Multiculturalism, individualism and human rights
Romanticism, Enlightenment and lessons from Mauritius
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
In Richard Wilson, ed., Human Rights, Culture and Context. London: Pluto
1996.
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Introductory remarks
About this The term "multiculturalism" covers a
site number of current political trends in
North America and elsewhere which,
[Image] although they are quite different in their
aims and ideological content (see Goldberg
Relational 1994 for an overview), share a positive
index evaluation of cultural traditions and,
particularly, the cultural or ethnic
[Image] identities of minorities. Multiculturalism
is evident in literature and the arts as
Thematic well as in politics, and it seeks to
index revalorise the artistic and intellectual
contributions of hitherto silent
[Image] minorities as well as supporting their
quest for equity in greater society.
Alphabetic Related to the critical Hegelianism of the
index early Frankfurt school, feminist critiques
of epistemology and to postmodernist
[Image] trends inspired directly or indirectly by
Derrida, multiculturalist thought is often
Recent accused of inspiring nihilism (see e.g.
Bloom 1987) since it seems to relativise
absolute value judgements.
[Image] This article is restricted to a discussion
of one particular political aspect of
World multiculturalism, and investigates under
which circumstances multiculturalist ideas
may be at odds with individual human
rights (as depicted in the original UN
charter). As a consequence, it is
necessary to review the concept of
"culture" invoked in multiculturalist
thought. This conceptual discussion (which
has practical ramifications) forms the
head and tail of the article, the main
body of which is devoted to a critical
presentation of multiculturalist practices
and debates in Mauritius, which is used
here as an exemplar of multiculturalist
dilemmas and opportunities.
Cultural variation as a political
challenge
For many years, it was commonplace within
post-evolutionist comparative cultural
research -- cultural and social
anthropology -- to assume that cultures
were generally sharply delineated and
distinct, relatively homogeneous and
stable. The world was thus depicted as a
vast archipelago of cultures, each
possessing its own internal logic and its
own values, and which could exclusively be
understood in its own unique terms.
Variations in morality, custom and
tradition were thus regarded as evidence
of man's ability to adapt to the most
variable environments and to shape his
existence in a multitude of ways, and it
was emphasised that there was no
"objective" standard available for the
evolutionary ranking of cultures or the
moral evaluation of actions. Value was
defined from within. This line of thought,
which is historically associated with the
great German-American anthropologist Franz
Boas (1858¡1942), is usually spoken of as
cultural relativism or historical
particularism.
Recently the classic perspectives from
cultural relativism have become
increasingly problematic (cf. also
Wilson's Introduction to this volume), and
cultural theory from the eighties and
nineties tends to emphasise (now
approaching the point of irritating
reiteration) that "cultures" are neither
clearly bounded, tightly integrated nor
unchanging. An important contributing
cause, or at least a major catalyst, in
bringing this change about, is the
intensiication of the globalisation of
culture since the Second World War. The
globalisation of capitalism and the modern
state, along with innovations in
communication technology (jet planes, TV
satellites and various wireless
telecommunications are key innovations),
have been crucial for these changes to
come about. When former tribals now apply
for mortgages, follow North American TV
series, take their Higher School
Certificates, elect local governments and
are imprisoned for criticising the
government, it becomes intellectually and
morally indefensible to seek refuge in the
fiction assuming that cultures are
isolated and committed to their "proper
logic": Political discourse has, to a
great extent, become globalised.
The situation may be even more problematic
to handle intellectually for persons
steeped in Boasian relativism when very
tangible expressions of global cultural
variation suddenly appear at our doorstep,
which indeed is happening in most
industrialised societies due to labour
migration and to the ongoing influx of
political refugees. This new polyethnic
situation has, especially in European
countries, provoked discrimination as well
as a revitalised cultural nationalism and
chauvinism in segments of the majority,
but many -- "indigenes" as well as new
arrivals -- have also responded by
developing ideological and practical
models for polyethnic coexistence.
Original alloys mixing anthropological
cultural relativism, nationalism, modern
individualism and human rights thought
have thus, in the course of the past
twenty years, created ideologies and
theories dealing with "multicultural
society". In this milieu of social and
political thought, difference is seen not
only as politically legitimate, but is
also frequently invoked as justification
for specific political rights. In this
regard, multiculturalist thought could be
seen as post-nationalist, since it
acknowledges the existence of several
"cultures" within one and the same
political system. At the same time,
multiculturalism may easily conflict with
values seen as universal in modern liberal
states, especially those to do with human
rights and the rights and duties
associated with equal participation in the
institutions of society.
