Revisiting Intercultural Competence

This paper argues that intercultural competence is not something that needs to be acquired anew but that needs to be recovered from our past experience of small culture formation developed during the process of socialization from birth. This small culture formation is on the go because it is a constant activity in response to everyday engagement with other people. It is activated by drawing threads of experience that can connect with the experiences of others. During cultural travel such threads can be pulled both from home to abroad and back again. This is however not a straightforward process because operating in the other directions are blocks that are created by Self and Other politics and essentialist discourses of culture that can enter into the process at any point, also fueled by our everyday understanding of the world and the global position and politics inherited from national structures. Any process of intercultural competence training needs to help intercultural travelers to recover existing threads and avoid blocks by means of ethnographic disciplines.