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This article presents an approach of doing Discourse Analysis in the study of interfaith dialogues, informed by the tools and theories from cognitive linguistics. The data is drawn from my larger project which compares 'secular-oriented' dialogues conducted by civic society activists with 'religious-oriented' dialogues engaged by religious representatives as key participants; and how dialogue practitioners used identity-relevant resources in the course of their conversations. In my doctoral thesis (Lee, 2017), I explained why a discourse approach to the interfaith studies would be useful for practitioners, to assist in deepening practitioners' reflection upon their practices; and for the sociologists of language and religion, further to understand how religious and non-religious manners of speaking interact. This article invites the same audience alongside new readers, to test bringing in the analytic concept of 'interculturality' into the field of interfaith dialogue studies. First, my use of the term interculturality in interfaith dialogue refers to an activity which involves what practitioners continuously accomplish with identity categories (faith-based or not), and with the topics which arise with the use of these identity categories, and with the cultural discourses which surround those topics — in interaction with other dialogue practitioners. I use the verb 'accomplish' here, and elsewhere in this article, for the same reason as a social constructionist use of the term: to signal that cultures and identities are emergent things that are constructed in talk, and recognised for what they are — rather than intentional performance of roles (see, for example, Benwell & Stokoe, 2006; Have, 2004). Why then, is there a need to bring in this concept of interculturality into this field? I draw upon Interfaith Dialogue scholar-practitioner Riffat Hassan's (2014) voice from her auto-ethnography as a preface for demonstrating its significance:
“However, a challenge that had a much deeper impact on me personally confronted me in the Fall of 1974, when I was teaching at Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, and became faculty adviser to the Muslim Students' Association (MSA) chapter at that university. This “honor” was conferred upon me solely by virtue of the fact that each student association was required to have a faculty adviser, and I happened to be the only Muslim faculty member on campus that year. The MSA had a tradition of having an annual seminar at which the faculty adviser introduced the seminar's theme. However, in my case, I was assigned a specific subject, namely, “Women in Islam,” presumably because the MSA office-bearers did not think that a Muslim woman, even one who taught Islamic Studies, could have the competence to speak on any other subject…” (p. 134-135).
Institutionalised practices of interfaith dialogue tend to select for speakers for essentialist religious identity categories, because of the politics of the gaining legitimacy from representative voices, resulting in the marginalisation of other voices. Even though, while some of these marginal voices' links to religiosity and religious institutions are only tenuous, they certainly are not unimportant because Interfaith Dialogues are also about lived experiences. Scholars of Interfaith Dialogue discourse will need to shift their focal lens from these institutionalised and essentialist categorisations, towards an expanded collection of identity labels that are used in talk, in an interculturality of encounter. They can then closely examine how interfaith dialogue participants use these identity categories and cultural repertoire, and manage the discursive powers of these resources, within the structures of institutional practices. Then, seen from this lens of interculturality, interfaith dialogues are sites where members work with unstable and fluid identity positioning, deploy a range of discursive repertoires, (and not always religious ones) — among voices which seek to be authoritatively representative, and those which do not.