Evolution and crisis of multiculturalism in light of the ideas of polyethnic (cross-cultural) justice

The goal of this research lies in analyzing the essence and problems of the genesis of multiculturalism and its varieties, factors of crisis in its development, and overcoming the crisis situation in a broad ethical-philosophical context. The author demonstrates that the construction of multicultural society should be based not on a limited understanding of culture as a set of religious statutes, ethnic norms, customs and traditions, but on the philosophical conceptualization of culture as a system that forms profound values, the crucial of which is justice. Special attention is given to substantiation of the categories of “social justice” and “law”, which manifest as the essential grounds of a modern multicultural society. It is demonstrated that social justice is the determining basis for the development of modern multicultural societies, i.e. the necessary condition for harmonious coexistence of individuals, groups and society as a whole. The conclusion is made that on the one hand, the globalization processes strengthen the integration, forming a single sociocultural space, while on the other hand, complicate the adaptation of ethnic cultures and their representatives, which generates tension in cross-cultural interaction, as well as inclusion and positive reliance on social justice as the fundamental value of any society allows finding the ethical measure in regulation of issues emerging in modern multicultural societies.

Cultural and Ethnic Features of Udege People’s Experiences in Extreme Situations

This article discusses the definition of an extreme situation, its parameters and features, as well as the impact on the psychoemotional state of a person. The changes that can occur in a person's mental activity, in particular at the cognitive, emotional and behavioral levels, are described under the influence of not only personal factors, but also cultural characteristics, as well as individual life experience. On the example of the Udege ethnic group, ethnicity is considered as a factor of influence on human behavior in an extreme situation. Detailed consideration of this issue allows us to determine the degree of influence of ethnicity on behavior in an extreme situation and pay attention to the need to take into account cultural and ethnic characteristics when performing professional activities by psychologists in an extreme situation. The analysis of research is carried out, which allows us to identify the overall psychological characteristics of the Udege people, which were formed under the influence of cultural and moral - ethnic norms and values characteristic of these representatives of the Tungus-Manchu ethnic group. In particular, the features of ritual actions and rites were considered, as a characteristic of religious beliefs, moral and ethnic bases of interaction between representatives of the ethnic group. Features of everyday life features of gender distribution of roles, bases of marriage relations, bases of child-parent relations and characteristics of education. These features of cultural and ethnic values are considered as conditions that affect a person's behavioral response in an extreme situation and allow us to create a General psychological portrait of the Udege ethnic group, on the basis of which it becomes possible to make assumptions about the possible reactions of Udege people in an extreme situation.

Communicatively Meaningful Silence as a Way to Express the Emotional States of Characters in the Novel of Mikhail Sholokhov «And Quiet Flows the Don»

Silence is a communicative phenomenon with its own psychological meaning and evaluative semantics. The article treats silence, when it replaces speech, as a zero verbal reaction, the meaning of which depends on the specific communicative situation and on the previous phrase of the dialogue. The research of communicatively meaningful silence in the novel of Mikhail Sholokhov «And Quiet Flows the Don» suggests that it is closely connected with the cultural and ethnic norms of behavior that are common among Don Cossacks. Emotive silence that means a threat and evaluative silence as a reaction to the previous phrase of a dialogue are two of the typical ways to express the emotions of characters that Mikhail Sholokhov uses in his novel «And Quiet Flows the Don». The analysis of such dialogical fragments of the novel that represent communicative situations of conflict made it possible to single out several functions of silence that are typical of this text, and the actualization of these functions helps to express emotive-evaluative meanings. Primarily the expressive and the evaluative functions of silence help the text of the novel to depict a living communicative situation.

