Interpersonal Skills in Dealing with Multiculturalism: Bosnian Borderland Case

Abstract

The article tackles the issue of interpersonal skills that provide and ensure a foundation for intercultural dialogue and communication as recognized by the author within her own research project carried out in spring 2015 in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Multitude of cultures is contemporarily a part of everyday life for many democratic countries. At the same time, cultural similarities and differences have begun to play a substantial role in the public discourses and individual biographies encountering multiculturalism on a daily basis. It consequently demands from the members of such culturally diverse societies to generate given code of communication, axiology and attitudes that enable culturally heterogenic dialogue. Otherwise, we may deal with cultural antagonism that can lead to social and political tensions questioning democratic functioning of such states and countries. Taking it into consideration, the subject of research concerns interpersonal skills manifested by the members of Bosnian multicultural communities of Sarajevo, where cultural diversity occurs both within the families as well as communities in which they function. Hence, cultural differences are part of their everyday life, manifested within cultural legacy of own community, cultural system of the family, family socialization, experienced problems resulting from cultural differences within own family and beyond it, attitudes to different representatives of cultural communities, and last but not least, within values by reason of which the cross-cultural dialogue and multicultural coexistence are possible. Consequently, multicultural, interpersonal skills should be acknowledged and practiced as a potential and concurrently as a chance for recognition of the priorities of cross-cultural education, crucial for all the democratic states worldwide.