The basic idea of CEDAR (Communities Engaging with Difference and Religion) is that differences are inherent in our social life. One of the differences that make group life particularly difficult, today as in the past, is the difference of religion. Its importance touches every aspect of our common life — it ranges from the legality of ritual slaughter and the composition of school menus to the laws governing the allocation of municipal land where a mosque may be built, all the way to the dates of examinations in the national education system, for example. These difficulties pose the question of the public importance of what many consider a private matter, when minorities (Jewish and Muslim, for example) lay claim to their religious needs in the public sphere. They bring to light the reluctance of the Republic in the face of the communal demands of French citizens of the Jewish and Muslim faiths1.
According to CEDAR, living with these differences requires a new approach. To live together, one must not begin by seeking the common ground we share by denying, trivializing, or privatizing difference. If we must conceive possible solutions, we must first come up against these differences and the conflicts they provoke when they are laid claim to. For some fifteen years, CEDAR has developed a pedagogy of encounter between people of different religions and has put in place a support framework in small groups where the participants undergo the personal and communal experience of these differences. The first groups were centered on religion; but, since then, we have come to realize that poverty, sexual belonging, and now refugee status are central categories of difference in certain contexts. In these groups, we work to encounter what, in general, we prefer to obscure in everyday life.
One of the pillars of this methodology is what we call reflective practice (Reflective practice)2, whose objective is the becoming-aware of the difficulties one encounters in living for two weeks with people from communities or religions different from one’s own. Reflective practice is a process that centers the gaze on the way in which we perceive social reality through and over the course of our experiences. As social actors, we are caught in networks of understanding, but also in mental categories and theoretical hypotheses. These hypotheses come from past experiences and from the theories we have about those experiences. Reflective practice allows us to become aware of our social roles and of our expectations regarding others, regarding strangers.
Our program practices an encounter with difference without effacing it. To gain access to it, we have created temporary structures that allow us to reflect on our experiences of difference, as close as possible to their lived reality, while keeping in mind their historical and social context. We have devised three apparatuses that structure the time we spend in the group. We call them “activity systems” or “activity fields.” These temporary structures are deconstruction3, small-group facilitation4, and experiential learning. The program is conceived in such a way that each day we pass from one activity field to another, the movement of the participants having to be at once structured and fluid, which allows them to reflect as close as possible to the act or the event that may have provoked difficulties in them. The activity fields become a field of practice where we come up against our sensations of discomfort, against our difficulties in encountering claimed differences that disturb us.
The combined practice of these three activity fields allows us to transform this discomfort into a source of knowledge. It helps us to encounter the difference arising from social life, without trivializing it or denying it, while trying to integrate it into our new vision of the place of difference in our lives. In addition to this reflective method, we offer lectures presented by experts on the questions that interest us in one program or another. In Uganda, for example, as we were debating the place of refugees in society, someone came to speak to us about the regional conflicts that are catalysts of the influx of refugees into that country.
At CEDAR we do not favor the purely cognitive mode of knowledge; rather, the training passes through visits to various religious sites, through group work, and through the very fact of spending all one’s time for two weeks with colleagues who are very different both in religion and in geographical origin or sexual identity5. We try to create groups in which we maximize the differences.
As an anthropologist in charge of reflective practice, I am going to present a few examples of structures that we have put in place and that have made it possible to resolve a certain number of difficulties. To give an idea of this approach, I will now present a few examples of experiential learning and of deconstruction6.
