Multiculturalism and Political Philosophy

Author(s):  
Annamari Vitikainen

Multiculturalism has been used both as a descriptive and a normative term, as well as a term referring to particular types of state policies. As a descriptive term, multiculturalism refers to the state of affairs present in contemporary societies: that of cultural diversity. As a normative term, multiculturalism affirms cultural diversity as an acceptable state of affairs, and provides normative grounds for accommodating this diversity. As a policy-oriented term, multiculturalism refers to a variety of state policies that aim to accommodate people’s cultural differences—most notably, different types of culturally differentiated rights.The main focus of the debates on multiculturalism within political philosophy has been on normative multiculturalism, and the broader normative questions relating to the appropriate grounds for responding to people’s cultural differences. The debates on descriptive multiculturalism and on particular multicultural policies, however, feed into the debates on normative multiculturalism. One’s views on the nature of culture, the value of culture, and the appropriate means of demarcating group boundaries have implications on the ways in which one understands the proper objects of cultural accommodation, as well as the extent to which such accommodation should be applied. The different types of multicultural policies—including rights of indigenous groups, immigrants, and national minorities—incorporate slightly different sets of normative considerations that must be independently assessed and that also feed into the more general debates on the normative foundations for cultural accommodation.Equality-based and identity-based arguments for cultural concern provide strong grounds for the state to be concerned about people’s cultural differences and to aim to alleviate culturally induced disadvantages. The case for (or against) culturally differentiated rights as a means for responding to these disadvantages may, however, come from several sources, including approaches to cultural diversity based on equality, autonomy, toleration, and state neutrality. While there is relative (albeit not full) agreement among normative theorists of multiculturalism that differentiated rights may be acceptable, though not always required or even desired, responses to cultural diversity, disagreements about the normative bases, and extents of application, remain.

1995 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Moore

One of the most important and divisive issues facing heterogeneous or culturally diverse states—and most states are culturally diverse—is the relation between these different cultures and the state.This question was raised initially in contemporary liberal political philosophy in terms of the fruitful debate between liberals and communitarians. Sandel, for example, criticized Rawls’s A Theory of Justice and, by extension, all liberal theories for falsely abstracting from conceptions of the good, abstracting from culturallyspecific conceptions, and grounding his liberal principles in terms of an abstract Kantian individualism. Liberal theorists countered by complaining that communitarians falsely conceived of a single homogeneous community. Although Rawls’s revised defense of liberal justice in his 1993 book Political Liberalism does not refer directly to the liberal-communitarian debate, nevertheless, his new grounding of liberal political principles, as principles which would be acceptable to individuals with diverse conceptions of the good, seems to justify liberal principles in terms of contemporary conditions, and, at the same time, challenges the relevance of those theories which appeal to any notion of a homogeneous ‘community’.


Author(s):  
Eduardo Salas ◽  
Maritza R. Salazar ◽  
Michele J. Gelfand

Cultural diversity—the degree to which there are differences within and between individuals based on both subjective and objective components of culture—can affect individual and group processes. However, much is still unclear about the effects of cultural diversity. We review the literature on cultural diversity to assess the state of the art and to identify key issues for future research. This review emphasizes the importance of understanding different types of cultural diversity and their independent and combined effect on team performance. We identify key contributions to the study of cultural diversity and discuss frontiers for future research.


Author(s):  
Meenaxi Barkataki-Ruscheweyh

Can small indigenous communities survive, as distinct cultural entities, in northeast India, an area of mind-boggling ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity? What are the choices such communities have, and what are some of the strategies such communities use to resist marginalization? In recent years, many such small groups are participating in large state-sponsored ethnic festivals, and organizing their own community festivals. But are these signs of their increasing agency or simply proof of their continued marginalization? How do state policies and political borders— inter-state as well as international—impact on a community’s need to perform their ethnicity? These are some of the questions that will be addressed in this work, on the basis of ethnographic fieldwork conducted among the small Tangsa community living in Assam in northeast India. The study also reveals the asymmetry in the relations between the dominant power-wielding Assamese and the Tangsa. In summary, this is a study about marginality and its consequences, about performance of ethnicity at festivals as sites for both resistance and capitulation, and about the compulsions, imposed by the state and dominant neighbours, that can force small ethnic groups to contribute to their own marginalization.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 378-388
Author(s):  
Reski Ramadhani ◽  
Rosaria Mita Amalia ◽  
Lia Maulia Indrayani ◽  
Sutiono Mahdi

