Cultural Diversity

Cultural Diversity

                         

  The contemporary wave of culturalism has transformed the notion of cultural diversity from a given of the human condition – and the stuff of anthropology – into a normative metanarrative, whether culture is seen as ‘the ground of perpetual, irreducible (and, in most cases, desirable and worth conscious preservation) diversity of human kind’ (Bauman, 1992) or in terms of ‘the conscious mobilization of cultural differences in the service of a larger national or transnational politics’ (Appadurai, 1996: 15). While the culturalism is patently global, the discourses of cultural diversity as a policy ideal have been generated principally in Europe and North America and appear to have their strongest purchase there. Everywhere, though, understandings of cultural diversity as a strategic notion tend to favour ‘billiard ball’ representations of cultures as neatly bounded wholes whose contents are given and static – hence mainly to be ‘protected’ or ‘preserved’. These understandings downplay ‘the ways in which the meanings and symbols of culture are produced through complex processes of translation, negotiation and enunciation’ (Stevenson, 2003: 62), as well as by contestation and conflict. Keywords collective identity, cosmopolitanism, cultural goods and services, cultural policy, international relations, multiculturalism, politics of recognition 20_culture_062700 10/5/06 10:24 am Page 372 Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at University of Western Sydney on December 9, 2012 The notion has also been rather specifically connoted: in the United States, for example, it was a code word throughout the 1960s and 1970s for the recognition of the civil rights of AfroAmericans; as Appiah (1987) has suggested, the call of collective identities expressed in American ‘multiculturalism’ is much less a reflection of ‘culture’ than an expression of the individual’s concern for dignity and respect. It is only recently that the term has become the handmaiden of a ‘multiculturalism’ that seeks to celebrate the full variegation of American society. And the 21st century has introduced yet another special coding: ‘cultural diversity’ in international cultural politics is the standard-bearer of a campaign to exclude cultural goods and services from global free trade rules. Once a technical term deployed by the social sciences, the term ‘culture’ itself has escaped all academic control and has undergone a marked inflation of usages. ‘Culture’ is now proclaimed as an inalienable ‘right’, conceived of as a value in itself, and justified as an inherited ‘tradition’. It has entered the repertoires of discourses and strategies deployed by ‘imagined communities’ at different levels – from the activism of minorities, religious sodalities and local groups to the ‘cultural policies’ of nation-states. Perceived as threatened by a dominant source of ‘civilization’, the values of different ways of life have risen to consciousness and have become the rallying cry of diverse claims to a space in the planetary culture. ‘Before, culture was just lived. Now it has become a self-conscious collective project. Every struggle for life becomes the struggle of a way of life’ (Sahlins, 1994: 11). It was in this spirit that the notion of cultural diversity was given international political legitimacy by the World Commission on Culture and Development, of whose report, entitled Our Creative Diversity (UNESCO, 1996), it was the leitmotif. The notion also dominates the cultural policy lexicon in Europe; the Council of Europe has issued a Declaration on it and it is foregrounded in the cultural rhetoric of the European Union. As a counterpart to the idea of a European cultural identity, built on the assumption of a shared history and common ‘roots’, the diversity of its cultures is proclaimed as one of the defining, if not unique, merits of European civilization (the idea was actually first mooted by the great French historian François Guizot a century and a half ago). The European Union has even adopted ‘the unity of diversities’ as its slogan. The principle of subsidiarity protecting this diversity gives the Union only complementary or residual competence for cultural policy, leaving the main responsibility at the level of national governments (EFAH, 2004). Yet over five decades ago, ‘unity and diversity’ was already the motto of the newly-formed Republic of India. But in this usage, the term merely recognized the empirical plurality of the sub-continental nation’s constituent parts rather than being an overt celebration of its cultural variety; this factual usage is replicated frequently elsewhere in the non-Western world. While the conscious mobilization of collective cultural differences and concomitant claims to the recognition of cultural rights are worldwide phenomena, the elevation of cultural diversity to the status of a value in itself and its use as a ‘buzzword’ in the popular lexicon have been largely Western. Within nations, the accent has begun to shift from policies with a nationalist and homogenizing cast to the acceptance and even active promotion of cultural differences, as postcolonial developments force societies to address the challenge of articulating and mediating a sense of separate as well as shared space for diverse cultural communities (Bennett, 2001). Thus, the term is now commonly deployed with a view to supporting the ‘right to be different’ of many different categories of individuals/groups placed in some way outside dominant social and cultural norms, hence including disabled people, gays and lesbians, women, as well as the poor and the elderly. And yet, the predominant emphasis – particularly outside the West – is on ethnic differences and the affirmations of ethnic minorities in the face of dominant majorities and/or the homogenizing tendencies of ‘national’ cultures. But even these affirmations are diverse, as Bennett has pointed out. They include, first, sub- or multinational communities (the Basques or the Sri Lanka Tamils, for example) that dispute the homogenizing tendencies of national cultures, but do so on the basis of essentially similar strategies by articulating a set of associations between a territory, its people and their culture which competes with that of the dominant national culture. Second, autochthonous communities, ethnically marked, that are the result