THE DIAGNOSTICS OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE OF THE PERSON USING PROVERBS AND SAYINGS

In this article social intelligence of teachers of pre-school educational establishments was analyzed in the context of understanding by the person the meaning of proverbs and sayings which include socially determined sense. The author of the article considers the most important criteria for productive functioning of the teacher’s social intelligence so called successful solution of human social non-standard (including – the most original) tasks, as well as the success of a specialist in the implementation of pedagogical activities. The first involves the mandatory functioning of decision-making mechanism. This mechanism, as well as other functional mechanisms of social intelligence (the mechanism of decentralization, the mechanism of intellectual initiation, reflexive mechanisms, etc.), are predetermined by individual cognition, for example, attention, imagination, perception, memory, thinking. That’s why we have a deal with automatism of functional mechanisms of social intelligence. In the field of mnemonic experience (the mnemonic aspect of social intelligence) conscious experiences are accompanied by a sense of subjective evidence of what had been happened. The mechanism of making a socially balanced decision was analyzed taking into account the complexity, non-standard social situation. This mechanism allows the teacher to move away from intellectual formations of a person as a representative of a certain national-cultural space, and, avoiding prototypes and ethnic stereotypes, to choose the most appropriate for this social situation the mechanism for updating the reflection of the subjective space, the cognitive style of carrying out professional activity, and building a development logic situations of interpersonal interaction, taking into account moral and ethnic norms, values, etc., to make a socially weighed decision. The latter will contribute not only because the teacher will adequately and empathically interact with other actors (colleagues and trustees), but also, including the achievement of the teacher of success in the professional activity. In the functional aspect we are talking about the amplification of social intelligence. The empirical results of our research allow to distinguish the following tendencies: 1) there are no statistically significant differences in the results of teachers of different groups (including the directors of pre-school educational institutions) according to the success of their interpretation of social meaning at a generalized level; 2) teachers of pre-school educational institutions prevail over the following levels of understanding the meaning of proverbs (sayings), as the “level of concrete understanding” and the “level of global understanding”.

I Feel Myself in a Cage of Bird: Berber Female Students’ Self-Identification in the Algerian Society - A Phenomenological Study

Algeria is flavoured by a diversity of ethnicities and languages. The country is dominated by two ethnic groups: Arabs and Berbers. My concern falls upon identity negotiation within the latter group and exploring how women within the Berber community represent themselves and how the society perceives them. To answer this question, I explored the autobiographical stories of three Algerian female students who study English as a foreign language at Bejaia University, and who grew up amongst Berbers. They took part in a forum theatre course I ran at their University to explore EFL learner identity. Adopting an idiographic case-by-case phenomenological analysis to the written stories of these three students brought my attention into the self-image they gave to themselves to articulate their identity. This study also looked at the factor of power relations in their experiences drawing on Bourdieu’s perspective. The findings of this phenomenological analysis revealed the impact of culture and ethnic norms on these students’ s freedom, desires, and transitions in education. This impact was at some stage distinctive. I discuss in this further in this paper.

‘Good Muslim women’ at work: An Islamic and postcolonial perspective on ethnic privilege

Within sparse studies available on ethnic privilege at work, the emphasis is dominantly on ethnic privileges available to white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, heterosexual men and to a lesser extent white women. This paper presents and develops an Islamic and postcolonial perspective on ethnic privilege, which is unique not only due to contextual and cultural differences but also due to its postcolonial nature and composition. By postcolonial, the paper refers to cultural legacies of Arab colonialism and ideology in South Asia and elsewhere. Drawing on a qualitative study of Muslim female employees in Pakistan, the paper shows that religio-ethnic privilege represents postcolonial influences of a foreign (Arab-Salafi, ultra-orthodox Islamist) culture on a (non-Arab Muslim) society, and as such does not represent ethnic norms of a local mainstream society. The paper investigates the case of religio-ethnic privilege and female employment in Pakistan and examines how a foreign-influenced stereotype of female modesty is used to benchmark and preferentially treat ‘good Muslim women.’ The analysis shows that an Islamic and postcolonial lens may be needed to understand the nature and implications of religio-ethnic privilege at work in Muslim majority countries and societies.

Ethnicity in linguistic variation

The Afrikaans speech community is characterized by a long-standing rift between Whites and Coloureds, and is for a large part bilingual, with English being increasingly integrated in its stylistic repertoire. Yet, the history of English is different across the White/Coloured divide, as in particular in terms of diffusion and in terms of ideological associations. The question we wish to ask is twofold. First, how far may there be a question of ethnic norms of Afrikaans-English code-switching? Second, if norms of code-switching are different across the ethnic divide, is code-switching used differently in the negotiation of White and Coloured identities? This contribution is organized in three main parts. First, we give an overview of the different norms of Afrikaans-English code-switching encountered across Whites and Coloureds on the basis of a corpus of informal speech data. Then we give an overview of the sequential patterns of Afrikaans-English code-switching following a CA methodology. Finally, we determine with the help of macrosocial knowledge in how far these different forms and functions of Afrikaans-English code-switching are made relevant to the projection of White and Coloured identities in South Africa’s current post-Apartheid context on the basis of select individual examples. The results of our analysis indicate that Afrikaans-English code-switching in the Coloured data displays the features of a ‘mixed code’, which is perceived as a ‘we-code’, where English input tends to be stylistically neutral. By contrast, English input is more syntactically and sequentially salient in the White data, and more visibly serves purposes of identity-negotiation. Despite those differences, there remains a clear correlation in both White and Coloured samples between the use of English monolingual code and affiliation with ‘New South African values’.