The Friday evening service in Bursa (Turkey) in 2007
That Friday, we were ten Jews gathered to bring in the Shabbat. We had also invited other members of the group, and a few Muslims and Christians had come as onlookers. Our small group of Jews did not have enough men to make the quorum necessary for a religious service in the Orthodox manner. We had to count all the Jewish women to manage it. For the only Orthodox man in the group, that was obviously not an option. But for the only liberal woman in the group, it was not an option either. It was unbearable for her not to be counted in the quorum — in Bursa, which had been the first Ottoman capital, which was once a very important center of Jewish life, and which today comprises no more than a small minority of Jews. This woman grew angry and the tone flared up. In the discussion that ensued before the Muslim participants, she expressed her frustration and refused to allow a ritual in which women would not be counted. Moreover, she added, our group is supposed to work on the ways of living one’s difference, so how is it possible that, within our small group of Jews of different obediences, we are incapable of bringing in the Shabbat in peace? The small group discussed the different positions and the emotions attached to them, and ended up finding a compromise so that all could live with this problem provoked by the reality of our differences, raw and unresolved. One of our religious men, whose practice it was to count women for the religious quorum, led the prayer. He included in it the prayer (Bare’hou) that, in Orthodox practice, is recited only when a quorum of 10 men is present. The acceptance of the Bare’hou is proclaimed aloud by all, which means that each one, in order to pray, accepts the authority of the group itself. For this ritual service to acquire a public force, it was necessary to insert the Bare’hou for one and all, the Orthodox as well as the others. The Orthodox man allowed himself to be counted, and we never knew whether he had responded aloud to this call to prayer in which women were counted, for his voice would in any case have been drowned in the collective response of the others. We explained to all our non-Jewish onlookers that, from his Orthodox point of view, he had found a compromise. This man let the others count him, but for him, inwardly and publicly, this ritual was not a quorum. However, the fact is that we had been able to act publicly according to the ritual without concerning ourselves with the inwardness of each. For Judaism, this is what counts: the public ritual and not the intimate meanings of one and another. The liberal Jewish woman was satisfied that the female presence had been publicly recognized, and she was willing to live with the ambiguity of the situation, in which one could not know whether the Orthodox man had or had not recognized this public action. But that did not matter, for, from the outside, this service had been public, and it is this ambiguity that had allowed all to surmount their basic conflict, at least for that time.
It is interesting to wonder whether this small group of Jews so different from one another was able to reach this compromise thanks to the presence of the Muslim and Christian onlookers. Indeed, the conversation had been fascinating for the Muslims. They expressed their surprise at the fact that the Jews had consented to have this discussion before them. They then recounted that this same Friday morning, when they had gone to the juma (the public Friday religious service at the mosque) in a local mosque, the only woman in the group, a veiled participant, had not been admitted inside the mosque and had had to go and pray outside.
Experiential learning concentrates us on the present moment. This process is very different from an abstract study where we do not have to confront other actors. Viewing the context of our experience is as important as the content of that experience. It is in these moments where life interferes that an essential knowledge is created. In the Bursa example, the Orthodox man or the liberal woman had managed to grant moral credit to the other, or at least to live in an ambiguity that made it possible to find a way out of their differences, of their disagreement on a precise point of the Jewish liturgy. In the practice of the program, we experiment with our limits, those of our co-religionists as well as those belonging to other religious traditions. It is by doing together, by experimenting with religious rituals with those who are different — or, as in the next example of the songs on a bus — that we manage to restructure our vision of reality. To change register and to suspend what we take to be our certainties.
Singing on the bus in Uganda (2014)
On Sunday, December 14, 2014, I was in Uganda for a program of the Equator Peace Academy (EPA). It was the second time we had organized a structure in Uganda. In December 2012, with colleagues, we had set up a first satellite program of CEDAR. The subject of this 2014 program was the place of refugees in the Ugandan state.
That Sunday, the weather was very fine in Kampala, the sun shone in a beautiful blue sky, and we were preparing to set off toward the east of the country, to visit refugee camps. Uganda is an East African country that has received a significant number of refugees coming from the various neighboring countries in conflict, such as Rwanda, Burundi, and South Sudan.