The basic dilemma of polyethnic societies
can be phrased like this: On the one hand
all members of a liberal democracy are (in
principle if not in practice) entitled to
the same rights and opportunities. On the
other hand, they also have the right to be
different -- and in our day and age, the
rights of minorities to maintain and
promote their cultural specificity, and to
be visible in the public sphere, in
cluding the media, school curricula and so
on, are increasingly insisted on. A
crucial challenge for multiethnic
societies therefore consists in allowing
cultural differences without violating
common, societally defined rights; in
other words, the challenge consists in
finding a viable compromise, for the state
as well as for the citizens (representing
power and agency, respectively, in the
framework proposed in Wilson's
Introduction), between equal rights and
the right to be different.
This contradiction is as old as
nationalism itself. Nationalism, the
ideology holding that states ought to be
culturally homogeneous (Gellner 1983,
Anderson 1983), has a double origin in
German romanticism and French
enlightenment thought, which emphasise,
respectively, cultural (in many cases
ethnic as well) uniformity, and shared
territory and citizenship, as the basis
for national integration and as the source
of political legitimation. According to
classic Enlightenment thought, there
existed a universal human civilization,
which was in principle accessible to all
humans. According to German romanticism,
represented in the works of Herder above
all, every people (Volk) had its proper
linguistic and cultural character and the
right to defend it. This view of culture,
incidentally, was developed largely as a
defensive response to French universalism,
which was locally perceived as a form of
cultural imperialism (probably not without
a certain justification). This perspective
and its derivates (including cultural
relativism in its "strong" variants) are
currently expressed through ideologies
arguing the importance of cultural
homogeneity for political identity. This
applies whether they are nationalist and
champion the idea of homogeneous states,
or ethnopolitical and insist on ethnically
based rights for minorities within
existing states. However, the difference
between "German" and "French" nationalism,
so often stressed in the literature (see
Kohn 1945 for a classic statement), is not
absolute: in actually existing nations,
the two principles are generally mixed,
and even in principle, French
territorialism is far from being
culturally innocent. Insofar as the French
universalist civilisation insists on
speaking French, it has certainly not been
perceived as culturally neutral among
non-French speakers in Brittany, in
C⌠te-d'Ivoire and elsewhere. Modern human
rights thinking is no more neutral either,
incidentally, as it assumes global sharing
of a specified set of societal values.
The contradiction between the demands for
equal rights and for the right to be
different is accentuated at present by two
principle tendencies. Firstly, it has
finally become clear in public discourse
-- nearly eighty years after Woodrow
Wilson famously announced the right to
self-determination of peoples -- that
hardly any ethnic group has its territory
by itself. States are poly-ethnic, and any
ideology stating that only people "of the
same kind" should live in a country is
potentially dangerous. This problem was
recognised already by Renan (1992 [1882]),
but it has acquired unprecedented
importance since the 1960s. Secondly, the
current processes of cultural
globalisation break down cultural
boundaries and make it difficult to defend
the idea that a "people" is culturally
homogeneous and unique. Cultural
creolisation (or "hybridisation", or again
"bastardisation" if one prefers),
migration and increased transnational
communication are important factors in
this respect.
A widespread counterreaction against the
perceived threat of boundary dissolution
through globalisation consists in
ideological emphases on "cultural
uniqueness". In this sense, cultural
homogenisation and ethnic fragmentation
take place simultaneously; they are
consequences of each other and feed on
each other in dynamic interplay (cf.
Friedman 1990).
In other words, societies are
"multicultural" -- or so it may seem. I
shall nevertheless argue that
"multiculturalist politics" have to be
universalistic in their very nature. The
position to be defended below argues that
culture is not a legitimating basis for
political claims, and that cultural
singularities among minorities and
majorities in modern societies can only be
defended to the extent that they do not
interfere with individual human rights.
All societies are indeed "multicultural",
whether they contain diverse ethnic groups
or not, since different citizens hold
different values and different world
views. "Multiculturalism", a term
describing doctrines which argue the
importance and equivalence of cultural
heritages and the decentralisation of
defining power as to what is to count as
one, may in practice be either a disguised
form of hegemonic individualistic thinking
about personhood (the world seen as a
smorgasbord of identities to be chosen
among by free individuals) and human
rights, or else it is liable to regress
into nihilism, apartheid and the enforced
ascription of cultural identities. As the
empirical discussion below will make
clear, the former alternative has many
virtues in relation to human rights, which
the latter does not.
The politicised concept of culture
Culture, Raymond Williams has written
(1976: 87) in a much quoted passage, is
one of the two or three most complex words
of the English language. The meaning of
the word, Williams shows, has gone through
many changes since the original Latin
colere, which referred to the cultivation
of the soil. Today, the word has several,
if related, meanings.
One of the most common meanings of culture
posits it as synonymous with the way of
life and world view the members of a
particular group or community have in
common, and which distinguishes them from
other groups. This definition may at first
seem plausible, but it does not survive
closer scrutiny. Within nearly every
"group" or "people" there are varying ways
of life and world views; the rich differ
from the poor, the men from the women, the
highly educated from the illiterates, the
urban from the rural and so on.
