Living with Difference: How to Build Community in a Divided World (California Series in Public Anthropology, 37, Band 37) - Softcover

Seligman, Adam B.; Wasserfall, Rahel R.; Montgomery, David W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520284127 ISBN 13: 9780520284128

Verlag: University of California Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Whether looking at divided cities or working with populations on the margins of society, a growing number of engaged academics have reached out to communities around the world to address the practical problems of living with difference. This book explores the challenges and necessities of accommodating difference, however difficult and uncomfortable such accommodation may be. Drawing on fourteen years of theoretical insights and unique pedagogy, CEDAR—Communities Engaging with Difference and Religion—has worked internationally with community leaders, activists, and other partners to take the insights of anthropology out of the classroom and into the world. Rather than addressing conflict by emphasizing what is shared, Living with Difference argues for the centrality of difference in creating community, seeking ways not to overcome or deny differences but to live with and within them in a self-reflective space and practice. This volume also includes a manual for organizers to implement CEDAR’s strategies in their own communities.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Adam B. Seligman is Director of CEDAR and Professor of Religion at Boston University.

Rahel R. Wasserfall is Director of Training and Evaluation for CEDAR and a resident scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University.

David W. Montgomery is Director of Program Development for CEDAR.

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"The authors have the courage as well as the philosophical skills to challenge the sentimentalities designed to help us all to just 'get along.' Instead, they draw on their pedagogical experience to provide an account of how difference can be lived. This fascinating book has the potential to change the discussion about how we might live at peace without the peace achieved occluding our rightly lasting differences."—Stanley Hauerwas, Professor Emeritus of Divinity and Law at Duke University

"Both a work of scholarship of value to the academy and a practical guide for improving intergroup relations. The material is fresh and the work innovative, with new and illuminating insights. I cannot think of a comparable work.”—David Smock, Vice President of the U.S. Institute of Peace
 
"This book challenges readers to engage intellectual and human experiential resources to acquire empathy and celebrate differences as part of the knowledge of the self. An interdependent and interconnected reality can be realized when we interact with others in fully authentic ways."—Abdulaziz Sachedina, Professor of Islamic Studies at George Mason University

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"The authors have the courage as well as the philosophical skills to challenge the sentimentalities designed to help us all to just 'get along.' Instead, they draw on their pedagogical experience to provide an account of how difference can be lived. This fascinating book has the potential to change the discussion about how we might live at peace without the peace achieved occluding our rightly lasting differences."&;Stanley Hauerwas, Professor Emeritus of Divinity and Law at Duke University

"Both a work of scholarship of value to the academy and a practical guide for improving intergroup relations. The material is fresh and the work innovative, with new and illuminating insights. I cannot think of a comparable work.&;&;David Smock, Vice President of the U.S. Institute of Peace
 
"This book challenges readers to engage intellectual and human experiential resources to acquire empathy and celebrate differences as part of the knowledge of the self. An interdependent and interconnected reality can be realized when we interact with others in fully authentic ways."&;Abdulaziz Sachedina, Professor of Islamic Studies at George Mason University

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Living with Difference

How to Build Community in a Divided World

By Adam B. Seligman, Rahel R. Wasserfall, David W. Montgomery

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-28412-8

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix, 
Introduction, 1, 
1. The Story of Practice, 15, 
2. A Pedagogy of Community, 38, 
3. A Community of Pedagogy, 59, 
4. Ethnographies of Difference, 89, 
5. Living with Difference, 110, 
6. On Boundaries, Difference, and Shared Worlds, 137, 
Conclusion, 157, 
Appendix A. Signposts for Organizers, 169, 
Appendix B. Guide for Evaluators, 179, 
Appendix C. Study Questions for Discussion, 185, 
Appendix D. Further Readings, 187, 
Notes, 193, 
Bibliography, 205, 
Index, 217, 

CHAPTER 1

The Story of Practice

A radical Muslim activist from the United Kingdom, organizer of anti-Israel demonstrations and Relief for Gaza convoys, calls home in dismay when she finds herself participating in a program with Zionists — and then sums it up after two weeks saying, "I learned I could be friends with people I hate."

HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE PROGRAM

The key to the CEDAR approach is the requirement that participants, known as fellows, confront one another's differences — and then learn how to live with them anyway. In two intensive weeks of combined lectures, site visits, and hands-on learning, these fellows experience unfamiliar religious customs, grapple with beliefs that contradict their own, reexamine lifelong assumptions, and figure out how to share time and space.

