Anthropology Of Multiculturalism Research Paper

The politics signaled by the term multiculturalism has at least two notable features. First, it frames issues of social justice and domination in terms of identity groupings, that is, groupings of persons that correspond to socially prevalent notions of human kinds. Foremost among these identity-groupings, in affirmations of multiculturalism, have been groupings defined by ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity,’ with groupings based on ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ the next most prominent. Second, multiculturalism has promoted an understanding of ‘the political’ that foregrounds issues of representation, particularly in the senses of depiction and proportionate access to public institutions and space.

In addition, like so much other talk about persons and social relations at the end of the twentieth century, multiculturalism as an idiom reflects a complex movement of ideas between the social and behavioral sciences, on the one hand, and the world those disciplines inhabit and study, on the other. More specifically, multiculturalism represents a major instance of the public circulation of the key term of American anthropology, culture—though contained within a compound term that was not itself prominent in any social or behavioral science discipline prior to the compound’s wider circulation. Multiculturalism is, in short, a hybrid concept, born out of the too little examined interaction between social scientific knowledge and its social reception and circulation.

1. Multiculturalism In Time And Place

Multiculturalism takes the form of, and thus characterizes itself as, an affirmation of plurality, announcing both the recognition and championing of diversity. Deployed as a predicate about the US and other Western societies, the designation multicultural rhetorically contests the more established identification of these societies as ‘white’ and, in the case of societies in Europe, as exclusively ‘European.’ At a descriptive level, then, multiculturalism acts to disrupt the set of presuppositions that allow whiteness to go without saying when speaking about an American (or an Australian or a Canadian) and that make black European sound oxymoronic and white European sound redundant. At the same time, in normative terms, multiculturalism speaks against the notion that dominant kinds, most notably white folk, are the primary agents of history, producers of ‘great works,’ and the holders, as it were, of the intellectual property rights over most every human institution of national and universal worth. In this sense, the singularity contested by multiculturalism is the singularity of monopolistic claims to agency and worthiness that differentially distribute status and cultural capital along the lines of the most legible distinctions of ‘identity’ in Western societies and, concomitantly, the larger global order.

1.1 Multiculturalism And Prior Critiques Of Eurocentrism

In attacking the attribution of unmarked (whether national or universal) status to dominant identities, multiculturalism converges with, and to some extent has borrowed from, an earlier set of critical analyses of ideologies and practices of domination in colonial societies (e.g., Fanon 1963). Yet when compared to these earlier critiques of monopolistic claims to worthiness on behalf of whiteness (that is, the critiques of Eurocentrism), multiculturalism exhibits at least two distinctive features or tendencies.

First, given that whiteness and persons of European ancestry are fixtures of Western societies (or more precisely, are imagined to be), in multiculturalist discourse has not taken the form of an affirmation of an alternative cultural singularity for these societies absent whiteness (as is the case in various instances of anticolonial nationalisms). Rather, it has taken the form of an affirmation of cultural plurality (multiculturalism), in which the ideal is less the excision or repatriation of the ‘Euro-’ element than its repositioning as just one among many cultures.

Second, by comparison to earlier critiques of European colonialism, multiculturalism has exhibited a greater tendency to supplement concerns about Eurocentrism with attention to socially visible axes of stratification other than race, though in limited and uneven ways, as we shall see. This relative potential for analogic extension, that is, for recognizing oppressions and cultures defined in other terms, is both signaled and rhetorically enabled by the very open-endedness and lack of specificity of multias the term placed into opposition to singularity/Eurocentrism.

