PUT ON IN THE PLACE OF OTHER?

Abstract

This article discusses the teaching practice of taking thestudents to put themselves in somebody else’s shoes through a dramatic experience that promotes an imaginative empathy with other peoples and cultures. Here two principles, that underlie this perspective, are problematized: the one that claims that whatever the culture there must be a 'universal humanity'common to all of them; and the assumption that a foreign culture can be understood and justified according to its own logic and morals. The confrontation of these principles with the understanding that the individual is inevitably tied to the imaginative matrices of its own history and culture is here approached by crossing the theoretical contributions of Clifford Geertz and Henri Bergson.