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Between Temple and Forum,
Third, cultural diversity enriches and vitalizes collective life and is desirable not only for minority communities but for society as a whole. It adds a valuable aesthetic dimension to society, widens the range of moral sympathy and imagination, and encourages critical self-reflection. Since no one culture realizes all that is valuable in human life, each needs others to correct its inescapable biases, to appreciate its specificity, to help it arrest the tendency to create absolutes for itself, and to deepen its appreciation of the nature and possibilities of human existence. Furthermore, every culture fosters the need for constructive interaction with other cultures to revitalize, regenerate, and enrich itself. In short, cultural diversity, being both a vital component of human freedom and well-being and a necessary condition of cultural activity and progress, is a valuable social asset. Of course, cultural heterogeneity is not new to our age. But, thanks to the global reach of multinational media and to the political and cultural processes referred to earlier, contemporary multiculturalism is now wider, deeper, more defiant than ever before. Furthermore, it occurs in the context of the process of an increasing economic and cultural globalization. Globalization is a paradoxical phenomenon. On the one hand, it pushes people up into a kind of world citizenship, into the sharing of universal ideas, institutions, moral and social practices, and forms of existence. On the other, it pulls them back into their regions, arouses fears about the loss of identity, and stimulates the rediscovery or reinvention of indigenous traditions to legitimize a strong sense of difference. |
 Photograph from Fix, a solo choreographed and performed by Akram Khan. Photograph by Chris Nash |
Identity as a complex network My final theme is mildly provocative. I want to suggest that in the construction of identity, ethnicity is not the one difference that makes all the difference. Our identities are now far more complex and multi-layered than they have ever been perceived to be in the past. We are now witnessing the emergence of other kinds of social groupings--organized along the axes of age, disability, gender, and class, as well as ethnicity, religion, language, civil status, and even musical styles and dress codes. These groups too are claiming recognition in the name of their particular social affiliations. And it is the persistence of such claims that has led social researchers to focus on identity as a major preoccupation of our era. Perhaps it is best to understand identity as being made up of many parts, with all the different parts appearing to be upheld either simultaneously, successively, or separately with different degrees of force, conviction, and enthusiasm. Each individual constructs and presents any one of a range of possible social identities, depending on the situation. These identities are stored within the person and are not always visible to the observer. Like a card player concealing a hand, an individual pulls out a religion, a language, a historical affiliation, an ethnicity, a life-style as and when the context deems that a particular choice is desirable or appropriate. |