Notes from Day One of SIETAR Brasil 2026
I joined the first day of SIETAR Brasil 2026 online because Renata Takacura asked me to come back. I was also putting my kid to sleep, so I caught only a few minutes of Professor Vinícius Vieira's keynote, and I wish I had watched the whole thing. 😔
What I did catch were a few terms: tolerância, aculturação, and the idea of treating other cultures as de segunda classe.
I do not know how he connected these ideas, so what follows is my own exploration of the questions they raised. If you attended the keynote and I have misunderstood the context, I would genuinely like to know.
Is tolerance the same as acceptance?
Not necessarily. Tolerance generally means allowing something one may disagree with or disapprove of to continue, rather than interfering with or opposing it. That can be an important condition for living together, especially when the alternative is exclusion or persecution.
But tolerance raises another question: who gets to decide what is acceptable, and who is expected to be grateful for being accepted?
Wendy Brown's Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (2006) is one place to begin exploring this question. I have not read her work closely enough to offer a reliable summary of her argument, so I am including it as a lead for further reading rather than claiming to speak for her.
Is tolerance the same as acculturation?
No. Acculturation refers to cultural changes that can arise when people or groups come into sustained contact with another culture. Those changes may involve language, everyday practices, values, or cultural identity.
In John W. Berry's framework, assimilation is one of four acculturation strategies. It involves placing less importance on maintaining one's heritage culture while seeking engagement with the larger society. Integration involves maintaining one's heritage culture while also engaging with the larger society. Separation and marginalisation are the other two strategies in this framework.
These are different orientations towards cultural maintenance and engagement. They are not stages everyone passes through, and they do not tell us, on their own, whether someone has freely chosen to adapt or has faced pressure to do so.
That distinction matters. A person can learn a new language, adopt unfamiliar customs, and change how they interact with others without abandoning their original culture. Another person may feel compelled to suppress aspects of that culture to gain acceptance.
The changes may look similar from the outside, while the circumstances surrounding them can be very different. The options people have are also shaped by the receiving society: maintaining a heritage culture while taking part in the wider society is harder when institutions or communities expect people to abandon their cultural practices to belong.
Is tolerance the same as ranking cultures?
No, though the two can coexist. Cultural hierarchy involves treating some cultures as superior or more legitimate than others, often by using the dominant group's norms as the standard.
A society may allow people to maintain different customs while continuing to judge those customs against its own standards. It may welcome cultural difference as long as that difference does not challenge the expectations of the majority.
The question then becomes whose ways of living are treated as the norm, whose are treated as exceptions, and who is expected to change.
What I actually think
I think tolerance is a floor.
People can be allowed to maintain their cultural practices while still being treated as outsiders whose ways of doing things are considered less legitimate. Being permitted to participate is different from having an equal say in what participation looks like.
A society can tolerate an accent, a cuisine, or a different way of greeting people without recognising the people who bring those differences as equal participants in its social life.
The expectation to adapt is also not always shared equally. The newcomer may be expected to learn the language, understand the unwritten rules, adjust their behaviour, and prove that they belong, while the majority may never have to consider whether its own habits could change too.
This becomes especially visible in workplaces, where ideas about professionalism, appropriate communication and good behaviour can reflect the norms of the dominant group. I wrote about one version of this in Wait. Whose Etiquette?. What looks like a neutral standard may also decide whose ways of communicating are taken seriously and whose need explaining.
So the question I took away from those words is this: who gets to decide what is tolerated, and who is expected to change in return?
Why I am writing this here
The norms we grow up with can feel self-evident until we meet people who follow different ones. Moving abroad can make those assumptions harder to ignore, especially when we become the people expected to adapt.
It is the inherited scorecard again: the unwritten list that decides which differences may stay, which are penalised, and which have to be dropped.
I keep coming back to the question of who gets to write that list.
Studying this topic?
These posts go deeper into the same territory.
You Are One of the Good Ones. But What Does That Make Everyone Else?: on conditional acceptance.
This Got Under My Skin: on a belief that feels like a fact because it is repeated.
Huh? I Am a Minority?: on how minority status happens in a room.
The concepts I use across this blog are defined in the Intercultural Glossary.
Have you ever felt that someone accepted your cultural differences while still expecting you to change? I would love to hear about it in the comments. 💛
Jessica Gabrielzyk
Further reading
Berry, J. W. (1997). Immigration, Acculturation, and Adaptation. Applied Psychology, 46(1), 5-34. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1464-0597.1997.tb01087.x
Brown, W. (2006). Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton University Press.
