Dismantling Kurdish Texts: An Orientalist Approach

Introduction

Postcolonial theory traces back to the skeptical view toward the quality of representation of non-Western societies and cultures in Western literary, cultural, social, and political worldviews. In the first stage, figures, such as, Raymond Schwab (1984), Edward Said (1994, 1997, 2003), Aijaz Ahmad (1992, 1995), Mary Pratt (1992), and Peter Hulme (1992), in different ways, critically reread the effects of colonial imperialism discourse on an Orientalists’ perspective toward cultures of non-Western societies or colonies. These thinkers have shown that the “Orient,” in Orientalists studies, is a discursive notion constructed by the Western writers and bears mainly a negative representation, and as Edward Said (2003) argues, the “Orient” was almost an European invention and is depicted as irrational, depraved, childlike, exotic, inferior, and different. In the second stage, the postcolonial discourse, in addition to the main issue of colonial discourse, proposes a number of new ideas and questions raised by scholars, such as, Gayatri Spivak (1990, 1995, 1996), Homi Bhabha (1994a, 1994b), and Robert Young (2001, 2003), who have explored the “colonial discourse analysis” and tried to evaluate it from psychoanalytical, deconstructive, and neo-Marxist perspectives.

Although the prefix “post” in the term postcolonial refers to a historical era and theoretical orientation, the main issue of postcolonial discourse is to investigate the impacts of colonialism on the social structure and configuration of the current Third World countries. It is assumed that even after the demise of colonialism, the fundamental relationships of power have remained unchanged. Asian, African, and Latin American countries as non-Western continents are still predominantly in an unequal relationship with North America and Europe. Postcolonial studies intend to investigate the multifaceted relations between Western and non-Western people and societies. Thus, these studies are now conducted to open room for voices of the voiceless.

Since the Renaissance, when the objective and subjective obstacles of knowing the “Rest” were removed and exploratory journeys and colonial activities took place, the “West” has been distinguished from the “Rest” (Hall, 1992). Consequently, Western passengers, tourists, and writers published a variety of books on non-Western societies and cultures that validated Orientalism. These works not only formulated the concept of the “Other” universally but also constructed the “Orient” and “Orientalism” (Said, 1997) and paved the way for the “European culture to gain in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (Said, 2003, p. 3).

Although representations of the Orient in the Western texts have formed the subject of many studies, the Kurdish texts have been generally overlooked. Thus, in this article, we concentrate on Kurdistan ¹ in a similar position to the Orient in Orientalism studies; that is, the Kurdish texts by Western writers follow the logic of “Orientalism.” Therefore, this article tries to answer three main questions: (a) How are the Kurds represented in Kurdish texts? (b) What are similar elements of Kurdish texts by Western writers and the Orientalism discourse? and (c) What are the new changes and orientations in Kurdish texts?

Kurdish Studies in Context

Kurdish studies in its broadest sense have emerged since the fourth century BC. The Greek writer Xenophon devoted a few parts of his famous work Anabasis to events that happened in Kurdistan. He calls the Kurds “Kardokh” and Anabasis is the oldest source for Kurdish studies (Dilsoz, 1987, pp. 18–20) and the main text for European Kurdish scholars. The other famous book on the Kurds is Armenian History written by Moses of Khoren, an Armenian historian in the fifth century AD. When a center for Orientalism was established in Europe in 1841, this book was translated into French. Vladimir Minorsky frequently referred to this book as one of the main references in his studies on the Kurds (Pirball, 1998). According to Minorsky, “Ostrabon,” a Greek geographer, “Polybius,” a Greek historian (120 AD), and “Livius,” a Roman historian, visited some parts of Persia and used different names to refer to the Kurdish people: “Kyrtioti” by Ostrabon, “Criti” by Polybius, and “Critei” by Livius (Minorsky, 1983, pp. 2–41 cited in Pirball, 1998, p. 19).