of earlier movements of peoples or boundaries. Third, diasporic cultures, produced in association with the histories of displaced peoples, involving mobile international cultural networks operating across, and offering an alternative to, the territorial logic of national cultures. Finally, indigenous cultures developed in the context of resistance to colonial occupation that typically contest national mappings of the relations between people, culture, history and territory by mobilizing deeper and longer histories. In Europe, the topical challenge is posed by the claims to difference associated with the international movement of – mainly non-European – peoples. This has brought articulations of ethnic difference into the public sphere, rather than relegating them to the private sphere alone, an Problematizing Global Knowledge – Culture 373 20_culture_062700 10/5/06 10:24 am Page 373 Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at University of Western Sydney on December 9, 2012 issue that has become a key stake in the re-composition of the notion of ‘national’ culture and identity. How is difference heard in the public sphere and what are the strategies, social objectives and recognition goals sought by its actors (Wieviorka and Ohana, 2001)? We are in the midst of a polarized policy debate. On the one hand, the classic liberal position, which posits the primacy of the individual and her/his identity over collective belonging and restricts the affirmation of the latter to the private sphere. On the other, the communitarian approach which sees individual identity as the product of community. As an increasing number of individuals opt for the right to choose the markers and roles they use to construct their identities, how are the claims of equality and citizenship to be reconciled with the claims of difference? The challenge of including diversity within the national public sphere can also help question the ‘national’ culture itself and develop new understandings about its increasingly interethnic and inter-racial composition. There is an increasingly visible discourse of according respect and value to different cultures that now coexist within national civic communities. Such liberal forms of ‘multiculturalism’, however, may well aestheticize difference through the cosmetic celebration of cultural diversity; they may reify difference at the expense of the new patterns of interaction which might arise from their mixing and intermingling (Bennett, 2004). How to nurture relationships of difference that avoid such pitfalls? What are the forms of intercultural competence – both mutual translation and dialogic interchange – that this would require? Enabling all the groups that henceforth constitute the national community to assume ownership of its composite cultural identity remains a major challenge for policy-makers. This is not simply a matter of combating intolerance and exclusion, but also of giving dignity, voice and recognition in the public sphere to different cultural groups while constructing – negotiating – a sense of national community. How can we forge societies that are truly pluralistic yet possess a shared sense of belonging? What can states do to help different cultural communities live together as one national community? Are current policies and practices effective in promoting attitudes and values that encourage mutual respect? How should policies and institutions evolve so as to better respond to the needs of diverse societies? Can national identity be defined so that all communities may identify with the country and its self-definition? This entry would be incomplete without a reference to the latest avatar of the notion, its current transubstantive reduction, through a subtle process of semantic sleight of hand, to the issue of cultural goods and services. In this guise, the term emerged at the turn of the present century, as an alternative to the limited and somewhat negative connotations of the ‘exception culturelle’ that France, Canada and other nations had been negotiating since the end of the Uruguay Round discussions in the mid-1990s. When the United States attempted to make free trade principles apply to all ‘cultural goods’, principally their own audiovisual exports, in the context of a debate over the European Union’s broadcasting directive Television Without Frontiers, France countered with the argument that a ‘cultural exception’ was necessary because culture was not just another type of merchandise. The shift from exception to diversity as the master concept allowed French international diplomacy to tap into a much broader range of cultural commitments and anxieties in international relations. Thus, UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, adopted in 2001, was the successful outcome of a vigorous Franco-Canadian strategy. Article 8, which is entitled ‘Cultural goods and services: commodities of a unique kind’, states: In the face of present-day economic and technological change, opening up vast prospects for creation and innovation, particular attention must be paid to the diversity of the supply of creative work, to due recognition of the rights of authors and artists and to the specificity of cultural goods and services which, as vectors of identity, values and meaning, must not be treated as mere commodities or consumer goods. Although the Declaration contains 11 other articles that address the policy challenges of cultural diversity in a much more comprehensive way (including many of the issues discussed above), its main strategic purpose, clearly, was to legitimize policy measures taken by national governments to protect nationally produced cultural goods and services. This is also the main purpose of the ‘Convention on the Protection of the Diversity of Cultural Contents and Artistic Expressions’ that was adopted in October 2005 by UNESCO; it is the sense in which many individuals, non-governmental organizations, cultural activists and government officials strategically use the term today. The principle is laudable. The goal is to foster the dynamism of contemporary cultural production rather than play a preservationist role. Yet this new international trope is also built upon unquestioned, undeconstructed discourses of nationhood. Precisely because its object is cultural diversity among nations rather than within them, it brings us little closer to a truly cosmopolitan agenda.