Before leaving, our group had gathered in the small church of Saint Augustine in the middle of the compound of buildings where we were lodging in Kampala. Our leader, a Catholic priest, invited us to join him in the small round church. In our programs we are in the habit of asking the participants to observe the rituals of their colleagues when this is possible, to see them at work in their various roles. I remember very well the first time I became aware of my prejudices regarding the Christians in our group. I had a great affinity with one of our Christian colleagues; we had the same reactions to certain things and we spent a great deal of time recounting our personal stories to each other. During a Sunday mass, this colleague accepted the Eucharist. This provoked an unease in me; I thought that accepting the Eucharist bore witness to a much more traditional approach than I had imagined. Since I saw him as a bit like me, I had obscured his religious difference; but in observing his religious act, I became aware of our central difference, and my reaction unveiled to me what I took for granted and which shattered to pieces. I realized that one can be liberal and traditional at the same time. I had been shocked by my reaction of unease before this act of faith, for I had thought: “how is it possible that this person so liberal is so religious?” For me, at that moment, religion and liberalism did not mix well.
Let us return to Uganda. We were a little surprised and also glad to find ourselves only among colleagues for this Sunday mass, for the previous week we had been the guests of a charismatic church of Congolese Pentecostal refugees in Kampala. It was therefore a new experience to find ourselves among ourselves, some fifteen people of diverse religious obediences. As a Jew and a member of the minority in this group, I was moved at having to observe my colleagues in their religious fervor. The church of Saint Augustine is small, round, simple, and beautiful. It is surrounded by very beautiful gardens. A pleasant luminosity entered through the windows and flooded the pews.
The group was composed of a majority of Christians (Catholics, Pentecostals, and Presbyterians) with a tiny minority composed of one Muslim, two Jews, and two people identifying as secular. Maximiano Ngabirano, the director of the program, called by some Max, by others Father, and by still others Professor, entered the church in the ceremonial garb of a Catholic priest. All rose. The group of Christians had organized itself into a choir and their joyful hymns rang out in the church. Clear voices accompanied by a guitar filled the space of this small parish church. An atmosphere of peace enveloped this small group whose members, a week earlier, had been perfect strangers to one another. We had become a fellowship through our shared exploration of the place of refugees in Uganda. We were a congenial group that worked the different registers of the program with ease. There was an evident pleasure in being together, and I had noticed that some spent their free time in the company of their colleagues. The atmosphere was truly joyful, professional, and congenial.
Our program had been conceived in two phases. The first was a study of urban refugees in the capital, Kampala. The second phase, during the second week, looked into the question of refugees in a rural context. It is in fact in the Ugandan countryside that the largest refugee camps are found, that is to say the majority of the 500,000 persons refugees in Uganda.
After this religious service, our second week began with a journey toward Mbarara, in the east of the country. The journey began in good spirits. Getting out of the congested streets of Kampala took time, but as soon as the countryside took shape, our leader, Max, encouraged the members of the group to take the microphone and sing, which many colleagues did, each in turn. After a certain time I realized that the songs were in fact all Christian hymns and constituted a sort of continuation of the service we had just left. This did not seem to bother the company. An hour later we stopped at the equator line, on the verdant campus of Uganda Martyrs University, the sponsor of our program. When we resumed our way, very beautiful voices took over and again sang Christian religious hymns.
A certain unease then set in among the non-Christian persons of the group. Two of us seemed to have completely withdrawn from the situation, with earphones in their ears. Another watched the countryside go by and turned his back to the group. My colleague Adam Seligman, one of the organizers seated near me, told me that he felt a little outside the group, and the question arose whether it would not be a good idea to make the group aware that the Christian majority sang nothing but religious hymns and that 20% of the group was not participating and had in fact set itself aside. I felt very ill at ease. As a minority, I wanted to efface myself and not make waves. To assume my minority status as a Jew in a group with a Christian majority seemed to me very difficult. My colleague, for his part, thought that this was an occasion to discuss the relations of the majority and the religious minorities. Becoming aware of our actions in real time is the core of our methodology, so could discussing this unease serve to learn to live with the differences that matter for one and another? Could intervention in real time on a subject that seems benign, such as singing, stand as a model of reflection on more difficult subjects, such as the relations between refugees and the Ugandan population? That was in fact the subject of our collective work. Could we, in real time, explore together how to live our religious differences in an a priori innocuous example?