Additionally, it is often extremely
difficult to draw boundaries between
"cultures". If one argues that a Norwegian
culture exists and is by default different
from Danish culture, one will need to show
what it is that all Norwegians share with
each other but not with a single Dane.
That is not an easy thing to do. Finally,
culture is naturally not a solid object,
even if the word unhappily is a noun.
Culture is something which happens, not
something that merely exists; it unfolds
through social process and therefore also
inherently changes.
Problems of this kind have made such a
conceptualisation of culture difficult to
manage, and many scholars have ceased to
use it, while others insist on using
culture in the singular sense, as that
which all humans have in common, defining
them as a species as opposed to nature in
general and other species in particular.
However, ideologists and political
entrepreneurs of many shades have embraced
this Romantic concept of culture. In
recent years, "culture" and "cultural
identity" have become important tools for
the achievement of political legitimacy
and influence in many otherwise very
different societies -- from Bolivia to
Siberia. It is used by political leaders
of hegemonic majorities as well as by the
spokesmen of weak minorities.
Indigenous peoples all over the world
demand territorial rights from the states
in which they live, emphasising their
unique cultural heritage and way of life
as a crucial element in their plea.
Immigrant leaders in Europe occasionally
present themselves as the representatives
of cultural minorities, demanding, inter
alia, special linguistic and religious
rights. The hegemonic elites of many
countries also refer to their "national
culture" in justification of warfare or
oppression of ethnic minorities. "Cultural
pleas" are, in other words, put to very
different political uses.
A frequently mentioned "paradox"
concerning the breakup of Yugoslavia and
subsequent war is the fact that the
fighting parties, Serbs, Croats and
Bosnian Muslims, are culturally very
similar, yet justify their mutual hatred
by claiming that they are actually
profoundly different. This kind of
situation, where ethnic relations between
groups which are culturally close take on
a bitter and antagonistic character, is
more common than widely assumed. In
Trinidad, in the southern Caribbean, the
following development has taken place in
recent years (Eriksen 1992a). The two
largest ethnic groups, Africans and
Indians (originally from India; they are
not American Indians), have gradually
acquired more and more in common,
culturally speaking; in terms of language,
way of life, ambitions and general
outlook. At the same time, they have
become ever more concerned to express how
utterly different they are; culture and
cultural differences are spoken about more
often, and cultural differences are
brought to bear on daily life, public
rituals and political organisation to a
greater extent than what was earlier the
case. Partly, this is because the groups
are in closer contact than earlier and
compete for the same scarce resources; but
it is also partly because members of the
two groups feel that their cultural
boundaries are threatened by tendencies
towards creolisation and therefore feel an
acute need to advertise their cultural
differences. The groups have
simultaneously become more similar and
more different. This paradox is
characteristic of globalisation processes,
whereby differences between peoples are
made comparable and therefore come to
resemble each other, and where "small"
differences are "enlarged". It could, in
line with this, be said that the entire
discourse over "multiculturalism" is
embedded in a shared cultural framework
encompassing, and bringing out the
contradictions between, the Romantic
notion of culture and the Enlightenment
notion of individual rights. To put it
somewhat more crudely: To make demands on
behalf of a self-professed "culture"
indicates that one subscribes to a shared
global political culture. The logic of
multiculturalism and ethnopolitics shares
its dual origins with the logic of
nationalism in the Enlightenment and
Romantic thought of early modern Europe.
In order to illustrate and further
illuminate the preceding points, I shall
now turn to an extended empirical example,
which brings out many of the tensions and
contradictions inherent in ideas of
multiculturalism.
Ethnicity in Mauritius
Since Mauritius was permanently settled by
French planters and their African and
Malagasy slaves in 1715, this island in
the south-western Indian Ocean has been a
polyethnic society, and it still is very
much so, as is witnessed in official
symbolism as well as many aspects of
everyday life (Eriksen 1988, Bowman 1990).
The currency is the rupee, and the text on
the banknotes is in English, Hindi and
Tamil. However, Mauritian newspapers tend
to be in French, but the video shops offer
mostly Indian and East Asian films. A
leisurely walk through the capital,
Port-Louis, may bring one past, within
half an hour or so, a Buddhist pagoda, a
Sunni mosque, an Anglican church and a
Catholic one, and two Hindu temples -- one
North Indian, one Tamil. And it is by no
means uncommon that Mauritians have names
like Franτoise Yaw Tang Mootoosamy.
Contemporary Mauritius, with a surface of
some 2,000 square kilometres, has about a
million inhabitants. Their ancestors came
from four continents, and they belong to
four different "world religions".
According to official categories, the
largest ethnic groups are Hindus from
North India ("Hindi-speaking", 42%),
"Creoles" of largely African descent
(27%), Muslims of Indian origin (16%),
Tamils and Telugus of South Indian descent
(9%), Chinese (3%), gens de couleur (2%)
and Mauritians of French descent (2%).
