The Difference that Diaspora Makes: Thinking through the Anthropology of Immigrant Education in the United States

In this article, I examine the possibility of a productive dialogue between diaspora studies and the anthropology of immigrant education in the United States. Arguing that their respective views on the nation-state is a key source for their different orientations toward migrant social and cultural worlds, I nevertheless argue that an engagement between these two fields of study will yield more critical understandings of nationalism, the category of the "immigrant," and multiculturalism within both these areas of scholarship.     

Immigration,Christian faith communities,and the practice of multiculturalism in the U.S. South

Recent scholarship has declared multiculturalism to be in retreat, yet multiculturalist discourses and practices remain salient in many realms of social reproduction. This paper explores multiculturalism in predominantly white churches in the U.S. South, a region that has seen significant demographic transformations due to immigration. Church outreach to immigrants draws on theologies that reject racial prejudice and that call for the accommodation and celebration of cultural differences. Drawing on qualitative research with pastors and congregants, this article explores how multiculturalist practice is both re-working and reinforcing existing social relationships in Christian faith communities. Multiculturalist practices, we show, disrupt racialized hierarchies long embedded in white churches. But they simultaneously leave racialized distinctions and inequalities intact, in part by maintaining separation between immigrants and non-immigrants. This case illustrates the everyday politics of multiculturalism and the ways in which the boundaries of social membership take shape in ordinary, seemingly non-political spaces.     

A Durkheimian critique of contemporary multiculturalism

Multiculturalism has been under scrutiny and subject to heated debates by politicians, commentators, and academics over the past two decades. Behind these debates lie concerns about the erosion of social cohesion, national security, and economic problems. This article frames and explains the debates over cultural diversity from the perspective of Durkheimian functionalism. This article presents a systematic review of Durkheim's theory and debunks (mis)interpretations that transpose his notion of division of labour to cultural diversity. It is argued that the competitive nature of the global nation-state system poses challenges for sustaining cultural diversity within national borders. After contrasting the Durkheimian functionalist perspective on multiculturalism with contemporary social justice perspectives, the article highlights and analyses the pressure point between multiculturalism within and the competitive global nation-state system without.     

The marketization of multiculturalism: neoliberal restructuring and cultural difference in Australia

This article assesses the relationship between multiculturalism and neoliberalism, focusing on the Australian context. It analyses recent reforms concerning immigrant integration and cultural diversity, and argues that since the mid-1990s Australian multiculturalism has embodied three central components of state restructuring: heightened demands for sociocultural discipline and conformity; fiscal conservatism and the retrenchment of safety nets; and the promotion of economic competitiveness, flexibility and efficiency in global markets. In retracing the trajectory of Australian policy this analysis contributes to emerging literatures on multiculturalism, and the shifting nature of citizenship and government rationalities in the present neoliberal context. In addition to illuminating recent changes in Australia, its findings display significant import for countries facing similar dynamics.     

How Do Real Indians Fish? Neoliberal Multiculturalism and Contested Indigeneities in the Colorado Delta

ABSTRACT   There has been a growing interest in anthropology regarding how certain political conditions set the stage for "articulations" between indigenous movements and environmental actors and discourses. However, relatively little attention has been paid to how these same conditions can suppress demands for indigenous rights. In this article, I argue that the pairing of neoliberalism and multiculturalism in contemporary Mexico has created political fields in which ethnic difference has been foregrounded as a way of denying certain rights to marginalized groups. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in northern Mexico, I analyze how the arguments of a group of Cucapá for fishing rights in the Colorado Delta have been constrained within these political circumstances. I argue that cultural difference has been leveraged by the Mexican federal government and local NGOs to prevent the redistribution of environmental resources among vulnerable groups such as the Cucapá.     