1.2 From Civil Rights To The Politics Of Identities And Representation

When considered in relation to the historically antecedent Civil Rights movement in the US, what is arguably most striking about multiculturalism is the relative valorization and amplifying of ‘identity’ consciousness. In the key legal statutes and cases of the Civil Rights movement, attending to identity distinctions, such as observable signs of racial identity, was condemned as the very root of unjust discrimination—as when an employer judges a job applicant on the basis of ‘color’ rather than ‘merit’ or ‘ability.’ Indeed, one of the lasting legacies of the Civil Rights era in the US is the legal principle that employers are permitted to take social identity into account only when it can be established that social identity is a ‘bona fides occupational qualification,’ as when a synagogue is hiring a religious instructor. Moreover, that ‘race’ could ever be so regarded was diminished almost to the vanishing point in US law, for it was held that resistance to nonwhites serving in certain positions, for example, as policemen in predominantly white communities, did not make nonwhites less qualified to serve in those positions, even if it made it more difficult for them to do. In sum, in the defining legal battles of the Civil Rights era, social injustice was defined as discrimination on the basis of group identity, as distinct from a judgment based on an individual’s abilities and accomplishments.

While advocates of multiculturalism do not repudiate this understanding of ‘discrimination,’ they add to it in ways that are transformative. They argue that prevalent and institutionalized standards of worthiness are themselves fundamentally biased, due to systematic privileging of dominant identity-groupings in the social recognition and definition of merit. Here too, as in the US Civil Rights movement, we see that social injustice is defined in a context of meritocratic ideals and institutions claiming allegiance to such ideals. In the case of multiculturalism, however, unjust discrimination is found to be embedded deeply in institutionalized standards of merit. Persons of color, women, and other subordinated identity groupings are disadvantaged because standards of judgment are, on a systematic basis, disguised measures of ‘whiteness’ and ‘maleness,’ rather than the ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’ measures they are represented as being. Concomitantly, these same persons suffer harm because they find ‘achievement’ defined in institutional and public settings as something alien to their ‘identity’ and ‘culture.’ The comments of Dale Fleming, the director of the Native American Center of the Stockton Unified School District in California, capture well this multiculturalist vision of both injustice and the social reproduction of identity-group stratification: ‘The culture is the base … [I]f the kids feel bad about themselves or can’t deal with their own history or who they are, then school is real difficult’ (quoted in Gallagher 2000, p. 37). By contrast, even the most intensely class-disadvantaged white male, multiculturalism tells us, does not experience the acquisition of school knowledge—be it in the form of ‘correct’ speech, knowledge of Shakespeare, or mastery of calculus—as contradicting, violating, or masking ‘who they are’; instead, they experience this more happily as individual ‘achievement.’

From such a diagnosis of the manifold injuries of identity, it follows that social injustice cannot be achieved without a systematic revaluation of subordinated identities. On this view, in contrast to the judicial lessons of the Civil Rights era in the US, identities and their observable signs should not be disregarded categorically in the quest for social justice. On the contrary, overcoming existing injustice requires a compensatory identity consciousness.

1.3 Forms Of Multiculturalism Emanating From The US

In this historical context, as it has emanated from the US, multiculturalism is more a struggle over the differential distribution of cultural capital to identity groupings than over legal rights, financial capital, or material resources. Concomitantly, we find an intense politicization of schooling, as well as of museums, performance venues, and sites of commemoration. That a politics located in these sites has been embraced as a means of pursuing progressive agendas no doubt registers the extent to which such agendas have been blocked in electoral politics, the courts, and labor negotiations in the wake of the 1960s, particularly in the US.

Within US higher education, the effort to redress injuries of identity has been associated primarily with three overlapping projects: the increased hiring of faculty and administrators who are not white males; the increased representation on syllabi of works authored by persons of color and women, particularly in humanities courses; and increased curricular attention to histories and experiences of nondominant identity groups. In lower grades of schooling in the US there has been less organizing to change the identity demographics of classroom teachers, primarily because the lower status of K-12 teaching has for some time meant that this occupational niche has been relatively open to both women and persons of color. In other words, here ‘diversity’ preceded multiculturalism, if for reasons that confirm multiculturalism’s general understanding of social stratification. In addition, in the lowest levels of schooling, the precursor to the humanities is primarily the teaching of language skills, both oral and written. In this context, what counts as ‘diversity’ is not works authored by persons of subordinated identities, but language correlated with and indexical of those identities. As such, multiculturalism in these grade levels has been concerned with both multilingual education and classroom uses of nonstandard forms of the national language.

