More On Multiculturalism
Norm follows up my post on Kenan Malik's critique of the claims of Islamaphobia by linking to an interview with the anthroplogist Adam Kuper. Norm cites this from the interview:
In practice, the so-called multicultural agenda, when it is adopted by the state, turns into a very, very prescriptive and limiting set of choices with all sorts of connotations which I might not like.I would also highlight Kuper's views on the tautology of culturalist arguments:
Everybody’s got this rather vague idea that there’s a new force out there in the world called culture which has replaced social class and replaced biology and replaced all those other determinants of behaviour. Culture, we are told, is what really makes us behave the way we do. Not only that. It explains history and explains difference and explains the future. But when you try and put your finger on this thing culture and try to find out what it tries to explain it turns out to be very vague. It turns out that what culture explains is culture. So it’s not only ambiguous and ubiquitous, it’s far too powerful and it’s also circular.Dead Men Left, by contrast, has a rather different take on Malik's piece. Read the rest.
posted by Gareth at 11:56 pm
1 Comments:
Reading Kuper against Kenan Malik:
The concept of culture itself--engineered to be essentialist by the state, as I understand Kuper's argument to be saying--has to be understood, in some instances, separate from the race + ethnicity paradigm of classifying people. If we do not break out of the race/ethnicity paradigm when thinking about culture, how do we explain Islamic culture, practiced by people in Iran as well as Malaysia as well as America?
Islam itself can be broadly understood as a culture and in this day and age, it would seem as though Muslims all over the world are being lumped together as belonging to ONE culture and discriminated as such. But, at the same time, according to Malik, not all Muslims are being harrassed--just the black ones.
The problems with trying to make sense of Islamaphobia are multifold because the chief dilemma is coming to terms with the fact that harrassment is very much motivated by phenotypic associations--i.e. I pick you out from a crowd and beat you up because you LOOK like what I think a Muslim looks like. The reason why our darker-skinned brothers, our veil-wearing sisters, and our goatee-bearded friends are getting grief is because they visibly fit a stereotypical profile.
In my mind, the concept of culture, as advanced by Kuper, does not really work when read against the likes of Malik because Islam does not fit easily into the categories the former outlines. For that reason, I am with the Dead Men Left point of view about the more apparent connection between Islamaphobia and anti-Semitism because both Muslims and Jews do not fit easily into either the racial or religious category of identity exclusively.
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