The use of Systemic Functional Linguistics proposed by Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) is rarely applied mostly in courtroom discourse analysis. This article presents the analysis of modality system used in the lawyer and witness’s utterances on courtroom questioning in cross-examination. The main focus is to explore the lawyer’s linguistic power to examine the facts given by the witness. Applying the interpersonal grammatical metaphor, the utterances are evaluated based on the different types, orientations, and values of modality in order to show a powerful position and to convince the jury toward the facts.  This is a case study employed a qualitative method with a descriptive approach. The data are taken from the transcriptions of the courtroom questioning between the lawyer and the witness of Michigan V Charles Warren’s case from YouTube (2015). This case study revealed that most of the utterances produced by the lawyer contain a higher and more medium value of modality system. Then, the way he states the argument tends to be more objective. On the other hand, the witness tends to use medium and low modality system. In answering the questions, subjectivity is employed more by the witness which indicates that he has a personal attitude toward the state of affairs. It can be indicated that the lawyer has more linguistic power by applying more high value of modality system which means that he makes the facts strongly clearer toward the state of affairs at the time. The implication of this research is expected to give the information to the reader on how language can provide power to the user especially for the lawyer in order to examine the facts given by the witness


2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 352-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Baugh

In Bergsonism, Deleuze refers to Bergson's concept of an ‘open society’, which would be a ‘society of creators’ who gain access to the ‘open creative totality’ through acting and creating. Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy is oriented toward the goal of such an open society. This would be a democracy, but not in the sense of the rule of the actually existing people, but the rule of ‘the people to come,’ for in the actually existing situation, such a people is ‘lacking’. When the people becomes a society of creators, the result is a society open to the future, creativity and the new. Their openness and creative freedom is the polar opposite of the conformism and ‘herd mentality’ condemned by Deleuze and Nietzsche, a mentality which is the basis of all narrow nationalisms (of ethnicity, race, religion and creed). It is the freedom of creating and commanding, not the Kantian freedom to obey Reason and the State. This paper uses Bergson's The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, and Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: For a Minor Literature, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy? to sketch Deleuze and Guattari's conception of the open society and of a democracy that remains ‘to come’.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-162
Author(s):  
Jeremy W. Skrzypek

It is often suggested that, since the state of affairs in which God creates a good universe is better than the state of affairs in which He creates nothing, a perfectly good God would have to create that good universe. Making use of recent work by Christine Korgaard on the relational nature of the good, I argue that the state of affairs in which God creates is actually not better, due to the fact that it is not better for anyone or anything in particular. Hence, even a perfectly good God would not be compelled to create a good universe.


2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-37
Author(s):  
Lidia Mierzejewska ◽  
Jerzy Parysek

Abstract The complexity of the reality studied by geographical research requires applying such methods which allow describing the state of affairs and ongoing changes in the best possible way. This study aims to present a model of research on selected aspects of the dynamics and structure of socio-economic development. The idea was to determine whether we deal with the process of reducing or widening the differences in terms of individual features. The article primarily pursues a methodological goal, and to a lesser extent an empirical one. The methodological objective of the paper was to propose and verify a multi-aspect approach to the study of development processes. The analyses carried out reveal that in terms of the features taken into account in the set of 24 of the largest Polish cities the dominating processes are those increasing differences between cities, which are unfavourable in the context of the adopted development policies aiming at reducing the existing disparities. In relation to the methodological objective, the results of the conducted research confirm the rationale of the application of the measures of dynamics and the feature variance to determine the character (dynamics and structure) of the socio-economic development process of cities. Comparatively less effective, especially for interpretation, is the application of principal component analysis and a multivariate classification, which is mainly the result of differences in the variance of particular features.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 87-96
Author(s):  
Elena Yu. Guskova

The article is devoted to the analysis of interethnic relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in the 1940s and 1960s. The article is based on materials from the archives of BiH, Croatia, Slovenia, Yugoslavia. The documents show the state of affairs in the Republic – both in the economy and in ideology. In one or another way, all of them reflect the level of tension in the interethnic relations. For the first time, the article presents the discussion on interethnic relations, on the new phenomenon in multinational Yugoslavia – the emergence of a new people in BiH under the name of “Muslim”. The term “Muslims” is used to define the ethnic identity of Bosniaks in the territory of BiH starting from the 1961 census.


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