Multiculturalism in museums and other sites of commemoration and performance, both in the US and elsewhere, are recognizable variants of these school forms. In art museums, for instance, multiculturalism means collecting and exhibiting more works by artists who are persons of color and/or female; producing and trumpeting exhibitions of the ‘heritage’ of subordinated identity-groupings; and actively pursuing ‘new’ (here a code-word for ‘nonwhite’) audiences.

1.4 Forms Of Multiculturalism Emanating From Outside The US

As multiculturalism has increasingly circulated both into and out of Western Europe, there have been notable supplements to and shifts away from multiculturalism as it has emanated from the US. What most distinguishes the two cases is that in the US, ‘diversity’ is understood to be something longstanding, going back many centuries to the beginnings of European and then African migration to the Americas. By contrast in the European case, multiculturalism primarily registers a response to ‘diversity’ understood as something historically recent, resulting from significant numbers of ‘new’ (here again, a raced term) immigrants from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. This historical consciousness reflects the success of European nationalist ideologies in producing the reality effect of primordial homogeneity. The consequent foregrounding of ‘new immigrants’ in Western European multiculturalism has meant, in turn, a distinctive concern with legal issues regarding citizenship and immigrant workers’ rights. In addition, debates about multiculturalism in both Germany and France have been haunted by, and deployed as a means of shaping, collective memories of the holocaust. The major exception to these general trends within Western Europe is Spain, where the relative weakness of Spanish nationalism has meant that regional identities are the primary focus of debates about ‘pluralism’ in society and in relation to the state (Greenhouse 1998).

Other national traditions of multiculturalism similarly reflect their own patterns of erasing and remembering difference, relative to both whiteness and the nation. In Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, for instance, the relatively greater social visibility of persons of ‘Native’ ancestry—by comparison to the US—has brought to the fore legal issues involving land and natural resources, often in the context of disputes over past treaties.

1.5 Marketing Multiculturalism

The use of multiculturalism by arts institutions to pursue ‘new’ audiences suggests ironic affinities with commercial efforts to expand consumption by reaching and forging ‘new’ markets parsed along the lines of already established social identities. Indeed, what is perhaps the only other widely recognized instance of ‘multiculturalism’ is also the least political and, arguably, the most international: marketing. Of course, the linking of brands to legible social identities has been a staple of marketing from the time it first became mass, a century or so ago. By contrast, what has been most distinctive in recent marketing labeled ‘multicultural’ has been advertisements in which the desirability of a product is located in figures of multiracial comingling, though of uniformly affluent consumers. This fetishism of multiracial, intraclass sociality has been aptly dubbed ‘the Benneton effect,’ after the Italian garment corporation that used it to such commercial advantage (Chicago Cultural Studies Group 1992, p. 552).

1.6 The Mutual Abstraction Of Class Relations And Cultures

While such marketing of affluent cosmopolitanism is quite far from the serious political struggles of multicultural educators and other activists, the very legibility of these tableaus of class-homogenous consumers as ‘multicultural’ raises the vexed issue of the relationship between multiculturalism and class, or put slightly differently, between identity politics and class politics.

In multicultural talk, ‘race, gender, and class’ trip off the tip of the tongue as a triplet. Yet class has clearly played a different and much less significant role in multiculturalism than have race and gender, or even sexuality (Ortner 1998). If one surveys US art museums over the decades of multiculturalism, for example, one finds few if any exhibitions of the art of working-class persons, in contrast to the by-now-numerous exhibitions of art by African–Americans, Chicanos, and women—exhibitions framed (and marketed) in precisely these identity terms. Similarly, though Studs Terkel’s Working (1974) has been taught in a great number of US college and university courses, its inclusion on syllabi is neither presented nor conventionally read as enacting a multicultural agenda. Class positions are not, in short, among the cultures of multiculturalism. On the contrary, the cultures of multiculturalism are figured as occupying such positions, understood in the minimal sense of ranked slots along a scale of wealth, or somewhat more complexly, these cultures are figured as having a particular statistical distribution along such a scale. Moreover, multiculturalism offers a vision of a just future in which extant cultures will no longer be stratified—as if the same cultures would exist if the political-economic relations between them were transformed. Such a view obscures, and thereby risks giving safe haven to, the mutual constitution of class and identity distinctions. We would most emphatically find a different constellation of class relations were classes not mediated by imagined distinctions of kind (i.e., by ‘identities’), just as vice-versa, we would find a significantly different system of identities were identities not used to organize and ground class relations.

