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The Multiculturalism Dilemma Alexandre Coello de la Rosa Randi Gressgård, Multicultural Dialogue: Dilemmas, Paradoxes, Conflicts (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 190 pp. ISBN 9781845456665.
John L. and Jean Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 236 pp. ISBN 9781869141783.
We do not classify things because they need to be classified, but because by classifying, we discover [and perhaps we can add 'invent'] the elements with which to do it. (Pouillon 1981: 29)
Culture has become the semantic terrain of scientific, social, and political debates. The notion of culture is today as ubiquitous as it is ambiguous (Stolcke 2011: 6). The economic globalization described by Brazilian lawyer and geographer Milton Santos (2000: 23-36) is associated with the progressive cultural homogenization of post-national societies that is nonetheless accompanied by an explosion of local identities centered on cultural, ethnic, and/or racialized axes. The indigenous peoples of America, Oceania, and the South Pacific demand respect for their political/ethno-political rights by appealing to a complex web that threads their native, ethnic authenticity with a 'salvationist' rhetoric (Kuper 2003: 389-395).1 Transnational migrations incite alarm in host countries, whose natives fear that recent arrivals will erode (or are eroding) their cultural identity and social cohesion by introducing 'different' cultures.2 Some analysts see in cultural intermingling or mestizaje an antidote to identity-based fundamentalism, something like the 'friendly face' of the culturalist boom.3
Literature on multiculturalism is overwhelming. It relates to ideologies and policies that promote interaction and communication among groups with different cultures within a society. In Multicultural Dialogue: Dilemmas, Paradoxes, Conflicts, Randi Gressgård looks at multiculturalism as the conflictive co-existence of difference in the same national-political space. Reconciling the opposites that it generates-dignity and equality, on the one hand, and identity and difference, on the other-leads us to wonder if it is possible to translate into praxis the theoretical debates on socio-political recognition of subaltern ethnic groups, generally called 'ethnic minorities' even when they are large (or majority) demographic sectors. Gressgård refers to Charles Taylor's view that modernity defines human liberty, dignity, and equality before the law as universal rights, but at the same time, and perhaps for this very reason, it suggests that the differences between human groups and the way that they diverge from modernity itself must be...