Mauritius, independent since 1968 and a
republic since 1992, is a liberal
multi-party democracy and a capitalist
society (meaning, in this context, that
both labour and consumption are mediated
by money) which was impoverished,
relatively overpopulated and dilapidated,
with a vulnerable monocrop economy (sugar
cane) and a high level of unemployment
during the first decades after the Second
World War. Mauritius has undergone an
astonishing economic transformation since
the early 1980s, and is now a relatively
prosperous society with a dynamic economy
based on sugar, textiles and tourism.
Mauritius is one among many peaceful
polyethnic societies in the world.
Although many of the country's inhabitants
are concerned with their cultural
identity, their "roots" and the
maintenance of local ethnic boundaries,
compromise and tolerance are important
ingredients in the shared Mauritian
political culture. Notions which form part
of a shared cultural repertoire include
the admission that it would have been
impossible to win a civil war, that
secessionism would have been absurd, and
that the country's political stability
rests on a precarious balance between
ethnic group interests. Therefore
Mauritians have developed many more or
less formalised methods for the
maintenance of this balance (see Eriksen
1992b for details).
Ever since France lost Mauritius (then
Ile-de-France) to Great Britain during the
Napoleonic wars, the recognition of
difference has been an explicit tendency
in its politics; first vis-a-vis the
French settlers, since the "niggers and
coolies" were not initially endowed with
rights. When the French capitulated in
1814, the Britons guaranteed the settlers
that they would be allowed to retain their
religion, their language, their customs
and their civil rights. That the British
kept their promise is evident today, as
Mauritius is still much more Frenchified
than Anglified. Even the legislative
system appears as a unique blend of
British law and the Code NapolΘon.
During the twentieth century, and
particularly since the extension of the
franchise after the Second World War and
the accession to full independence in
1968, policies relating to interethnic
tolerance have been extended so as to
include the entire population. There is a
continuous search for common denominators
(cf. Eriksen 1988) in legislation and in
everyday social life, which are necessary
for societal and national integration to
be at all possible ("multicultural" or
not, people need to have something in
common if they are to have a society), and
those universalist principles are balanced
against the alleged conventions and
culturally specific rights claimed by
certain members of each constituent group.
Modes of interethnic compromise
The electoral system in Mauritius is more
or less a carbon copy of the British
Westminster system, with simple majorities
rather than proportional representation.
The parties are largely organised along
ethnic lines, and very many Mauritians
vote for politicians who they feel
represent their ethnic (sectional)
interests. Attempts at creating
interethnic alliances or supraethnic
alternatives (based on, for example,
class) have generally been short-lived.
Although ethnic competition is in this way
thematised in politics, there is
nevertheless wide agreement over the
political rules, and electoral results are
respected. The Creoles, who are
Christians, and the Muslims accept being
governed by Hindus, who are politically
dominant by virtue of numbers. At this
point, there is no "multiculturalism".
There is a shared discourse through which
cultural variation may be articulated.
An important element in the Mauritian
political system is the so-called Best
Loser arrangement, which guarantees the
representation of all ethnic groups
through allotting a limited number of
parliamentary seats to runners-up at
General Elections. The "best losers" are
selected so as to ensure the
representation of all ethnic groups in the
Legislative Assembly. In this way, the
importance of ethnic differences is made
an integral part of the electoral system.
Like in many other multiethnic societies,
questions concerning schooling, religion
and language are among the most
complicated and controversial ones in
Mauritius. It is perhaps here that the
dilemma of equal rights and cultural
differences is most evident. In all three
fields, compromises of various kinds have
been developed.
Regarding religion, the popular idiom
Sakenn pΘ priΘ dan so fason ("Everyone
prays in his/her own way") has nearly
achieved legal status. As mentioned, four
"world religions" are represented in the
island, and three of them (Christianity,
Islam and Hinduism) are divided into a
large number of sects and congregations.
Religious groups receive state funding
according to the size of their membership.
In this field, a consistent compromise has
been established, where no religion is
given priority by the state.
The Mauritian schooling system represents
a different kind of compromise. Here,
equality is emphasised rather than
differences. Thus, core curricula are
uniform island-wide, as are exams.
However, classes in "ancestral languages"
are offered as optional subjects. As a
matter of fact, a growing majority of
Mauritians speak Kreol, a French-lexicon
Creole, as their first language, and
scarcely know the language of their
ancestors, but Kreol is rarely written. It
could be said, therefore, that Mauritian
school stresses equal opportunities yet
allows for the expression of symbolic
differences. It represents a compromise
not only between ethnic groups, but also
between a Romantic and an Enlightenment
view of society.
A third kind of compromise is expressed in
language policies. Officially, as many as
fifteen languages are spoken in Mauritius;
in practice, at least four or five are the
mother-tongues of various groups. When
Mauritius was to become independent from
Britain in the late 1960s, one was in
practice faced with four possibilities.
First, one could have opted for Hindi,
which is the ancestral language of the
largest ethnic group (although many
Mauritian Hindus do not understand it).