Non-metropolitan productions of multiculturalism: refugee settlement in rural Australia

In spite of the widespread backlash against multicultural policies, diversity remains a feature of globalized societies, requiring better understandings of how cultural difference is negotiated in rapidly transforming communities. Building on existing studies of multiculturalism in metropolitan contexts, we use interviews and ethnographic research to consider the transformation of a non-metropolitan community from a relatively homogeneous to an increasingly diverse place resulting from recent humanitarian resettlement flows. We argue that the new arrivals and established settlers in this regional city collaborate in the discursive and practical production of a form of multiculturalism that is shaped by the particularities of a rural imaginary, which they assert as distinct from urban experiences of super-diversity. At the same time, the local emphasis on rurality contributes to the reproduction of power inequalities that limit opportunities for eliminating discrimination and social exclusion in spite of evidence of conviviality in formal and informal encounters.     

Wieviorka's view on multiculturalism: a critique

Like any other society France is increasingly diversified culturally and in terms of collective identities. Clearly it is a multicultural, multi-identificational society, but it is not often willing to discuss openly the changes needed to accommodate its diversity and its de facto multicultural character. Michel Wieviorka has been courageous in trying to launch this crucial debate. In France his work is often appreciated but it is also often held to be ‘politically incorrect’ precisely because it questions the validity of the French republican model and its adequacy for the deep social changes at work in French society, and also because it raises the issue of the necessity of building a French multiculturalism. In this article the most important insights of Wieviorka's perspectives on multiculturalism are presented and some of the problems it implies are discussed.     

Disciplined to diversity: learning the language of multiculturalism

This study shows that contemporary multiculturalism is a cultural referent used in the construction of modern and socially-acceptable selves. By analysing the practices of diversity training, I consider one of the ways in which multiculturalism moves from abstract philosophical idea and fodder for policy formation to adoption as a cultural and moral framework that individuals use in establishing their identities, discerning meaning and engaging others. Demonstrating that people must acquire competence in the use of a particular multicultural vocabulary and rules of interaction, I challenge the perspective that both bigotry and acceptance are organic to individuals. Properly multicultural selves are not merely the natural extension of interior individual qualities. Instead, people produce modern identities vis-à-vis diversity through the use of language and the negotiation of its meaning.     

Is multiculturalism the solution?

As far as multiculturalism is at stake, three kinds of question arise at the more or less confusing meeting point of sociology, political science and political philosophy: What are the sources and meanings of cultural difference in our societies? In what way do institutions and policy-makers in some countries deal with multiculturalism? Why should we favour or not favour multiculturalism? This article tackles these questions in turn and seeks to answer them. Cultural differences are not only reproduced, they are in the constant process of being produced which means that fragmentation and recomposition are a permanent probability. In such a situation, the problem is how to broaden democracy in order to avoid at one and the same time the tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of the minorities.     

The practice of capoeira: diasporic black culture in Canada

Abstract

This article draws on ethnographic research with Canadians who practise the Afro-Brazilian martial art, capoeira, to discuss, renew and perform African heritage, black circulating cultures and Canadian nationalism. I make several incursions into Paul Gilroy's theory of the Black Atlantic. First I draw attention farther north to Canada to show that diaspora cultures reference an ‘elsewhere’ as they also come to represent ‘here’; capoeira is used to engage with local Aboriginal and multiculturalism politics. I overcome the little attention that has been paid in Gilroy-influenced black cultural studies to embodiment, corporeality and the particular movements of the sporting body, which are deployed to preserve and share diaspora cultures. This examination of the micropolitics of sport reveals the past, ‘tradition’ and ‘African’ symbols and heritage (roots), along with antiphony, innovation and transnational circulation (routes) as essential elements of black expressive cultures.     