For some centuries after Moses of Khoren, the Armenian historian (i.e., in the Medieval period), the Europeans did not publish anything new about Kurds. From the tenth century onwards, texts by Muslim writers became references for scholars. The main Muslim authors who wrote on the Kurds include Ibn Tabari, Ahmad Dinawari, Ibn Rasteh, Yaaqoubi, Istakhri, Masoudi, Ibn Howql, Abu Ali Farsi, Ibn Balkhi, Ibn Assir, Ibn Jobeer, Yaqout Hamavy, Ibn Shdad, Abu Zakaria, Sheikh Al-Rabveh, Abulfada Alaywbi, Ibn Khaldun, Fazlollah Al-Amri, Ibn Battuta, and Hamdollah Mostofi (ibid., pp. 2–21).

With the prevalence of Orientalism in the next centuries, European writers again published some texts about the Kurds. Among the books written by Western writers which deal with the Kurds somehow till the end of the eighteenth century, two cases are exceptional. The first to be published was a book written by Maurizio Garzoni, an Italian priest, on the Kurdish Grammar in 1787. He spent 18 years in the “Emadie” region and is seen as the founder of modern Kurdish studies. While in the other books just a few pages were devoted to the Kurds, his entire book is devoted to the language of the Kurds. Second work, Comparative Dictionary of Languages of Academician Palace was published in the same year upon Princess Kathrin’s orders. For the first time in history, it included 276 Kurdish words (Nikitin, 1987, p. 602). Up to 1959, Kurdish studies were part of Iranian studies which had separated from Orientalism in the late nineteenth century. At that time, the department of Kurdish research separated from Iranian studies and Kurdish studies became an independent discipline in the Orientalism Faculty of Saint Petersburg Academy.

After that, people of various expertise and concern gathered fundamental and essential information and data by traveling to Kurdistan or through studying the works of other Kurdish scholars and published a plethora of works about the Kurds. The main objectives of the Western writers are political, missionary, economic, scientific, literary, and artistic and their subjects are anthropological characteristics of the Kurds (race, origin, etc.), archaeology and history of the Kurds and Kurdistan (manuscripts, historical and ancient sites and remains and so on), Kurdish language and its dialects, Kurdish literature and folklore, architecture, music, natural and political geography, religion and religious characteristics.

Textual Approach

The Kurdish texts discussed in this study include a variety of works ranging from daily notes to macro-political analysis and academic studies published in the form of books and articles by Western writers. In addition, this study draws no dividing line between academic texts and nonacademic ones. As Edward Said (2003, p. 3) argues,

Orientalism includes several aspects, all of them are interdependent. In one aspect, Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident.” Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. Thus, a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, “mind,” destiny, and so on.

Then, all of these works whether academic or nonacademic together produce and reproduce the “Orient.”

Therefore, Edward Said has shown that there are a number of features which occur frequently in texts about colonized countries and that these cannot be attributed simply to the individual author’s beliefs, but are rather due to larger-scale belief systems structured by discursive frameworks, and are given credibility and force by the power relations found in imperialism (Mills, 1997, p. 106). Colonial discourse does not therefore simply refer to a body of texts with similar subject-matter, but rather refers to a set of practices and rules which produced those texts and the methodological organization of the thinking underlying those texts. In Orientalism, Said described the discursive features of that body of knowledge which was produced in the nineteenth century by learned scholars, travelers, poets, and novelists, which effectively produced “the Orient” as a repository of the Western knowledge, rather than as a society and culture functioning on its own terms (ibid., p. 108).

This study mainly focuses and analyzes the following books: Kurds and Kurdistan: A Political, Sociological and Historical Study (Nikitin, 1987), first published under the title Les Kurdes: étudesociologique et historique in 1956; Kurds, Turks and Arabs: Politics, Travel and Research in North-Eastern Iraq 1919–1925 (Edmonds, 2003), first published in 1957; The Kurds and Kurdistan (Kinnane, 1993), first published in 1964; Into Kurdistan: Frontiers under Fire (Laizer, 1991); Agha, Shaikh and State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan (Bruinssen, 1992), first published in 1992; A Modern History of the Kurds (McDowall, 2004), first published in 1996; and After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? My Encounters with Kurdistan (Randal, 2000), first published in 1997.