My colleague intervened, took the microphone, and remarked that all the songs had in fact been Christian hymns. He asked how the minority experienced this situation and how the majority lived with this minority in this bus and in this very congenial group. He explained that, as a minority, we had participated in the religious ritual in the church with pleasure. In the church, the minority and the majority participated in a common program that, for some of us, was a religious act, but not for the others. We, the minority, had a place, a very defined role in the face of this religious act, whereas in the bus, these spontaneous songs could be experienced as a sort of exclusion. As non-Christians we were excluded, we could not participate in this spontaneous joy that singing in a group evokes. How could these songs, a sign of joy, of friendship, and of unity, become a means of exclusion experienced by the minority? This experience we had just lived through pointed to the real difficulties of integrating a minority into the unity of the majority. How to behave in a group composed of different religions? Could we explore our collective differences while learning to live in a group with people of different religious belongings, without obscuring what is important for each?
After this intervention, our only Muslim member sang a song in Arabic, then a young woman took up the microphone again and began once more to sing a Catholic hymn, and her co-religionists asked her to stop. From that moment on, no one took up the microphone again; we reached our destination a short time later.
During our organizers’ meeting that evening, this incident was discussed. Our group of leaders was composed of five people: two non-Ugandans and Jews, and three locals, two Catholics and one Protestant. One of the local organizers explained that he had been aware of the situation and had hoped that the Christian participants themselves would realize that all the songs were hymns and that some among us were not Christians. He had hoped that the group would become aware of it on its own and that the individuals would change their behavior. Why had the group of singers not thought to integrate the minority? The Jewish organizer wondered whether his intervention had not been too harsh and whether it had not assailed the majority. We were in agreement on the fact that the intention of the singers had not been to exclude, but that there had been a lack of awareness. How could they imagine that their joyful hymns were going to create difficulties for the minority? This incident therefore merited a group discussion to analyze the reactions of one and another, for it touched on the principal problem: is it possible to live the religious differences of some without excluding the others? And if we accept this question, how must we behave?
The deconstruction on the bus (Dec. 15, 2014)
Since we were making long bus journeys, Max, who led our daily deconstruction, posed this problem to the group on the bus. He asked it to reflect on the incident and above all to wonder why, after Seligman’s intervention, the singing had stopped. Several Catholic participants shared their embarrassment. They had indeed felt these songs to be a continuation of the mass, and expressed a feeling of powerlessness, not knowing how to rectify matters and engage in this delicate situation, after having become aware of it.
Our Muslim participant explained that, since he had been the only Muslim pupil in a Catholic school, he knew these songs. For him, a member of a minority all his life in a Catholic milieu, his minority status in the bus had posed no problem. Then, he had been the only one to try to rectify matters by singing in Arabic. In his mind these Catholic hymns were part of his cultural past and did not correspond to a religious ritual. The majority, by contrast, expressed a feeling of perplexity; they accepted that their songs had been a sort of continuation of the mass and did not feel assailed by the intervention of our Jewish colleague. They did not know how to react, and had remained silent.