Culture and Rights after Culture and Rights

Building on a critical, theoretical approach outlined in Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives (Cowan et al. 2001a), I posit rights processes as complex and contradictory: Both enabling and constraining, they produce new subjectivities and social relations and entail unintended consequences. To encourage interdisciplinary engagement on these themes, I explore selected texts that consider the relationship between culture and rights, addressing two literatures: (1) debates on culture, rights, and recognition in the context of multiculturalism among political philosophers and (2) an emerging literature by anthropologists, feminists, critical legal scholars, and engaged practitioners analyzing empirical cases. Although political philosophers elucidate ethical implications and clarify political projects, an outmoded arsenal of theoretical concepts of "culture,""society," and "the individual" has hampered their debates. When accounts are both theoretically informed and empirically grounded, contradictions, ambiguities, and impasses of culture and rights are more fully explored and the liberal model of rights and multiculturalism is more open to interrogation.     

A Therapeutic Moment? Identity, Self, and Culture in the Anthropology of Education

Identity is a key area for consideration in contemporary educational analysis and in the anthropology of education in particular. This article considers the need for critical inquiry into the notion of identity, suggesting that the field might reconsider the need and value of an approach that moves beyond identity toward consideration of cultural models of self and their implications. The discussion outlines three areas where self appears to be a useful construct (cultural therapy, multiculturalism, and transcultural comparisons of teaching and learning).     

Has multiculturalism failed in Britain?

Abstract

This paper subjects the criticisms advanced against multiculturalism to empirical test. It asks whether ethno-religious groups lead ‘parallel lives’ and, in consequence, fail to integrate with the wider society. It looks in particular at the alleged corrosive effects of multiculturalism, specifically at the maintenance of an ethnic rather than a British identity, social distance from white people and willingness to contemplate violent protest, but finds that all groups alike have displayed major change across the generations in the direction of a British identity and reduced social distance. It finds no evidence that rates of intergenerational change have been slower among ethno-religious groups that have made successful claims for cultural recognition. In contrast, lower levels of integration are associated with perceptions of individual or group discrimination.     

Constructions of race: symbolic ethnic capital and the performance of youth identity in multicultural Australia

The relationship between ethnicity and cultural and social capital has been taken up by several scholars in terms of questions of disadvantage. This paper considers the performance of race and ethnicity as positive capital among a group of Sudanese young people with refugee backgrounds in Brisbane, Australia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I demonstrate young people's adaptation of cultural associations in their hybridized and essentialized self-representations. In particular, I explore my informants’ use of hip hop music and style as resources in performance. Much of young people's engagement with capital in performance enables their relatively overt and self-conscious process of clarifying who they are in relationship to one another, often with particular reference to race and ethnicity. Their engagement with globally relevant mediums is indicative of young people's agency in defining their own lives in the context of the political and moral framework of Australian multiculturalism.     

Multicultural society and everyday cultural racism: second generation of Ethiopian Jews in Israel's ‘crisis of modernization’

Abstract

The core of this article sets out to examine the extent to which a multicultural society can prevent cultural racism, which, like multiculturalism, is by definition based on a culture of diversity and separation. The ‘first modernity’ was organized along national lines, with a centralist state that opted to create an essentialist and uncontested national identity. Immigrants, especially those who came from ‘third world’ countries, were expected to undergo a process of assimilation, and to integrate into the dominant culture by relinquishing their particular past and tradition. Multiculturalism, which emerged historically as a criticism of that perspective, aims at creating a kaleidoscope of associations and cultural communities, which inevitably presents a challenge to the one ‘truth’ of the nation-state with the argument that this ‘truth’ favours some groups over others. Within the multicultural model, identity politics of various groups is perceived as a means to achieve recognition, acceptance, respect and even public affirmation of differences. However, do multicultural society and identity-related differences provide a solution to cultural racism as well?

Investigating the second generation of the Ethiopian Jews, who migrated to Israel during its transformation from ethno-national republicanism to a neo-liberal, multicultural society, can help answer this question. By presenting their patterns of association, character of protest activities and the newly formed hybrid identity that Ethiopian youth have developed as a means to liberate themselves from a discriminating reality, and by examining the Others’ reaction to that challenge, this article uncovers certain mechanisms and methods of action through which a multicultural society, having a thin and mild version of multiculturalism, does not diminish cultural racism, particularly its everyday non-institutional version, but in fact augments it.     