Second, one could have chosen Kreol,
which, in spite of its being held in low
esteem, is by far the most widely spoken
language. Third, French could have been an
alternative, having been the dominant
written language throughout the history of
Mauritius. However, in the end it was the
fourth alternative, English, which was to
win. English is an international language,
and is learnt by Mauritians in the same
way as non-native speakers elsewhere in
the world learn English as a foreign
language. This means that most Mauritians
master it only partially. More
importantly, perhaps, English was nobody's
ethnic language, the few Anglo-Mauritians
(most of them colonial civil servants)
having either returned or become
assimilated into the Franco-Mauritian
group. By choosing English, an ethnically
neutral language, as the language of the
state, Mauritians avoided turning
nation-building into a particularistic
ethnic project at the beginning.
The other languages are nevertheless also
supported through the state and its
agencies. Public radio and TV broadcasting
alternates between the major languages of
Mauritius, and French still dominates in
the written mass media. North American
films are dubbed in French. There is in
other words a clear, but negotiable
division of labour between the non-ethnic
language English, the supraethnic
languages Kreol and, to some extent,
French, and the ethnic languages, chiefly
Bhojpuri/Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Mandarin and
Telegu.
Contradictions and paradoxes
This will have to do as a general
introduction to public policies relating
to ethnic differences and national
cohesion in Mauritius. I now turn to some
of the problems, controversies, paradoxes
and contradictions which inevitably arise
during this kind of ongoing balancing act
between demands for similarity and claims
of difference.
The Catholic priest and ecumenic Henri
Souchon became famous domestically when,
at the height of the legendary "race
riots" of 1968, he admonished his
congregation to visit the nearby mosque in
order to familiarise themselves with a
Muslim way of thought and thereby mitigate
the mutual suspicion between Christians
and Muslims. He called for contact and a
possible "merging of horizons", to use
Gadamer's term, between the
antagonistists.
More than two decades after the riots,
Souchon sees two possible scenarios for
Mauritius regarding the relationship
between ethnic boundaries and the
formation of identity categories oblivious
to ethnicity. He calls them the fruit
salad and the fruit compote, respectively.
In the fruit salad, the components are
clearly distinct; ethnic boundaries are
intact, and reflexively "rooted" identites
are secure and stable. In the fruit
compote, on the other hand, the different
fruits are squashed and mixed together
with substantial use of force. (This
metaphor, it may be noted, is a variant of
the American melting pot metaphor.) The
result of the compote de fruit, in pΦre
Souchon's view, would be uprootedness,
nihilism and confusion. He himself
therefore supports the fruit salad
variety, although he goes further than
most in expanding the compass of the
common denominators or, to stretch the
fruit salad metaphor a bit, thickening the
syrup. In order to have a dialogue,
Souchon argues, one needs a firm position
to conduct it from.
Some kind of fruit salad metaphor, or a
rainbow metaphor which politicians are
fond of invoking, is hegemonic in
Mauritius. Yet conflicts between equality
and difference are inevitable since the
tension between sharing and difference is
endemic to the island. Allow me to outline
a few examples.
Most Mauritian schools are public, but
private schools also exist, many of them
run by religious organisations. There are
anti-discrimination laws. It is
nevertheless well known that Catholic
schools have tended to prefer Catholic
applicants for teaching positions,
although they have also occasionally hired
Muslims and Hindus. This policy was tried
in court when an unsuccessful applicant
filed a suit against a Catholic school in
1989 because she suspected having been
bypassed on religious grounds. In court
the following year, the defence argued
that it was necessary to have faithful
Catholics in certain teaching jobs because
a part of their job consisted in turning
the pupils into good Catholics. The
prosecutor asked whether this was also
relevant with respect to subjects such as
French, English and mathematics, which the
school's lawyer admitted was not the case.
In his testimony, the Archbishop, Mgr.
Jean MargΘot, argued that the colours of
the Mauritian rainbow had to be kept
separate "for the arc-en-ciel to remain
beautiful". The Catholic school won the
case, and succeeded in this way in
creating precedence for differential
treatment on religious grounds in a
limited part of the labour market. The
principle of difference here won over the
principle of equality.
Another nationally famous case from the
same period concerned the controversial
Muslim Personal Law, introduced during
British rule, which allowed Muslims to
follow customary Muslim law in family
matters. A characteristic consequence of
this law was that it became nearly
impossible for women, but relatively easy
for men, to obtain a divorce. In the
course of the investigations of a
Commission of Enquiry set up in the
mid-eighties, it became clear that the
opposition to the MPL was significant even
among Mauritius' Muslims. Not
unexpectedly, many women and young Muslims
were against it, arguing that they were
entitled to the same rights as other
Mauritian citizens. In the end, the law
was abolished, and universalist
(Enlightenment) principles won over
multiculturalist (Romantic) ones.
