Embodied ethnocentrism and the feeling of culture: A key to training for intercultural competence

The experience we make of our culture is certainly an embodied one, whatever the state of our body is. Human beings, by virtue of their non-specialized perception can live almost in any environment, (unlike animals who live in an environment), and in order to do so they need to construct the world they live in. This is why “culture is part of the physical condition of existence. We socially organize ourselves in a world that embeds relationships between individuals and between individuals and their physical environment, through a knowledge process that is still mostly physical to which we assign a meaning that is co-shared by people who maintain the same “habitual bodies”, as Merleau-Ponty would say. This is why we still go to another place to “experience” a different culture and we don’t do it virtually: because we have an embodied feeling for our culture and for other cultures and we still need to see, touch and smell in order to “experience”. The article explores the implications of this concept both for a coherent definition of culture and for teaching and training applications