Human Intercultural Rights: a Nonkilling checklist, by Francisco Gomes de Matos

Note: in English,there are two lexical variants: Cross-cultural and Intercultural. I have exercised my linguistic right to opt for INTERcultural. The listing is open-ended. It is up to you to add to it,refine it,probe it, contextualize it ,and exemplify it. This checklist is also a reminder of how interculturallly literate we should be in an increasingly intercultural world.

We KILL INTERCULTURALLY when we ...

1. consider other cultures as inferior than our culture(s)
2. generalize hastily ,inaccurately about customs in other cultures
3. compare cultures and take our own culture as the model or standard for comparison
4. humiliate persons,groups,communities in other cultures through interculturally-insensitive vocabulary and phraseology (as when we refer depreciatively to racial and ethnic groups)
5. we make careless intercultural generalizations to describe cultural patterns
6. rely on dichotomies to refer to cultures (for instance, indivualist cultures, collectivist cultures), rather than consider the continuum in which cultures are variously co-constructed and experienced)
7. fail to relate to each other/one another interculturally with dignity, fairness, and respect
8. believe and impose that belief our culture is the best, to be imitated, etc
9. make intercultural statements unsupported by research evidence
10. fail to perceive and acknowledge the intercultural universality or near-universality of some core-values such as Peace, Nonviolence,and Nonkilling.
11. fail to contribute to intercultural understanding, especially through Internet communication
12. view instances of intercultural shock negatively and do not learn from such humanizing experiences
13. view cultural differences as resulting from unfavorable economic, educational, social, political conditions
14. separate language(s)from the cultures in which linguistic systems are embedded, that is, when we fail to see the integrated, holistic nature of languaculture.
15. criticize aspects of our culture which differ from those of another with which we are familiar, through study, work or leisure abroad
16. perceive different patterns of tourist behavior (in our culture) as negative or reflective of lack of intercultural education
17. fail to relate tourism and cultural change in considering dimensions of diversity such as cultural diversity,biodiversity
18. fail to contribute to a peacebuilding characterization of global culture, for instance,a Nonkilling culture, a killing-free culture, a culture in which we assure citizens of their right to live nonkillingly across cultures and to fulfil their responsibilities as nonkilling global intercultural citizens.

Francisco Gomes de Matos is an applied peace linguist from Recife, Brazil; Co-author of the chapter "Toward a Nonkilling Linguistics" (Toward a Nonkilling Paradigm, Honolulu, 2009), basis of the Course "Nonkilling Linguistics" at Wikiversity's School of Nonkilling Studies. Professor Emeritus, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco; Co-founder and currently President of the Board, Associação Brasil América. He can be reached at fcgm@hotlink.com.br