This second example is the most
interesting one in this context. Here, the
fundamental paradox of multiculturalist
ideology becomes highly visible: it
presupposes that the "cultures" are
homogeneous and "have values and
interests". The mere fact that the formal
leaders of an ethnic group invoke
particular values and traditions does not
imply that all members of the group
support them. This is why it can be
dangerous to accord special rights to
groups, for groups inevitably consist of
persons with often highly discrepant
values and interests.
A third example highlights the
relationship between particularist
identities and universalist principles in
a somewhat different way. Some
intellectual Mauritians, tending towards a
"fruit compote" as an ideal, have
experimented with mixing religions and
cultural conventions in novel way, such as
the radical music group Grup Latanier,
which performs an essentially Creole sΘga
music with strong Indian elements. One
leading Mauritian intellectual decided,
some time during the 1980s, to challenge
the rigid boundaries between different
religions, reasoning that the island
needed a "shared culture" for a proper
national identity to come about. On
Christmas day, therefore, he went solemnly
to church, bringing bananas and incense as
a sacrifice to the Hindu gods. This act
was, naturally, frowned upon by Hindus as
well as Christians, who both felt insulted
by the blasphemous syncretism implied. If
anything, they felt further apart after
the experiment than before it. The ideal
of the "fruit compote" thus cannot be
enforced against people's wishes. It
should nevertheless be noted that
universalist principles have been adopted
by the Mauritian population with respect
to political culture. In so far as
discrepant religious or otherwise cultural
practices do not interfere with the
universalism guaranteeing individuals
equal rights, there is no good reason to
chastise them.
Dilemmas of similarity and difference
The Mauritian attempt at creating a
synthesis between liberal principles of
individual equality and a cultural
relativist principle is remarkable and
unusual, and it certainly deserves
international attention.
The examples sketched in the previous
section suggest that both equal rights and
the right to be different may in
particular situations lead to
discrimination and the violation of
commonly agreed upon individual human
rights. If one insists on shared civil
rights as the basis of citizenship and
nationality, as the French revolutionaries
did, one will tend to oppress minorities
by forcing them to assimilate to a public
culture (language, rules, hierarchies and
conventions) which they perceive as alien
and intrusive. If, on the other hand, one
opts for differential treatment on the
basis of religion or ethnicity, the risk
is the opposite: those afflicted may lose
their equal rights. South African
apartheid policies are a good example of
this; South Africans were encouraged to
use their vernacular languages at all
levels, and the majority of blacks were
thereby in practice excluded from national
and international political discourse. The
hidden variable in this puzzle is,
naturally, power discrepancies.
Additionally, it should be pointed out
that political leaders and others are
frequently prone to exploiting notions
about cultural uniqueness strategically to
strengthen their positions. In a critical
study of ethnopolitics in the USA,
Steinberg (1981) concludes that persons
and organisations generally invoke
principles of cultural relativism when
they themselves have something to gain
from differential treatment, and that they
will otherwise support equality
principles. "Tradition", "rooted culture"
and similar catchwords are positively
evaluated in the political discourse of
our time, and are often used rhetorically
to justify privileges and political
positions. On the other hand, this warning
should not be taken to mean that there are
never legitimate reasons for wishing to
protect oneself against cultural
domination! We just need to be careful to
distinguish, and to draw a boundary,
between the right to a cultural heritage
and particularistic politics.
Another, related point, which is also
relevant for all polyethnic societies,
concerns identification with
collectivities in general. As a matter of
fact, many of my Mauritian informants
generally feel quite at ease as members of
what they see as an emerging "fruit
compote", and who do not long for roots
and purity. They would prefer to be
cultural hybrids to the extent they wish,
to be recognised as individuals and not as
the representatives of a particular group.
The legitimacy of this kind of strategy
was tried out by members of the small
radical socialist party Lalit ("The
Struggle") before the General Elections of
1991. The militants on the list first
refused to register their ethnic identity
(which is compulsory, partly because of
the Best Loser system), arguing it was
irrelevant, and then proceeded to draw
lots deciding their ethnic identity. The
result was not devoid of Theatre of the
Absurd qualities. For example, one of
their leaders, at all appearances a white
Mauritian of foreign birth, turned out to
be a Hindu on the election rolls.
The neo-Romantic ideological climate
influencing many parts of the world today
-- either viciously nationalist or equally
viciously multiculturalist -- is such that
persons may virtually be forced to take on
an ethnic identity whether they want to or
not. Indeed, authoritarian culturalism may
be just as oppressive in an ostensibly
multiethnic and tolerant "rainbow society"
as in an ethnically hegemonic nation. The
right to have an ethnic identity must also
include the right not to have one. Here,
perhaps, lies the greatest paradox of
multiculturalism: in its apparently
benevolent focus on "the wealth of
cultures and traditions" present in
society, it neglects the Salman Rushdies
of the world, so to speak; those persons
who spend their entire lives midway
between Bombay and London without wishing
to, or indeed being able to, land. It
excludes the "mongrels", anomalies and
idiosyncratic individuals who are numerous
and necessary as interethnic brokers and
in the forging of cross-cutting or
non-ethnic alignments, and who represent
the possible future of many societies.