We have chosen the aforementioned works for analysis due to some special reasons. They have been referred to by almost all writers and scholars who have studied and considered the Kurds. These works are in English or translated into Persian therefore, it enabled us to study and analyze them without a langue barrier. In addition, they are comprehensive and cover almost all parts and aspects of Kurdistan, not some parts or regions or aspects of Kurdistan. Furthermore, analysis capability is another criterion for choosing the works; “a critical assessment” is conducted on the works including social, political, and cultural statements, and therefore, lots of works were excluded from this study because they lacked such statements, generally discussed geography, agriculture and economy, habitat and such categories. Finally, the study did not plan to probe works written in the distant past.

Texts have been analyzed through Said’s Orientalist perspective. According to Said (2003), Orientalism provided a rationalization for European colonialism based on a self-serving history in which “the West” constructed “the East” as extremely different and inferior, and therefore in need of the Western intervention in order to be rescued. He believes that the Orient was almost a European invention, and has been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, and remarkable experiences. Therefore, Oriental discourse uses some discursive practices and elements to represent and articulate its subject-world. Thus, it regards its subject-world, “the Orient” (and Kurdistan as a part of it), as an integrated whole and united entity and describes it with recourse to its discursive elements, such as, alien to the West, asynchronous, lack of validity, exoticism, being problematic, violent seeking, intrinsic stupidity, backward, uncivilized, and at times dangerous and so on. This trend has been the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning “the Orient,” its people, customs, mind, destiny, etc. in order to achieve its goals, such as, high-handed executive attitude, power, domination, superiority, and gaining identity through constructing its “Other” and setting itself off against it as a sort of inferior identity.

Therefore, in this analysis, to examine “Orientalism” some core elements of this discourse, identified by Said, have been considered and then the study attempts to support and find evidences for these discursive elements of “Orientalism.”

In order to reveal discursive practices and elements of Orientalists, it would be more logical to begin with analyzing the phrases that authors have chosen as titles for the books on Kurds. Choosing specific words as the topic of a work seems to be indicative of a bunch of secret and fundamental opinions, ideas, and aims and would be able to reveal some information, such as, prominent discourse, group affiliation, reference group, status, and culture of the author. Then, the study focuses on the content of the books to answer the questions of the study and discusses nominal generalization, exoticism, asynchronism, myth-making, essentialism, strategic formation and access to discourse, strategic location, and moral position as the elements articulating the Orientalist discourse in the Kurdish texts. Finally, it will be argued that signs of understanding, sensitivity, and tolerance toward the Kurds have evolved in recent decades.

Findings

Strategic Formation and Access to Discourse

One of Edward Said’s principal methodological devices for studying authority in “Orientalism” is strategic formation. Said argues that strategic formation “is a way of analyzing the relationship between texts and the way in which groups of texts, types of texts, even textual genres, acquire mass, density, and referential power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large” (2003, p. 20). In explaining strategic formation, access to discourse is of great clarifying power:

that is, through special access to, and control over the mean of public discourse and communication, dominant groups or institutions may influence the structures of text and talk in such a way that, as a result, the knowledge, attitudes, norms, values and ideologies of recipients are—more or less indirectly affected in the interest of the dominant group. (van Dijk, 1996, p. 85)

Kurdish texts also could be analyzed within this framework.

Writers on Kurds fall into two groups: those who have lived or worked in Kurdistan as researchers or governmental agents and those who have no direct experience in Kurdistan and depended on existing data and archives. The works of both groups have some scientific and methodological defects. Although the first group has had lived experience in Kurdistan, they refer to early works which lack methodological validity or in many cases the sources of their works are not valid. On the other hand, the second group’s works are mainly based on secondary data and have some methodological and validity problems in their references. In this section, this article tries to reveal aforementioned defects in Kurdish texts mainly through Said’s methodological device for studying authority, that is, strategic formation, and demonstrates writers’ exclusive access to Oriental discourse and ignoring other voices.

