Intercultural communication: process of understanding or means of resistance?

First draft: please do not quote. Comments welcome. Intercultural communication is susceptible to ethnocentrism in two different ways. First, a self-conscious and overtly ethnocentric relativist may base his distortive perception of the other entirely upon his own prejudices, which he believes to constitute the insurmountable boundaries of our cultural situatedness. A second ethnocentric danger originates from a certain universalism which pretends to envisage a neutral transcendent omega-point, but nonetheless often and surreptitiously ends up imposing its own particularity in the name of a universal truth. The aim of the present paper is to contribute to the difficult task of developing a thorough understanding of how ethnocentrism may be avoided in intercultural interactions. For that purpose, I compare the approaches of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Édouard Glissant, who present mutually incompatible theories of the way in which intercultural relationships should be thought of in an appropriate and authentic way devoid of any form of undesirable disrespec