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 who...
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