Based on “strategic formation,” the first problem of Kurdish texts is related to their references; they refer to each other or some certain authors (e.g., Xenophon, Arab writers, Fraser, Wigram, Rich, Dixon, Muller, Moltkeh, and Leach) and that has led to repetition and reproduction of many historically wrong and invalid notions. For example, on the origin of the Kurds many researchers refer to the myth of “the Generation of Jinn” which has been proposed in earlier Kurdish works. In addition, even the first authors attribute some features to the Kurds which are based on the authors’ guess. Sometimes, they generalize the most unique and rare observed characteristics and behaviors to all of the Kurds. For example, Martin Van Bruinessen (1992, p. 127) confesses what Leach has written about Agha’s large share of the crop was not actually based on observed data rather it was based on his guess. Despite this fact, his wrong guess had been taken for granted as firsthand data by writers for decades. Ironically, Bruinessen himself makes a more unforgivable mistake than Leach. He writes a long story about rituals of marriage with the father’s brother’s daughter and about its details then generalizes it to the whole Kurdish population. Surprisingly, he writes about a certain custom of this ritual in this way: “I never witnessed a concrete case where this happened, but I have heard of this custom in various corners of Kurdistan” (1992, p. 72).

In connection with “strategic formulation,” referring to the concept of “access to discourse” will illustrate the goals of the study more pertinently. Teun A. van Dijk (1996) believes access to the discourse is possible only for in-groups and discursive control is defined based on this access. He believes minorities and the “Others” have limited and often no access to the discourses articulated by dominant groups or institutions.

According to the above model, the Kurds do not have access to the discourse of these writers on them. In many cases, writers and their works are neglected in the interest of the dominant group or sometimes based on what Said calls “strategic position.” Through strategic position, the Western scholars cast their own sayings and writings as superior to the sayings and writings of Eastern scholars (Said, 2003, p. 20). In accordance with this principle, wherever writers refer to Kurdish sources, authors and informed people, they underestimate them, and there are signs of mistrust of them. For example, Edmonds on Kurdish ruling families wrote Kurdish available sources do not have validity and are worthless to refer to (2003, p. 68). Similarly, Bruinessen doubted all Kurdish sources, the oral and written notes, about Sheikh Said’s movement in Turkish Kurdistan and claims that he had checked the accounts and comments of Kurdish sources with the Turkey and Iraq files of the British Foreign Office (1992, p. 266). In addition, about the capture of one major town, Elaziz, he claims that “information from Turkish and Kurdish sources (none of which is first-hand) is usefully complemented by the observations of a European resident of that city” (ibid., p. 289).

Finally, as Ibrahim Younesi, a Kurdish translator of Kurdish texts to Persian, claims that Kurds, due to lack of access to the Orientalist discourse still have not been able to erase the lies of the nineteenth century travelers and writers from the minds of European people and others. The story of imaginary banditries and dastardliness is still the story of revelries through which readers develop their image of the Kurds (quoted in Laizer, 2003, p. 7).

Strategic Location and Moral Position

One of Said’s principal methodological devices in his book Orientalism is “strategic location,” which reflects intellectual authority, and, methodologically, it is a way of describing the author’s position in a text with regard to the subject he writes about. Said argues that every Westerner who writes about the Orient locates himself vis-à-vis the Orient and demonstrates its superiority over the Oriental people (2003, p. 20).

In the previous sections we demonstrated the Kurds’ inferior position in Kurdish texts which in turn indicates writers’ alleged superior position. In other words, all material of Kurdish texts presented in the previous sections under different themes indicates writers alleged superiority and the Kurds inferiority directly or indirectly through choosing titles, such as, The Yezidis: A Strange Survival, The Devil Worshippers, The Sheep and the Chevrolet, Wild Life Among the Kurds, Children of the Jinn, and Through Wild Kurdistan. Furthermore, we argued that writers believe in their superiority in the field of knowledge production, that is, they regard Kurdish sources, writers, and informed people to be inferior to Western ones.

In this section, we attempt to touch the Kurds moral inferior position which in turn is an indication of the writers’ moral superiority which they attribute to themselves based on their cultural criteria. Results of the study show that, in most cases, moral judgments have been made through Western humanistic and chiefly instrumental rational criteria, which are logically not able to describe and explain behaviors and conditions exterior to the Western moral discourse appropriately. For example, Edmonds who attributed the most negative traits to the Kurds writes about his bombardment of a village in Kurdistan in this way. “… Today we began to bombard Margah. ⁵ The bombardment excited all of us …” (2003, p. 321). “When the Napalm Bombs collapsed and subsequently column of flame and smoke rose to the air, the scene was charming” (ibid., p. 412). Here, Edmonds does not consider his brutal bombardment, in which innocent farmers and children were killed and their crops burnt down, as a sign of moral inferiority, but considers whatever different from the Western culture in Kurdistan as signs of moral inferiority. It is noteworthy to inform critics that his attitude toward the Kurds is so immoral that even other writers on Kurds criticized him severely including Lazier who believes Edmonds and others like him have made science an instrument for achieving governments’ goals in “the Orient” which has been effective in acquiring dominance and control over the wealth and oil sources (Edmonds, 2003, p. 154).

