La conversation anthropologique comme alternative au projet d’« éducation interculturelle » du Conseil de l’Europe : réflexions critiques à partir de l’enseignement-apprentissage du FLE

Abstract

By revisiting some aspects of a didactic sequence carried out in a beginner-level French as a Foreign Language (FLE) class around the concept of intercultural encounter, this article examines the types of difficulties a language and culture teacher might face in his/her improvisations and experiments when trying to incorporate an anthropological, non-essentializing, and non-differentialist view of culture into his/her teaching. Drawing from an anthropology of education influenced by the work of Ingold, ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein, Cavell), and anthropology inspired by it (Das, Bazin, Motta), the author shifts the perspective from “intercultural encounter” to “anthropological conversation,” understood as an ordinary conversation where everyone is placed in the position of the learner, and where mutual education about what it means to live a human life is always already taking place. From this perspective, offered as an alternative to the unrealistic and potentially conflict-laden conceptions of culture underpinning the European "intercultural education" project, the author provides a critical reading of a number of key texts from the Council of Europe, highlighting several preconceptions, including an essentializing, differentialist, and nationalist conception of culture; the illusion of an ego-ethnocentric human nature; and the denial of social actors’ ordinary capacity to live together.