The discussion turned on the difficulty for the majority of becoming aware of the presence of the minority and the difficulty of finding a means of integrating it. How, from their point of view, to become aware of the needs of this minority and of their presence if the latter remains silent? The five minority persons were in agreement in saying that participating in the mass was something other than this long journey accompanied by religious hymns, which had been felt to be too much. Each of us was referred back to his own limits. What was, in this situation, the responsibility of the minority toward the majority, and that of the majority toward the minority? Someone said that it had been very difficult for him to become aware of the different identities in the group, for the minority remained silent. One of the persons, herself secular, indicated that it was also up to the minority to make itself heard, to express itself, and to create a space for itself. She asked herself why she had chosen to withdraw into her shell and listen to her personal music. Another person asked why the group had not been open to singing pop or other non-religious songs. As soon as she had realized that all the songs were in fact religious hymns, she too had preferred to withdraw rather than to intervene, waiting for it to pass. To manifest oneself as a minority, and to speak out as such, is very difficult, I myself remarked. Minority status can create anxiety, especially if this status has a history of vulnerability and victimization. Each of us realized that we brought a very heavy baggage into our contacts with others, a personal emotional baggage, but also a collective one. In this discussion we became aware of our insecurities, of our collective fears, founded or not. Another person considered the difficulty of including the minority in real time, for things go so fast and certain reactions remain unconscious in a group like ours. The intervention of a member of the staff, a member of the minority, rendered visible the difficulties of the minority. The group had ceased singing as soon as the members of the majority had become aware of their impact on the minority members of the group; a feeling of confusion had followed this becoming-aware and the members of the majority no longer knew how to behave, this person explained. How must the majority behave in the face of the needs of the minority?
One person proposed that the group create procedures, rules of behavior. Another expressed her gratitude, for she had become aware of the way in which she obscured her Muslim refugee neighbors who had settled in her building in Kenya. She had never wondered what their names were, where they came from, and what it did to them to live surrounded by Catholics. She saw them as “the strangers” and generally she engaged no dialogue with these people who lived above her apartment, in fairly close proximity. Following this conversation, she questioned herself about the way to behave with refugee strangers in her “home.”
Max explained that it was also important to understand what one loses when the minority settles among us. Is the feeling of ease, of comfort that we feel as the majority destroyed as soon as a minority is present and must therefore be included? The question is: what must one give, but also lose, in order to be a member of a group composed of differences? How to know which practices not to impose on others?
The debate that in my view was the most important took place among the members of the Christian majority, composed exclusively of Africans, who questioned themselves about their own cultural baggage. They debated the question of the creation of new procedures for welcoming the refugee strangers in Uganda. What attitudes, what behaviors to adopt as African Christians in the face of strangers fleeing dangerous situations. Some argued that they possessed all the necessary tools in their cultural past for encountering strangers and had no need to create new procedures. It turns out, they said, that Africans are accustomed to encountering strangers, that they have always lived with strangers among them. The linguistic diversity on the African continent is well known, and even in a country like Uganda, with 39 million inhabitants and 56 tribes, there are 41 languages, the common language being in fact English. Thanks to this tribal and linguistic diversity, specific codes for dealing with strangers have always been part of the culture and of the social networks.
Some in the group thought that, after colonization, the Africans had adopted the colonialist vision regarding difference, based on the importance of the autonomy of the individual. That is to say that today, their sense of identity was based on the needs of the individual and not on those of the group. According to them, this attitude does not make it possible to live with strangers in society and to integrate them. They have lost the capacity to make room for groups of strangers, the new importance of individualism being contrary to their traditions.
For a person like Max, our leader, himself a Catholic priest, the fact that Catholic hymns had been sung in the presence of non-Catholic strangers results from such a deformation that came from the hegemony of the autonomy of the individual installed in Uganda with colonialism. From the expansion within the social group of an individual relation to the divine, the Catholic religion presented itself as a religion lived individually, the relation to God being for each an inner relation. In singing, even with others, it is one’s individual sense of the sacred that the individual expresses. Thereby, the Africans have forgotten their traditional roots, which include a sensitivity to strangers and an attempt to integrate them in a communal mode. The communal approach is no longer taken into consideration; what motivates people is to express their own desires and their individual need to draw closer to God, for example by singing. Their sense of the sacred is personal and has no communal meaning. In the bus, the Africans forgot to look around them before deciding which songs could be sung. Max thinks that they forgot to evaluate the impact on others of their songs, of their actions. In continuing to sing these religious songs, the majority in this group expressed itself in an individual mode and waited for the members of the minority to take charge of themselves. It is a matter of an expectation from individual to individual, each one sensing these needs, without any lived experience of collectivity to collectivity. No one asked the question: “what kind of songs should we sing in this group composed of Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims?” No one tried to express a “togetherness” and a sense of friendship with the strangers present in the bus, as the Ugandan tradition demands.
In the course of this discussion, Max, the director of the EPA, developed the idea that the tools necessary to create a group of difference were to be found in African and tribal culture. He has integrated the communal attitude into the modern context of individuality, of rigor in the Catholic ritual, while proposing to live on two registers at once. Himself very religious, the sacred for him expresses itself in a direct relation to God, in which his individuality has a central place. But he thinks that when a group is not homogeneous, one must refer to another register in order to learn to integrate difference, to live it without obscuring it.
This incident shows well how, in a group, one can use the unease felt by some, generally individuals who are part of the minority. Creating a space where a discussion can blossom will allow one and another to discover how to live together while being different in important domains such as that of religion. The unease and the difficulties of some made it possible to become aware of the importance of these differences without obscuring them. In deconstructing the impact of the Catholic religious hymns sung in a multi-religious group, we realized that other relational modes were needed in order to create a community composed of differences. And it is together that individuals can find solutions for living the differences in the precise case of the group in which they participate.
The symbol of the Dove, Old Coventry (England, 2008)
Standing in the cathedral of Old Coventry, our group of Muslims, Jews, Christians, Sikhs, and secular people had remained silent before the symbol of the destruction and the suffering of the British people during the Second World War. Having set out from Birmingham that morning, we had stopped at Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of William Shakespeare, a tourist attraction. The group based in Birmingham was working on “The ideal city: living together otherwise.” Birmingham is the second-largest city in England after London, and is composed of a very ethnically diverse population. Stratford-upon-Avon, by contrast, is a small town that evokes the grandiose past and the theatrical tradition of England. To cross these three sites in the same day makes one aware of the rich and complex history and of the ethnic diversity of contemporary life in this country.
In visiting the new cathedral building adjoining the ruins, we came up against the power of the history of the Anglican Church. It is also at this moment that the group, through the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, became aware of the importance of the universal narrative for the Anglican Church. Our guide, a young German volunteer, took us to visit the Chapel of Unity, in the shape of a six-pointed star. In this place where ecumenical services are held, the mosaic-covered floor is curved like a saucer and represents a dove of peace at its center. The room is constructed in such a way that an object thrown from the outer edge of the floor rolls toward the center. Our guide explained that this mosaic symbolizes the hope that all of humanity will end by living united and at peace. We were some thirty people in the chapel — among us, Jews with kipot, veiled Muslim women, and many people of color. Our guide handed out golf balls to us and asked us to roll them toward the center, in an exercise that he named “the unity of peace.” When, unfortunately, one of the balls did not roll as intended toward the center, the guide, nonchalantly, gave it a kick to make it reach the place where all the balls join the dove of peace.
I left the chapel reflecting on the very powerful image of this guide kicking the rebellious ball while he spoke of the unity of humanity. This image, juxtaposed with the image of the Sikh temple (gudwara) visited in Birmingham and with that of the medieval beauty of Stratford-upon-Avon, gave to this act a meaning of an offhand effacement of this so-called diversity that our group represented. My Jewish and Muslim colleagues had had the same reaction and this moment was noted not only by the participants but by the organizers themselves. The next morning, our local host, the vicar of Birmingham, Toby Howarth (currently Bishop of Bradford), decided to use this example to show how the Anglican Church dealt with difference. He explained that the dove does not represent only peace, as our guide had told us, but also the presence of God through the Holy Spirit. The dove recalls the Trinity, with Jesus Christ unifying humanity in the love of God.
What, then, was the concept of unity presented by our guide in the chapel, our host asked? A debate set in within the group and it was clearly established that this unity was in fact a Christian unity, although our guide had presented it as universal. His message also carried the idea that universal unity would be possible at the moment when all of humanity accepted the universalism of Jesus and of his message of peace. Another question presented itself to the group: can this Christian vision of unity recognize the diversity of contemporary life in England represented by our group? Although we were visibly a group composed of persons belonging to different religions, our guide had presented his Christian narrative without taking into consideration the obvious differences in the chapel. It was rather the gesture of effacing the differences that had been brought into relief in this exercise. The guide had evoked the credo of Christian unity by effacing every sign of discord, with his kick to the unruly ball.
In our deconstruction, we discussed this experience of the chapel. It questioned the supposed unity, for in this case the unity had been symbolically forced. The action of the guide contrasted clearly with his discourse. For the Christians among us, this example signified the central power of the Anglican Church and the force of its universal credo. For the Muslims and the Jews, it showed that their differences had not been taken into consideration, but that, on the contrary, they were subjected to the powerful narrative of Christian unity.
This experience in the chapel forced the Christians as well as the non-Christians to become aware of their place. The minorities became aware of their singularity as the rebellious ball not arriving on its own toward the symbol of peace, as though only the acceptance of general universalism allowed them to integrate themselves into the group. The Christian majority realized this dissonance when it became aware that its credo of unity in Christ, its sense of universalism, was not shared by the minorities who did not want to accept Jesus as their savior and wanted to keep their different modes of life. In these exchanges, the group realized that the problem resided both in the effacement and in the claim of the minority that refuses to be effaced. How, then, can one live with these different visions and create together a society in which we live on several registers? This becoming-aware is the first step in the discovery of solutions.
These three examples show the aspects of our practice of life with difference without obscuring it. They indicate that this practice leads us to reflect together on the moments that have been the most significant in the life of the group, the moments that created for some a discomfort and difficulties, because their collective identity had not found its place in the community of the group. It certainly takes courage to express such a discomfort, or to question one’s own biases as well as those of others. It is important to remark that this is generally possible in the second part of the program, after a friendship has set in among us.
In the three cases presented in this article, these moments of discomfort were followed by a becoming-aware on the part of some and by an act of pedagogical intervention on the part of the organizers, with the help of this activity that we have named deconstruction. After having led these groups for fifteen years, we know that a skillful intervention is possible and can help the group to realize the tools necessary to live the differences without obscuring them. In general, these moments of deconstruction take place each morning before the first lecture. But when an event arises in the program, we are flexible enough to address the problem in real time, and to make of it a group pedagogy. The group conducts a collective reflection on a personal aspect (the discomfort) and connects it to the theoretical points. This moment is therefore at once integrative and reflective; it is a movement of intellectual reflection starting from an individual lived experience of discomfort. This allows the participants to become aware of the intellectual and political stakes of the different positions. These moments of group reflection help us all to decenter ourselves. It is on this occasion that we become aware of the different aspects of our social life and of our prejudices, and that a change of point of view can occur. To use these forms of discomfort and these feelings of unease before communal difference is the necessary precondition for understanding and for change.
I want to end this article by evoking a few tendencies that have arisen on American campuses since 2014–2015, in particular a call to censor pedagogical materials liable to disturb certain students. To censor amounts to obscuring the difficulties, the forms of discomfort, that some feel before parts of the program that bother them. Student organizations have called on professors and administration to affix trigger warnings [literally: “warnings that set off a reaction”] on certain books. Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway are not easy stories and can, according to them, set off the fears or the traumas of certain students. The question posed is that of knowing whether it is really possible to learn and to grow without passing through a stage of discomfort when one comes up against difficult ideas. There is truly matter for discussion there. Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, has shown that this demand to put labels on certain books corresponds to “a kind of irrepressible movement that increasingly incites people to want to live in physical and moral comfort.” This movement is a call to obscure the difficult things in collective life. Lukianoff also notes that it is going to be more and more complicated to teach that being shocked or offended has an important pedagogical value. For learning requires that one bend over serious and difficult subjects7. To learn from one’s difficulties before the foreign other, from one’s discomfort, is also a means of learning to live with an ambiguity that exists in the world.
The methodology of CEDAR provides us with working tools for learning to encounter one another and to know our biases as well as those of others. By bending over what disturbs us when we encounter strangers in a limited period of time (two weeks), we may perhaps find new ways of living the collective differences that we lay claim to. It is only after having undergone the experience of the different narratives, thanks to the reflective method, that there is a possibility of integrating or making room for these new narratives in our societies. When we use what is at hand in our group life, we realize that the discomfort, the forms of unease, and the difficulties felt by one or another before these differences can become a powerful teaching tool. Learning requires a certain curiosity. This curiosity concerns not only the things that please us and reassure us; but does our field of knowledge of others not open further when we examine more closely what disturbs us?
Appendix
The questions posed to the small facilitation groups are elaborated in the organizers’ meetings. The questions change according to the program, but they always have to do with the problems of social belonging. Here, for example, are the questions drawn from the Ugandan program of December 2014.
- Sunday the 7th: reflect on your different groups of belonging. What is your way of belonging to your various communities?
- Tuesday the 9th: tell us about an experience of a community that changed, or that changed you in relation to your community. How did you live through it?
- Thursday the 11th: give an example of the way in which you have been treated according to what you were and not according to what you felt yourself to be.
- Saturday the 13th: give an example showing that you were the person who discriminated against someone else.
- Monday the 15th: give an example of relations of trust or of mistrust that occurred with members of a different ethnicity or religion.
- Thursday the 18th: how do you tolerate your perception of danger? of fear? Can you tolerate a difference that you perceive as “dangerous”?
- Friday the 19th: What are your feelings at the end of the program, on the eve of your imminent return to your community?
Notes
Cf. Noëlie Vialles, “Viandes rituelles” (“Ritual Meats”), in À Croire et à manger. Religions et alimentation, eds. Aïda Kanafani-Zahar, Séverine Mathieu, and Sophie Nizard, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2007; Pierre Birnbaum, La République et le cochon (The Republic and the Pig), Paris, Seuil, 2013.↩︎
Cf. Adam B. Seligman, Rahel Wasserfall, David Montgomery, Living with Difference: How to Build Community in a Divided World, University of California Press, 2015.↩︎
Taken in this sense, deconstruction corresponds to the “decoding” formulated by Paulo Freire in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 2000, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York, Bloomsbury, pp. 110–118).↩︎
The facilitation groups are small working groups of five to six people who meet every two days to work together on questions posed to the group by the organizers. These questions generally concern the collective belonging of individuals. After asking whether one and another consider themselves part of some community, one asks, for example, whether anyone has ever felt ill at ease or excluded within their group of belonging. The aim of these questions is to allow each one to make the link between their own life experience and the subject the group is discussing. The time spent together is structured in such a way that no one monopolizes the floor, each being able to speak only for a determined span of time. One learns to listen to the experience of others and to share one’s own. See in the appendix the type of questions posed in the facilitation groups.↩︎
In this article I bend over religious difference, but we have also had to face differences of sexual identity. See Adam B. Seligman, Rahel R. Wasserfall, David W. Montgomery, Living with Difference: How to Build Community in a Divided World, University of California Press, 2015. We think that our methodology of the discovery of what disturbs can be applied to differences other than religion.↩︎
For ethical reasons, I cannot publicly analyze examples drawn from the facilitation groups.↩︎
Greg Lukianoff, cited in Jennifer Medina, “Warning: The Literary Canon Can Make Students Squirm,” New York Times, May 18, 2014.↩︎