Comprensione, simbolo, alterità. Aspetti antropologici dell’ermeneutica interculturale

This article analyses some relationships between intercultural hermeneutics and anthropology, stressing in particular the role played by symbolic dimension in understanding culture (as showed in different ways by the work of Clifford Geertz and Carl Gustav Jung). Concepts like the ones of heterotopia, threshold, liminality can be useful to characterize the experiences of the other and of the stranger upon which the work of intercultural hermeneutics is based. In the context of globalisation Dilthey’s idea that understanding occurs in-between the self and the other takes on new importance. Aware of the impossibility to reduce different cultures to an all-encompassing model, both intercultural hermeneutics and anthropology focus on the issue to overcome the opposition between universalism and relativism. Through its dynamic idea of man as an indeterminate and open being, philosophical anthropology (Gehlen, Plessner) can give a basis to cultural hermeneutics for its aim of understanding humanity in its different forms.