The notion of tolerance is widely embraced across many settings and is generally considered critical for the peaceful functioning of culturally diverse societies. However, the concepts of tolerance and intolerance have various meanings and can be used in different ways and for different purposes. The various understandings raise different empirical questions and might have different implications for the subject positions of those who are tolerant and those who are tolerated. In this study, we focus on cultural understandings of tolerance and intolerance and how these terms are used in discourses. We first describe how in an open-ended question in a national survey lay people use a classical and a more modern understanding of tolerance to describe situations of tolerance and intolerance. Second, we analyze how those who tolerate and those who are tolerated can flexibly use these different understandings of (in)tolerance for discursively making particular “us–them” distinctions. It is concluded that the notions of tolerance and intolerance have different cultural meanings which both can be used for progressive or oppressive ends.

宽容的概念在许多情况下被广泛接受，并且通常被认为对文化多元社会的和平运转至关重要。但是，宽容和不宽容的概念具有多种含义，可以以不同的方式用于不同的目的。不同的理解提出了不同的经验问题，并且可能对宽容的人和宽容的人的主题地位产生不同的影响。在这项研究中，我们着重于对宽容和不宽容的文化理解，以及这些术语在话语中的使用方式。我们首先描述在全国性调查的一个开放式问题中，人们如何用经典的和更现代的对宽容的理解来描述宽容和不宽容的情况。第二，我们分析了那些可以容忍的人和那些被容忍的人如何灵活地使用对容忍的不同理解，从而以差异的方式对特定的“我们－他们”做出区分。结论是，宽容和不宽容的概念具有不同的文化含义，均可用于进步或压迫性目的。