The volume and wide range of negative and immoral characteristics, such as, banditry, pugnacity, bloodshed, and so on attributed to the Kurds explicitly suggests that morality does not have a reasonable place among Kurdish people. On this matter, Lazier writes that among works written about the Kurds only a few of them have admired the Kurds for the sake of desirable traits and characteristics while most of them have followed common clichés and stereotypes and described the Kurds as dreadful, brutal, atrocious, and heartless people (ibid., p. 146). The data of our study sections confirm Laizer’s notion.

In addition, wherever positive traits, such as, braveness, hospitality and so on, have been attributed to the Kurds, in most cases they have been emotional traits or have been immediately followed by negative and immoral ones, such as, banditry, natural violence, and bloodthirstiness. Let us point to some positive traits attributed to the Kurds, which is immediately followed by negative and immoral characteristics: Although the Kurds are brave, in economy, they are stupid (Nikitin, 1987, p. 170), and Kurds, in spite of savagery, have feelings full of honor and pride (ibid., p. 181). Their conscious face does not show anything other than respect for the law of nature and violence (Laizer, 2003, p. 70). It was supposed banditry was the entertainment of the mountainous Kurds (Kinnane, 1993, p. 53). The Kurds show interest for nothing other than plundering their neighbors (Wigram, 1910 cited in Nikitin, 1987, p. 183).

Evolving Signs of Understanding, Sensitivity, and Tolerance

In recent decades, the prevalence and emergence of postmodern movements, decline of grand-narratives and resurrection of the “Others” and minorities have led to more tolerant and sensitive attention to the Kurds. Based on factors, such as, depending on political powers and ontological and epistemological paradigms, Western writers could be categorized into two main groups, namely, the group that has non-empathic or even hostile attitudes toward the Kurds and the group that has more empathic or to some extent value-free attitude toward the subject.

Western writers who were dependent on political powers had the lowest level of empathy toward the Kurds and described them from a hostile perspective. For example, Edmonds (2003) and Nikitin (1987), who described the Kurd in the most negative way, are obvious examples of the first group. In addition, early Western writers whether they are independent of or dependent on political powers generally fall into the first category due to their West-oriented and positivist perspectives. They commonly wrote about the Kurds through Western scientific and cultural criteria without any empathy with their subject. Western writers who were independent of political powers and West-oriented and positivist perspectives fall into the second group. They were influenced by soft and flexible methodologies and thoughts of postmodernism and cultural relativism. In addition, it seems that scholars independent of political powers due to nonutilitarian attitude readily abandoned classical Orientalist perspective and accepted approaches sensitive to the “Other.” Therefore, they had more empathy toward their subject, and their attitude toward the Kurds is free of Western values; Randal (2000), Laizer (2003), McDowall (2004), and so on are among this group.

Randal, being aware of negative attitudes of Western writers toward the Kurds, criticizes Kurdish texts in this way, “What passed for a deeper knowledge of the Kurds could be summed up in a few banalities. Europeans considered Kurdistan as remote and dangerous as the American Wild West” (1998, p. 4). It seems Randal intends to argue that Kurdistan is described in ways to denigrate it, produce a negative image of it, and introduce it as “Other,” in order to produce a positive, civilized image of the Western society. He believes that each text which was written about the Kurds by Western writers reinforced particular negative, non-sympathetic, and stereotypical images and ways of thinking.