Neoliberal restructuring and multicultural legacies: the experiences of a mid-level actor in recognizing difference

In this article, I address the impact of neoliberalism and the attendant techniques of financialization on multiculturalism in Canada through ethnographic research at a non-profit, multicultural heritage institution. I consider how the workers at this non-profit maintained their solidaristic, pre-neoliberal conception of multiculturalism even as they experimented with a sociality dominated by market exchange. Even as worker subjectivity was transformed at the institution by dramatic budget cuts and the necessity for project-based contracts, ‘volunteerism’, entrepreneurialism, and flexibility, neoliberal discourse also opened new imaginative possibilities for the MHSO. Through extensive community networks the organization has been able to survive, if precariously, without dramatic changes to its pre-neoliberal programming which asserts a social democratic, pluralist ethos. Therefore, I argue in this article that we need to attend to the limits of neoliberal effects on the situated and historically distinctive way multiculturalism has been put into practice around the world.     

Linguistic Diversity and Traffic Accidents: Lessons from Statistical Studies of Cultural Traits

The recent proliferation of digital databases of cultural and linguistic data, together with new statistical techniques becoming available has lead to a rise in so-called nomothetic studies [1]–[8]. These seek relationships between demographic variables and cultural traits from large, cross-cultural datasets. The insights from these studies are important for understanding how cultural traits evolve. While these studies are fascinating and are good at generating testable hypotheses, they may underestimate the probability of finding spurious correlations between cultural traits. Here we show that this kind of approach can find links between such unlikely cultural traits as traffic accidents, levels of extra-martial sex, political collectivism and linguistic diversity. This suggests that spurious correlations, due to historical descent, geographic diffusion or increased noise-to-signal ratios in large datasets, are much more likely than some studies admit. We suggest some criteria for the evaluation of nomothetic studies and some practical solutions to the problems. Since some of these studies are receiving media attention without a widespread understanding of the complexities of the issue, there is a risk that poorly controlled studies could affect policy. We hope to contribute towards a general skepticism for correlational studies by demonstrating the ease of finding apparently rigorous correlations between cultural traits. Despite this, we see well-controlled nomothetic studies as useful tools for the development of theories.     

Multiculturalism,Latin Americans and ‘Indigeneity’ in Australia

What are the relations between the discourse of ‘multiculturalism’ and that of ‘indigeneity’ in Australia? In problematising these relations this paper explores the affiliations that Latin American migrants and political refugees living in Adelaide have with the notion of indigeneity. For some Latin Americans affiliations with the struggle of Aboriginal people and indigeneity is a product of strong political identification with the political left and the struggle for human rights in their countries of origin. At the same time references to Latin Americans' indigeneity are often evoked within Australian multicultural settings and performances that promote ‘cultural diversity’ and are consumed by White Australians for their exotic otherness and as forms of cultural enrichment. Such representations work to marginalise further the migrants (and the ‘indigenous’) into a cultural sphere which marks them as the tolerated ethnic ‘Other’.     

Beyond multiculturalism: interculturalism,diversity and urban governance

This review article discusses the volume by Giovanna Marconi and Elena Ostanel, eds. The Intercultural City: Migration, Minorities and the Management of Diversity, I.B. Tauris, 2016, in the larger context of studies on inclusion of migrants in cities. It evaluates the merits of interculturalism argument presented by the editors and contributing authors as it is applied to the migrants’ and refugees’ needs and demands from the city and public at large, and the transformation of identities of public spaces challenging assumptions of cultural uniformity at the national level. The issue of the viability of equitable and normatively justifiable governance of difference above and beyond multiculturalism is a very important one, especially so in an era where Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and expulsions of the Dreamers from the American cities have become part of our daily reality.