Marco Lazzarotti Focuses on Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue

November 29, 2022302 views0

Marco Lazzarotti Focuses on Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue

2022-11-29T14:07:54+01:00

By Marie

Marco Lazzarotti focuses on interreligious and intercultural dialogue in Taiwan in this interview. He teaches Social Anthropology at the University of Heidelberg in Germany.In 2020, he published a book, Place, Alterity, and Narration in a Taiwanese Catholic Village. It gathers and analyses stories shared by people living within and around a small Christian village in the western part of Taiwan.Between August 2008 and October 2011, he conducted extensive fieldwork to grasp the ways local Catholics, Presbyterians, and non-Christians approach religious coexistence.He found a small village lost in the middle of those fields with Christian farmers either Catholic or Presbyterian — coexisting with non-Christian Taiwanese.What can you tell us about the main argument of your book?In all my research, even in my previous research, I always considered an encounter or the meeting of two different religions or cultural systems, as a kind of dialogue. At such encounters, these two different entities can meet, start a dialogue and get to know each other.Another basic point of this book is that, when we tell a story, we are not just telling a story about what is happening to certain people, but we are also building the world. We build the environment, where this story takes place.It was quite evident in this small village, where most people were Catholics. When all non-Catholics from neighboring villages were referring to this village, they were not only telling a story about this village or about the people who inhabit it.They were building this village as something other, something completely different from the taboo, from the cultural environment that they were used to. This is a place where life is completely different from the life of the people in non-Christian villages.I began to think about how to bring this idea of dialogue into this context. That’s when the idea of this “circuit of narration” came to my mind. For dialogue, you need two people. When we tell a story, we also build a world using some concepts, symbols, and notions that we have in our mind, which are linked to a particular culture and its background.But very often when people from the Catholic village and the neighboring villages engage in a dialogue, the two people who form the circuit of narration belong to different cultural environments and different cultural backgrounds. So, the construction of their world was sometimes completely different.The interpretation of the very same event was completely different. For example, in the story that I just told you, it was okay for the Catholic person to go into the temple. But for the non-Christian person, it was a kind of taboo to let him enter this temple and change the incense sticks.We have an event here and also an interpretation of it. The interpretation is based on the differences between these two cultural systems of the two cosmologies. I tend to consider it as a cultural system, as a public system of symbols, which are understood by the people who live in this place.What was your methodological approach and how is it specific compared to other approaches?I’m an anthropologist. The basic method of anthropologists is called Participant Fieldwork, which means to go to a certain place. For example, I went to this village, and I lived there for three years with my family. So, what I did was interview and observe how people behaved. These three years of work came after seven years of living in Taiwan. So, I was able to notice how different some of the customs, and behaviors of the people were. I was comparing that to the Taiwanese cultural religion mainstream. The method was living with them, interviewing, and making a lot of friends. This is the specific approach of anthropology. As anthropologists, we usually don’t go for questionnaires or quantitative research. Our approach is much more qualitative.What has been the most challenging in this research?To tell you the truth, it was not so challenging, because Taiwanese people are among the most welcoming people on earth. They would come and welcome me and my wife and my son. After my son was born there, we became part of the village.The place I lived in Taiwan had big vegetable farms. Almost daily, someone would bring something to us as a present and that was really meaningful for us. The most difficult part was, maybe, the hot Taiwanese summer. This was sometimes a bit challenging for me. But it’s not a big problem.In the village, where we were living, the majority were Catholics, including me and my wife. It has been quite easy, let’s say, to get into the community and to be accepted.ALSO READ Former Missionary In Cambodia Elected Paris Foreign Missions Chief