Despite of many Western writers, Randal does not only devotes all parts of his work to focusing and highlighting exoticism and entertaining characteristics or other elements in constructing the Orientalist discourse but also writes about some facts the Kurds are concerned with. He writes:

For the Kurds were—and still are—the fourth largest group in the Middle East and, arguably, its prize losers. No one disputes that they are the world’s largest ethnic group without a state of their own. … Deprived even of their own oil and kept on short rations in one state, their national dress banned in another, their language in still in third, their most basic human and civil rights denied to differing … They have survived the first aerial bombing in the third world, poison gas, the deliberate leveling of their rural society in Iraq, mass destruction of villages and forced deportation to the western cities of Turkey, and the assassination of their leaders in Iran. The Royal Air Force bombed Iraqi Kurds in January 1919 in what is believed to be the first use of air power to put down revolts; bombing was cheaper than garrisoning troops. (1998, pp. 4–5)

One could discern empathy or to some extent value-free attitude toward the Kurds in Laizer’s work too. She openly shows and condemns utilitarian ethics and interests of the West in Kurdish texts. She writes:

Edmond’s book Kurds, Turks and Arabs deals with the Kurdo-British relations largely from the British point of view … the Kurds’ right to administer their own territory is never envisioned, nor are the benefits of British control questioned. The Kurds were to be managed in such a way to cause the British administration as little trouble as possible …. Many of the great English travelers were useful to the government back home in precisely the same term: they turned their special knowledge into working tools for the administrators of the East as they sought to retain influence and assets and to keep a firm grip on oil revenues. (1991, pp. 81–82)

McDowall is another Western writer being aware of Orientalism discourse and is among the group that has more empathic or to some extent value-free attitude toward the subject. His studies of Kurdish texts endowed him with this insight that the Kurds have remained marginalized geographically, politically, and economically deserving to be much better understood (2004, p. xi).

Concluding Remarks

This study argued that Kurdish texts are articulated on the bases of what Edward Said calls Orientalism. According to Said (1978), the core notion of Orientalism is that “the East” is extremely different and inferior to “the West,” and therefore in need of Western intervention in order to be rescued. Western writers tend to use Orientalist discourse when they describe the Kurds with recourse to elements, such as, alien to the West, exotic, asynchronous, lack of validity, being problematic, violence seeking, intrinsic stupidity, and moral inferiority.

Many of the writings studied in this article went to the extremes to show that the Kurds are different from the Westerners. They chose strange, unusual, and holistic titles for their works. The unusual and holistic titles not only have reproduced negative attitudes toward the subject but also have implied generalization and simplified the subject of the study. Western writers pointed to myths, exotic characteristics, asynchronism, and considering almost all negative traits as inherited and inborn ones in order to prove their superiority to the Kurds and legitimize their policies in Kurdistan. In addition, they attempted to differentiate the Kurds from the Westerners through representing them as existing on a different timescale and deny them coevalness. “Strategic Formation” was an effective way to reproduce the negative attitudes toward the Kurds and hamper the Kurds access to the Kurdish discourse and these texts have tried to improve moral inferior position of the Kurds, which in turn is an indicative of their morally superior position. In most cases, moral judgments have been made through Western humanistic and chiefly instrumental rational criteria, which are logically not able to describe and explain behaviors and conditions exterior to the Western moral discourse appropriately.

However, in recent decades, inflexible Kurdish discourse has been fading away, Orientalist characteristics in Kurdish texts have reduced remarkably and more signs of understanding, or at least more sensitivity and tolerance have appeared. During this period, Western writers have been influenced by soft and flexible methodologies and thoughts of postmodernism and cultural relativism. They had more empathy or somehow attitudes free of Western values toward their subject.

At the end, we must ask, is there an alternative for Orientalism? Is there a way possible for emancipation from its hegemonic pattern? As Edward Said (2003) believes, it is not logical to consider that Orientalism remains forever without rivals and opponents intellectually, ideologically, and politically. However, even if the duality of the “Orient” and the “Occident” is discarded, the strong ideological and political realities cast a shadow on contemporary scientific research. In other words, even if we dissolve the East–West dichotomy, there is no escape from cultural dualities, such as, north and south, black and white, male and female, and so on. Therefore, as he recommends, instead of thinking of an alternative, we must be sensitive to the method of representation of the “Others,” to the racism, the role of intellectuals, skeptical and critical attitudes. In addition, what is very important in such atmosphere is to establish and strengthen relationships among cultures and to practice communicative action beyond any assimilation and deprivation processes.