Under the
leadership of Annie Couëdel, Professor at Paris 8, a group of academics,
students, former Paris 8 students, friends and pen-friends from very different
nationalities and living in very different countries, have decided to create
this association to do « something different » from humanitarian or
political actions, to account for and expose cultural diversity, to encourage
exchanges between different worlds unknown to one another, in a manner that
will be more efficient than what happens inside the universities which most of
us come from.
How are
we going to achieve that ? There is no political line. For the moment,
there are projects, some of them coming from present or former students, some
from countries where a number of people agree with our aims : in Chile,
where a subsidiary of L’AMAP is being born, in Greece where the links created
within the Erasmus programme are probably going to encourage the creation of an
association with similar ambitions, contacts in Columbia, Argentina, Togo,
Bulgaria. Within this new-born network, initiatives are expected and respected,
considering that they alone can lead to a real intercultural exchange :
favouring personal meetings rather than curricula.
Following
the discussions about the main targets of our association, we propose three
long-term lines rather than a programme of events or experiments in the
immediate future :
– the
creation of libraries in places where books are rare, local languages and dominant
culture languages are far apart, or where there is even no interest in reading
at all, sometimes. Isn’t it the most efficient way to make cultures meet ?
The village or district library should then work side by side with the school,
with a literacy campaign, with the help of the « wise men », the
young people or the local authorities. Thus, the library will not be regarded
as something foreign.
– the
video-recording of everything that happens in cultural meetings, a technique –
and we should take advantage of what modern techniques offer us – which has
been a basic element in our procedure. It is not only a matter of saving
customs, rituals, tools, crafts that are disappearing. We want to avoid a
living museum of soviet-style show. To do so, we plan to record what happens in
a precise situation, at a precise moment with people who, although they are
representatives of thousand-year-old customs, are also our contemporaries. We
can have internet contacts inside a wind-mill.
– a
double culture : a large member of students who gather in L’AMAP or
support it come from such a background. This situation is similar to that of
descendants of Japanese immigrants in Brazil or Peru, whose parents have come
back to Japan where they are Japanese outside Japan and Latinos inside. How
to deal with one’s original culture and the culture of the country where one
studies : it is probably easier for Belgian or German students, but
students from China or Kabylie in a French university encounter the shock of
strangeness. And what about French students coming from French ex-colonies, and
living at one moment in the family circle and the next in the school or
university environment ?
At the
root of this initiative is the CIVD (Centre Interculturel de Vincennes à
Saint-Denis) acting within Paris 8 and also in the rest of the world. The
present President for 2005 of the CIVD, Assane Diakhaté, is a member of the
board of governors of L’AMAP. Other members of the board are Mme Francine
Demichel, former President of Paris 8 and former head of higher
education ; Daniel Sandoval, who created many associations and cinema
study programmes and who was the first to suggest the creation of this
association ; Guy Berger, President of A.F.I.R.S.E. (association des chercheurs
de sciences de l’éducation) ; and former students in Paris 8 or coming
from other backgrounds.
–