Anthropology as Necessary Unlearning. Examples from Camps, Courts, Schools and Businesses
Anthropology as Necessary Unlearning. Examples from Camps, Courts, Schools and Businesses

Summary/Abstract: This paper explores the problems which arise when people attempt to communicate across cultural boundaries. I draw on my fieldwork experience in various settings in Eastern and Central Europe – camps, courts, schools and businesses – where I found that communication works best when trust is established, and that the necessary step to fulfil this condition was to learn how to unlearn deeply rooted assumptions on both sides. The paper begins with a discussion of racial and ethnic stereotypes, drawing on a range of insights from evolutionary psychology and cognitive science. I then turn to memory myths, suggesting how to apply recent findings from specialized memory research. In the second part of the paper, I challenge the concept of "intercultural", which can all too easily legitimate the "clash of civilisations" ideology. In order to establish real intercultural communication, I suggest that we must abandon models of verbatim translation and instead take advantage of recent anthropological insights into how language works, how meanings are socially constructed and how shared understandings are achieved. In all this, I build on the work of linguistic and legal anthropologists who are already contributing to this endeavour and conclude with some meditations on the related themes of counter-dominance and laughter.

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