CEDAR programs create new social and interpersonal spaces, broadening the range of possibilities to present a new way of "living together differently." They do not seek to build a new community in which everyone agrees and shares the same assumptions, but rather to teach people how to live with their different understandings of home, life, faith, worlds of meaning, and belonging. In short, they model the reality of how to live in our existing communities with people who are not like us — whether these differences are religious, national, tribal, linguistic, or sexual.

CEDAR was conceived of during a multireligious discussion around a restaurant table in the central market of Sarajevo in December 2001. There, against a background of wartime destruction, a conversation among a group of Jews, Muslims, and Christians sparked the idea for an experimental program using religion as a tool for understanding, not as a weapon for intolerance. In 2003 CEDAR launched its first two-week program in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia as the International Summer School on Religion and Public Life, creating a unique model for people with divergent religious identities to live with, recognize, and learn about "the other" together. Since then, the school has been held in a different country or countries each year, meeting in over a dozen locations on four continents. During its first decade of operation, it attracted more than four hundred fellows from fifty countries and a variety of backgrounds.

In 2013 the school changed its name to CEDAR and transformed itself as an organization. Instead of running one school a year, under the direction of an international team and local hosts, CEDAR is now an international network of programs — in Africa, the Balkans, and North America. The different programs that we have run over the last fourteen years have taught all involved a good deal about difference and how to get people to live with difference — not just with the cognitive dissonance it produces but also with the challenges to building trusting relations across different communities of belonging that result. We learned early that while religion may be a prime marker of difference, it is far from the only one. As we expanded our programs beyond the first schools in Bosnia, Croatia, and Israel, we gradually realized that the issues we were addressing were not limited to differences between religions, or even to those between religious and secular individuals. We came to recognize as well the importance of ethnic and tribal identities, and of sexual orientation, as sites of conflict, intolerance, and distrust among many people. Consequently, we integrated these themes into our programming.

We learned too that shared experience, as opposed to academic learning, is critical to providing a safe space in which people can explore their differences, even in the face of challenges to their own taken-for-granted categories and expectations. Shared experiences provide the frame within which fellows process and make sense of intellectual analysis. In addition, we came to realize just how important the group itself was to the work we wished to accomplish. In the first years of programming, we believed that the "other" whom the fellows would encounter, interact with, and come to understand was someone in the selected environment: Palestinian refugee camps, gay and lesbian churches, Alevi communities in Istanbul, Pomak villages in Bulgaria, and so on. What we discovered, however, was that these site visits and meetings were really just the backdrop for the real encounter — of the fellows with one another. We realized then how critical it was to bring together fellows from all over the world with as much diversity as possible in race, nation, ethnicity, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, profession, and so on. The "other," we came to recognize, was not outside the group, but inside — and it was in that internal encounter, and the act of building a group despite these multiple differences, that the key learning took place.

With time, we came to appreciate the importance of "reflective practice" in a program such as ours, and we decided to have an internal evaluator function as a resident anthropologist in every program. In dealing with the myriad problems that arise in a program that necessarily makes the details of so many private lives issues of public concern — matters of halal and kosher food, of prayer time for those so obligated, of restricted travel on holy days, and so on — the "executive" branch has little opportunity on the ground to reflect on its concrete decisions and their implications. To learn what works and what does not — indeed, just to keep one's finger on the pulse of the program as it develops during those intense two weeks — it is critical to have someone present whose only job is to observe, question, and record the significant events of the day. Hard data are much more reliable than anecdotal recollections in answering questions such as the following: Did people of different communities eat together, or did they stay with their own countrymen? How did most of the fellows react to the challenging meeting with the gay and lesbian community in the Birmingham church? Did certain groups feel excluded from one or another activity — or, alternatively, coerced into participating in one? As an evaluating tool, this reflective practice helps us assess the learning outcomes. Every year the internal evaluator produces a long, detailed report that enables staff and organizers to learn from their mistakes, as well as showing the staff how fellows responded to the programming. Each year this process allows staff to create and integrate new aspects into the programming after they reflect on the data collected. We discuss the importance and insights of such a reflective practice much more in chapters 3 and 4.

Finally,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520284127
• ISBN 13: 9780520284128
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 232
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland