Cultural Materialism and Interculturalism in Complex Societies
Cultural Materialism
Cultural materialism aims, depending on the material conditions of existence, to explain variations in all areas of culture: in the field of moral values, religious beliefs, or artistic experiences. Variations in the material constraints affecting the way people face the problems that are presented to solving their basic needs in a given habitat are the most likely causes of differentiation in the mental or spiritual aspects of human life.
Interculturalism and Citizenship
1.1. How to Construct Identity in Complex Societies?
Managing diversity is key to heterogeneous communities mobilizing in defense of common collective goals. From the consequences of climate change to the problems of urban deprivation, illiteracy, and youth violence, we are challenged to self-organize. In this process, we actually experience what is called interculturalism: a theoretical perspective that goes beyond the mere coexistence of multiculturalism as incommensurable cultures together, to establish mechanisms for intercultural dialogue to generate new and better behavior and adopt common strategies for adaptation to new and old problems.
The community social worker has to carry on activities based on a twofold principle:
- The heterogeneity of individuals, groups, cultural patterns, and belief systems and values that exist in our environment.
- The value system linked to the notion of democratic citizenship.
The dignity and equality of all people is the engine that energizes democracy as a system of solving problems through participation and representation in politics (through political parties and elections) or the internal management of each community (through public debate and participation in the diagnosis, design, intervention, and evaluation of any project or task performed).
What was initially formulated as legal equality (equality before the law and voting rights) has expanded to education (universal right to education) and has achieved both the economic sphere (equal access to the market and transforming it to secure people’s rights) such as health (health for all) and welfare issues and support in situations of dependence (as the recent legislation on dependency in Spain).
1.2. The Market and Postmodernity: The Limits of Individualism
The values in which we socialize in twenty-first-century capitalist societies encourage an individualistic vision of society, our life path, and economy: competition, training, leadership, freedom, individual decision, the sole responsibility of each person for their destination. Postmodernism, by dissolving culture, history, and the subject’s own avatar in a moment, reinforces this individualism to the limit, reducing reality to a clash between individual will and the object that resists or adapts to it.
Thus, it is postulated that a person is defined through competition, consumption, and individual will, in a model of self in which the subject and reality have been turned into merchandise and, therefore, have been affected by the transfer of use value to exchange value, a value increasingly booming due to the nature of capitalism.
Strengthening the Public: Community Empowerment
The notion of democratic citizenship is based on a dynamic conception of a personal project. We are beings with potential, and the exercise of this potential demands a structural configuration of our environment.
For example, one of the problems of highly degraded environments is the relational model and set of values of people who internalize negative values. These models and values prevent them from realizing their potential and changing the structural conditions that continue to sentence them to lives in precarious conditions.
The objective of what we call empowerment, or strengthening, is the self-realization of each person, enhancing their welfare and their ability to change themselves, their family, and their environment. It is essential to establish relationships with others within a suitable model that allows us to recognize each other and recognize ourselves in them.
1.3. How to Define Empowerment?
This is a complex term difficult to translate to Spanish, and refers to the potential of people to face their inner lives, their relationships with others, and their collective projects with increased power. It has a direct bearing on the notion of democratic citizenship. For citizenship to be exercised, the environment must allow our citizens to exercise it, and each of us must have the ability to exercise it in the sense of undertaking our personal and community projects. Since we are relational beings, the relationship model is essential to the definition of oneself and others. In this regard, most theories concerning the notion of empowerment are designed to analyze the concept of power, its forms of use, and distribution as a central mechanism to promote social change. From these approaches to break the poverty cycle, it is necessary to train people and carry out a reform of social structures to achieve an equitable distribution of power.
Empowerment can be defined as a social action process that promotes the participation of people, organizations, and communities with the aim of increasing their capacity for individual and community control and the effectiveness of political action, improving quality of life and social justice.
It is a process of strengthening personal skills through community interaction, and also the capacity of the community to act together. This means it acts as a catalyst for social context and as a positive experience for each person in relationship with others.
In this sense, we can distinguish four characteristics of this building process, which are re-enacted on themselves in a dynamic process that can be called the virtuous circle of empowerment: