The changing discourse of intercultural ethics: a diachronic meta-analysis

ABSTRACT Contemporary epistemological debates on how to research interculturality frequently draw on either side of a schism between positivist and essentialist approaches vs. critical and poststructuralist paradigms. The debate lives from its retrospective either-or character dividing the history of research on interculturality into a first epoch of epistemological naiveté and a more recent age of ethical consideration and reflection. This dichotomy however is too simplistic, and it blurs our views from perceiving a more complex present and past reality. This study assumes that research on interculturality has always built on normative orientations from social discourse and that this discourse has been under permanent change. Accordingly, it assumes that there has not been a paradigm shift or break in research but that this shift has only been used as a hegemonic instrument in inner-disciplinary discourses. This study re-traces this changing discourse of intercultural ethics using a grounded theory approach to central literature from the field. Since the 1960s, four epochs of different normative orientations have been identified from pragmatism via modesty and then a new hope up to a most recent epoch of new explorations. This results in a more complex picture of the normative discourse on interculturality beyond the positivism-poststructuralism debate.