1.7 Essentializing And Multiculturalism

The broader point here is that the cultures of multiculturalism characteristically are figured as stable elements, and not as contingent formations. Indeed, what ‘race,’ ‘ethnicity,’ and ‘gender’ have in common, and what distinguishes them from ‘class,’ is that the former, unlike the latter, are recognized conventionally as inherent or unalterable characteristics, which is to say as components of ‘identity’ or ‘kind,’ rather than of situation. So too, with the next most common foundation of cultures in multiculturalism: sexuality. This, then, is the principle circumscribing the set of cultures in multiculturalism: cultures correspond to divisions of humanity (of a suprafamilial scale) that are presumed to be fixed, even natural.

This objectifying and essentializing delineation of cultures can be observed in other aspects of multiculturalism as well. For example, looking at multiculturalist discussions of history, we find contemporary identity groupings projected indefinitely, and thus anachronistically, into the past. This mode of commemoration obscures the very historicity of extant identity groupings in order to establish ‘their’ agency and define ‘their’ heritage. So too, multiculturalism often replicates dominant assumptions that allot expressive forms to persons on the basis of observable signs of identity, so that ‘jazz’ but not ‘Beethoven’ is spoken of as belonging to ‘the culture’ of a musician who is ‘black’—without regard to her personal taste, musical training, or primary socialization to music.

Overall, it would be fair to say that multiculturalism contests social domination of extent identity groupings, but does not interrogate the presuppositions and contingencies of their existence. Indeed, some multiculturalists have criticized such interrogation, particularly from anthropologists, for undermining the political project of valorizing currently subordinate identity-groupings (e.g., Trask 1991).

1.8 ‘Neoconservative’ Attacks

Much of multiculturalism’s notoriety both in and beyond the US is due to attention given to it by prominent neoconservative pundits and politicians. Like multiculturalism, the term neoconservative (or neocon) registers a political stance adopted in the wake of ‘the 1960s’ across Western societies but emanating in particular from the US. The self-proclaimed newness in this political label indexes distance from the discredited racism and anti-Semitism of the ‘old’ conservatism, as well as opposition to ‘sixties radicalism,’ itself a code-word for a decline in patriotism, a rise in secularism, and experimentation with gender roles, sexuality, and/or illicit drugs. Certainly, the multicultural debate was intensified and internationalized in 1989 when Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow was quoted, famously and widely, as saying that he would study Zulu culture when ‘the Zulus have a Tolstoy’—a quip in which ‘Zulus’ was at once legible as a metonymic substitute for peoples of color and derisively suggestive of primitivism.

Neocons have offered two main, and related, criticisms of multiculturalism. First, they have argued that demands for curricular diversification promote social divisiveness (‘Balkanization’) and threaten national unity; and second, that the celebration of diversity promotes ethical ‘relativism’ (typically depicted by means of Eskimo euthanasia and/or sub-Saharan clitoridectomy).

In terms of the first criticism, what is perhaps most striking is the extent to which neocons have been particularly exercised about curricular shifts in higher education. One thinks, for example, of William Bennett, the Secretary of Education in the administration of US President George H. Bush, insisting that Stanford University had jeopardized America’s ‘common culture’ by its decision in 1989 to drop from its graduation requirements a year-long survey course on the history of Western Civilization. Even allowing for the hyperbole of politicians, what is fantastic about Bennett’s view is that the pyramidal structure of schooling means that higher education in general, and education at Stanford in particular, has never been a means of producing a ‘common culture’ at the national or societal level (Guillory 1993). Through either intent or confusion, then, neocons have steadfastly misrepresented multiculturalism’s challenge to an ongoing class project—the teaching of ‘great works’ to elites—as a threat to the nation.

