2025.70.6

>LITTERARIA PRAGENSIA 2025 (35) 70

Curating Intercultural Action: Agency between Epistemologies

Pavel Drábek

 FULL TEXT   

 CC BY 4.0

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

 ABSTRACT (en)

Sociological, cognitive as well as epistemological differences complicate and often limit or even block intercultural communication. This article theorizes concrete strategies of understanding and interacting across cultural divides, between “us” and “them,” and offers possible strategies of overcoming epistemological differences in curating intercultural action. Inherited traditions and human reason itself complicate the task due to prejudice, epistemic vigilance (Sperber and Mercier), mutual assumptions and other factors. Analysing concrete examples of successful and failed intercultural action, the article draws on sociological concepts of action (Habermas), cognitive science and evolutionary psychology (Dunbar’s concept of mentalisation), and theatre practice (dramaturgical translation). It offers a theory of intercultural action and concrete strategies of curating interactions, which give participants autonomy and agency.

 KEYWORDS (en)

intercultural action, interaction, performance, agency, epistemology, dramaturgical translation, postcolonial theory, slow trading

 DOI

https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2025.70.6

 SOURCES

Bregman, Rutger. Humankind: A Hopeful History. Translated by Elizabeth Manton and Erica Moore. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.

Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago, IL, and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Drábek, Pavel. “Heterotelic Models as Performatives: From Speech Acts to Propositionality.” Litteraria Pragensia 31, no. 60 (2021): 100-17.

Drábek, Pavel. “Performative Models and Physical Fictions: Dialogic Performance as Social Coevolution. A Case for Arcadian Theatre (Modelling the World through Play).” Litteraria Pragensia 32, no. 64 (2022): 8-36.

Drábek, Pavel. “Playing, Viewing, Touching, Modelling, Mentalizing: Theoretical Reflections on PQ 2023.” Theatre and Performance Design 10, no. 1-2 (2024): 88-104.

Drábek, Pavel. “Theatrical Mentalisation: Experiencing Performance with Others.” Paper at Art as Experience conference (Brno: JAMU, 2025). Accessed 15 December 2025. https://www.theatreconferencejamu.cz/en/book-proceeding/ art-of-experience/lecture/theatrical-mentalisation-experiencing-performance-with-others.

Drábek, Pavel. “‘You have served me well’: The Shakespeare Empire in Central Europe.” Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance 28, no. 43 (2023): 83-114.

Dunbar, Robin. How Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures. London: Penguin Random House, 2022.

Gellner, Ernest. Words and Things: An Examination of, and an Attack on, Linguistic Philosophy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959.

Greenblatt, Stephen. “Theatrical Mobility.” In Stephen Greenblatt, with Ines G. Županov, Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus, Heike Paul, Pál Nyíri, and Friederike Pannewick Cultural Hybridity: A Manifesto, 75-95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984.

Krajník, Filip, Anna Mikyšková and Pavel Drábek. “Dramaturgical Translation as a Means of Training a Young Generation of Translators for the Theatre.” In Teaching Translation vs. Training Translators, edited by Michal Kubánek, Ondřej Klabal a Ondřej Molnár, 69-77. Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého, 2022.

Mercier, Hugo and Sperber, Dan. The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding. London: Penguin Books, 2018.

Searle, John R. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

Sennett, Richard. Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation. London: Allen Lane, 2012.

Zich, Otakar. Aesthetics of the Dramatic Art: Theoretical Dramaturgy. Edited by David Drozd and Pavel Drábek, translated by Pavel Drábek and Tomáš Kačer. Prague: Karolinum, 2024.

Zima, Peter V. Deconstruction and Critical Theory. Translated by Rainer Emig. London and New York: Continuum, 2002.