ABSTRACT
Since Samuel Huntington proposed in the 1990s that world politics have to be read in terms of a Clash of Civilizations, public discourse in various countries has reiterated the notion that ‘civilizations’ (in plural) constitute potentially antagonistic cultural blocks. Separated (in the words of Huntington) by ‘cultural faultlines’, they are said to represent an important source of global conflict (Huntington 1993: 22; 1996). The current proliferation and appeal of radical fundamentalist and right-wing populist movements propagating visions of religious and cultural antagonism – e.g. between ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’ – raises the following question: is it not necessary to systematically deconstruct the notion that individuals and entire societies form part of immutable and impenetrable monolithic macro-historical cultural entities called ‘civilizations’? Insisting on the complexity and dynamics of cultural phenomena, adherents to the transcultural approach regard the deconstruction of conceptual entities as one of its principal tasks (Juneja 2013: 25; König and Rakow 2016: 90–5).