The second neocon criticism recycles a workhorse of modern conservative thought—the bogey of secular modernity’s loss of moral certainty. In this regard, what is striking is that multiculturalists have exhibited little interest in relativizing ethical norms, as opposed to norms of canon formation or even norms of speech and writing. Indeed, multiculturalism has in many ways been strikingly conventional in its ethics. Multiculturalists have not, for instance, championed the rights of new immigrants in Western democracies to practice polygamy, even as they have embraced the extension of monogamous marriage to same-sex couples; nor have multiculturalists attacked the obvious ethnocentrism of laws that criminalize the consuming of pet animals that are elsewhere edible. Similarly, if in France and Germany the wearing of scarves by Islamic school girls has been defended in the name of ‘multiculturalism,’ multiculturalists in these European states have with rare exceptions steered away from seeking legal protection for clitoridectomies, traditional or not.

Finally, when the specter of relativism is raised, it is important to look back at modernity’s horrors and ask, ‘which should humanity fear more: modernity’s relativism or its absolutisms?’ It was, after all, racial anthropology, not its Boasian cousin, that did service in Hitler’s Germany. In this regard, it is worth recalling an observation made by Benedict at an early moment in the Nazi rise to power: ‘The recognition of cultural relativity carries with it its own values, which need not be those of absolutist philosophies’ (1934, p. 278; see also Geertz 2000, Chap. 3).

2. Multiculturalism And Anthropological Knowledge

As multiculturalism gained attention in both the academy and the mass media, many anthropologists responded with an edgy defensiveness. Sometimes in writing and more often in hallway talk, it was said that anthropology knew best about ‘culture’, and that anthropology had been multicultural a ant la lettre. Yet though too often concerned to protect disciplinary authority, anthropologists have nonetheless provided insightful, and largely sympathetic, criticisms of multiculturalism, focussing in particular on both its in- attention to global diversity and its essentializing tendencies, strategic or not (e.g., Domınguez 1995, Urciuoli 1999, Yanagisako 1995).

At the same time, anthropologists largely have overlooked the most fundamental issue of theory raised by multiculturalism: whether human sociality has its origins in sameness, as seems so obviously true in a world populated by identities, or in difference, as argued by Levi-Strauss in his discussions of reciprocity, thought, and myth. Similarly, at a different level of abstraction, cultural-social anthropologists have neglected to bring to the multiculturalist debate relevant ethnographic examples of social orders that normalize forms of social diversity that our world pathologizes. Thus, for example, crucially important struggles over bilingual education and over the proper educational roles of standard and nonstandard forms of speech have proceeded undisturbed by the salient evidence of the human capacity to live in multilingual social orders, as documented in, say, numerous ethnographic studies of Amazonia (e.g., Jackson 1983).

Finally, though it has gone largely unacknowledged within the discipline, it is worth observing that the use of culture in multiculturalism has itself contributed to the discipline’s own heightened care and scrutiny when using the culture concept in recent decades. For many anthropologists, observing essentializing uses of culture in multicultural discourse has yielded a pained but fruitful recognition of essentializing practices within anthropology. Thus, the public circulation of culture has itself impacted on the discipline, just as the earlier remaking of culture by the Boasians provided a conceptual resource that contributed to and helped authorize the public perception of Western societies as ‘multicultural’—if in a fashion outside of disciplinary control. In the end, this may be the greatest lesson of multiculturalism for anthropology: The disciplinary knowledge we strive to produce cannot be retained and stabilized. If that knowledge is at all ‘good to think,’ it will be put to some social use, and as a result, when we look again, the world we observe will not be the same.

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