Beyond universality: rethinking transculturality and the transcultural self

This article aims to show that a preliminary philosophical investigation is needed in order to clarify the meaning of multiculturality, interculturality, and transculturality, following two main directions. The first one implies a deconstruction, or rather a ‘decolonization’, of the notion of Western universality, which is still at work, if implicitly, beneath the current definitions of those terms. The second one consists in a consequential ‘decolonization’ of the anthropological model, which is at the same time at the basis and the result of that notion – that is to say the ‘universal human being’. Finally, a brief argument is offered in favor of a notion of transculturality understood as ‘going beyond culture’, whose presupposition lies just in a rethinking of the model of the human being, and particularly of the ‘researcher’, as a ‘transcultural/transculturing self’.