This position, however, detracts from the development of trust through dialogue amongst local groups and communities, as well as through educational measures toward community-based civic engagement and lifelong learning. Conversely, intercultural understandings and coexistence amongst peoples in East Asia have relied traditionally for instance on Confucianism. In political terms there are constitutional safeguards through form
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