Abstract:

To talk about intercultural mediation is to admit that there has to be transformations of the parties involved, in terms of attitudes, behaviour, representations and actions, so as to find platforms of understanding which are not fixed arithmetic points, but rather, movable third places, depending on the themes and agreements under discussion. But this process is not linear and it does not always have a happy ending in the story just like in the romantic films. Cultural shocks and the interpersonal shocks, which are also cultural shocks, are always eminent as a present and future hypothesis. Hence, it is important to reflect on the culture shocks experienced, differently, depending on the individuals that interact, each one with their own life story. Therefore, this results in interaction processes in a more dialogical, intercultural, mediating, creative and transformative form, or on the other hand, more enhancers and linkers of personal and social boundaries which become ethnocultural and therefore more monocultural.

It is understood that those who live in cultural stability with few interactions with otherness have the tendency to have more monocultural attitudes and attitudes which are closer to the culture’s modal behaviour in which they are naturally inserted with their peers and relatives. Those who, for various reasons, undergo social mobility processes, whether ascendant or descendant, or cross various sociocultural contexts in the social trajectory due to migratory processes, schooling processes or others, are submitted to cultural metamorphosis processes and therefore reconstruct their personal identities: the image that the self has of oneself and the one that it offers to others is reconstructed.

The intercultural mediation is presented as a social pedagogy to learn how to live together when We are from different cultural contexts. Although using biographical studies that we did with immigrants in Portugal, this communication has a pedagogical intention and not just an investigative one. We intend to show, precisely, how intercultural mediation is inscribed in a different paradigm from that of classical mediation, which is basically based on conflict resolution techniques. On the contrary, we intend to show how in hyper multicultural societies, what is so often called conflict, is nothing more than a clash of cultures because individuals act according to mental frames culturally constructed throughout their life history and in the cultural contexts they cross.
Thus, from a hermeneutic, biographical and ethnobiographical methodology, with immigrants seeking Portugal as a host society for a future life project, we want to show that living together when we are culturally different, implies learning interculturality as philosophy of life, on the part of those who welcome and those who are welcomed. Such interculturality can be achieved through Intercultural mediation here considered as a social pedagogy, as we will exemplify with life stories of Brazilian immigrants in Portugal and with the identity strategies that they use to include themselves in Portugal, and, at the same time, maintain a belonging to the original culture, the Brazilian, without, however, living in an ambivalent way. Rather, interculturally, assuming a plural and composite self of diverse cultural and educational influences (intercultural attitudes).

Keywords:

Intercultural mediation, living together, monocultural attitudes, intercultural attitudes.