Finally, cultural relativism gives no
moral advice. To make it the source of
public morality would imply that any
practice would be acceptable as long as it
can be justified by reference to "a
culture". This kind of position is
tantamount to no position at all.
Individualism as a key factor
It has often been asked why Mauritius is
such a stable democracy, incorporating, as
it does, a vast number of religious
groupings and people originating from
different continents. The question is
wrongly asked, and it reveals an
inadequate understanding of culture. At
the level of everyday representations and
practices, Mauritian culture can actually
be described as quite uniform in the sense
that there is a wide field of shared
premises for communication encompassing
most of the population: There is a shared
political culture and a standardised and
standardising educational system, there is
considerable linguistic uniformity, and
the recruitment to the labour market is
increasingly based on individual skills.
It is generally not difficult to argue the
virtues of individual human rights among
Mauritians; they tend to share similar,
Western-derived notions of justice. It is,
in other words, only superficially (if
noisily) multicultural even if it may be
profoundly multiethnic.
It should be noted that the
"multiculturalist" model of coexistence,
as practiced in Mauritius and elsewhere,
collapses unless the constituent groups
share basic values of individualism and,
in all likelihood, a shared lingua franca.
For instance, it is widely believed, not
least in that country itself, that the USA
has been capable of absorbing a great
number of different nationalities without
homogenising them culturally. This is
wrong, and generally, migrants to the USA
have changed their language within two
generations. One could perhaps say that
immigrants to the USA have been
assimilated to a degree of 99 per cent,
and have been allowed to use the remaining
one per cent to advertise their cultural
uniqueness, which exists largely as a set
of symbolic identity markers. As a
Norwegian, I have often met Americans who
identify themselves as "Norwegians" but
who seem to betray, in their verbal and
nonverbal language, lifestyle and values,
a strong attachment to the moral
discourses of US society.
If political multiculturalists favour
equal individual rights, the "culture" in
their rhetoric is but a thin cosmetic
film. If, on the other hand, they
seriously defend the right of ethnic
minorities to run their own political
affairs according to a cultural logic of
their own, they run the risk of defending
practices which conflict with the human
rights of individual group members.
The solution, or rather, the "good
multiculturalism", must arrive at a blend
of sharing and difference. It requires
common denominators in key sectors,
including politics, education and the
labour market, and it must
institutionalise a dialogic principle (see
Giddens 1994 on "dialogic democracy")
enabling a variety of voices to be heard
on an equal footing. This is not
relativism, but rather the recognition and
democratisation of different value
orientations in society, in the manner
acknowledged as necessary and
non-relativistic by Bauman (1993) when he
notes the ill effects of the attempts at
extending the Western "ethical code over
populations which abide by different codes
(è) in the name of one all-human ethics
bound to evict and supplant all local
distortions" (Bauman 1993: 12). It is a
question of striking a proper balance
between the demands for equality and the
quest for heritage, including the right
not to acknowledge a heritage.
Epilogue: on similarities and differences
In the foregoing discussion, I have argued
the importance of universalist human
rights in modern state settings, and have
alleged that political multiculturalism is
a very fuzzy concept as it presupposes,
yet explicitly and self-contradictorily
resists, the presence of powerful
processes of cultural integration. The
very statement "I have a culture worthy of
protection" betrays a considerable degree
of integration into a modern, reflexive
way of thinking about the individual,
human rights and politics. At the end, I
would like to reflect on the question,
tangential to the foregoing discussion, of
whether the promotion and spreading of
individual rights is morally objectionable
in the case of societies which are
multicultural in the sense that they
contain people who are not integrated into
a capitalist mode of production, have not
been exposed to individualism and modern
education and so on.
Debates about indigenous notions of
personhood in anthropology have frequently
oscillated between positions stating, on
the one hand, that remote peoples are
"just like ourselves"; and, on the other
hand, that they are qualitatively and
fundamentally different. Naturally, both
positions can be defended convincingly,
given the appropriate selection and
interpretation of empirical material.
Regarding human rights issues, it is an
often debated question whether or not they
are or ought to be universal, and if so,
whether they should be "adapted" to local
circumstances because of socioculturally
conditioned differences in the
constitution of the person. Be this as it
may, the situation in societies where
there are still groups which have been
spared the mixed blessings of
individualism, is not similar or directly
comparable to the situation in Mauritius,
the USA or other thoroughly modern
"multicultural" societies where personal
autonomy is considered an absolute value.
As many anthropologists have shown (see
e.g. Dumont 1980, Strathern 1992, Morris
1994), concepts of personhood vary
dramatically cross-culturally. In India
and Melanesia, for example, a dominant
view on the individual emphasises that he
or she is a product of social relations
and far from that self-sustaining,
independent and inviolable "monad" the
Western individual is seen as. In such
societies, the community rather than the
individual is accorded rights, and the
individual has duties rather than rights.
In such societies, individual human rights
can be seen as truly alien, even if they
are often promoted and adopted by some
segments of society, usually educated
middle-class elites.
In his very beautiful and very melancholic
book Danubio (Magris 1986, Eng. tr. 1989),
Claudio Magris writes that a fascist is a
person who has best friends but cannot
understand that others may be just as good
friends; who feels love for his homestead
but cannot understand that others may feel
the same kind of love for theirs; and so
on. It may therefore be proposed, as a
general principle, that "human rights
missionaries" have an obligation to gain
some understanding of the world views and
value systems current among their target
groups. They would then discover that
virtually all "peoples" are, like
Mauritian Muslims, divided on important
issues. Some of their members would have
gone to school and acquired individualist
categories; some would have learnt about
women's rights in remote countries; some
might see a solution in a Marxist
revolution or a liberal multi-party
system, and yet others might refuse to
question tradition. As Samir Amin has
written (Amin 1989), individualist
thinking and social criticism is just as
"rooted" in Islamic history as
fundamentalism. And as Salman Rushdie
(1991) and others have reminded us of, one
scarcely does southern or eastern peoples
a favour by continuously telling them that
individual human rights are really a
"Western" invention and far from an aspect
of their culture. This kind of attitude
essentialises "other cultures" and
alienates the growing numbers in those
societies which hold positive views of
individual human rights at the same time
as they resist cultural neo-colonialism.
Integration in a modern state with a
liberal constitution may create a
dialogical situation where human rights
principles become a common denominator for
the many groups and individuals which make
up the state. If this sounds like blunt
cultural imperialism, it should be noted
that the most likely alternative, in my
view, consists in a form of segregation
whereby the exertion of power is left to
persons such as the old men who are the
formal leaders of Mauritian Muslims, and
where there is a mounting risk of ethnic
conflict because of the intergroup
competition implied by segregation.
In most contemporary societies, processes
of cultural homogenisation are taking
place in some social fields (such as
consumption, education and the media),
while the demarcation of boundaries and
the symbolic strengthening of "identity",
"roots" and "tradition" takes place in
other fields. It is this process I
described at the beginning of this article
as the dual movement of cultural
homogenisation and ethnic fragmentation.
In this context, the Mauritius I have
described may perhaps serve as a microcosm
or an ideal type of a modern society:
Mauritian society is simultaneously
characterised by conflicts and
contradictions, pluralism and value
conflicts along several axes, and one
cannot offhand say what kind of values or
morality "society as such" represents. For
this kind of society to be cohesive at
all, common denominators are necessary,
and a recognition of cultural diversity
which does not interferes with the
principle of universal, individual human
rights may actually be the best alloy
available. It is the blatant
nonrecognition of cultural heritages which
leads to ethnic revitalisation and
fundamentalism; not their
institutionalisation through the state.
India was mentioned above as an example of
a society where Western human rights
thinking seems outlandish and alien. It
might therefore be appropriate to end by
stating that both Marxist, feminist,
liberal and other kinds of individualist
human rights related movements enjoy great
support in Indian society. Such groups are
no less "authentic Indian" than
traditionalists who dream of a reawakened
Hindu millenarian kingdom where ancient
hierarchies are respected in minute
detail.
Perhaps it would be useful to speak of a
"weak" and a "strong" variant of political
multiculturalism. The former is the one
practiced in some liberal modern states,
where a high degree of cultural
homogeneity is taken for granted. The
latter, which I have just argued against,
would be a kind of political rhetoric
rejecting liberal individualism and human
rights ideology on the basis of alleged
tradition. (Recall Tiananmen Square if in
doubt.) The former, "weak" variety is,
however, also hard to defend. It may, as I
have argued with reference chiefly to
Mauritius, (i) contribute to freezing
ethnic distinctions and thereby heighten
the risks of ethnic conflict, (ii) remove
the protection and entitlement of shared
societal institutions from the members of
minorities, (iii) strengthen internal
power discrepancies within the minorities,
(iv) direct public attention away from
basic contradictions in society, notably
economic ones, and (v) contribute to a
general moral and political
disqualification of minorities in society:
since they are not accorded the same
rights and duties as everybody else, there
is no apparent reason why they should be
treated as equals in other respects
either. The conclusion is, thus, not that
cultural variation in itself should be
combatted, but that politicised culture is
incompatible with the individual rights
modern states are, or ought to be, based
on. The slogan could be "cultural
nationalism, political cosmopolitanism",
to borrow a turn of phrase from Gellner
(1994).
This final statement, I now realise,
provides a starting-point for further
discussion pivoting on the meaning of
"politicised culture". Is marriage
politics? If so, should, for example,
arranged marriages in liberal
individualist societies be seen as
incompatible with human rights? Trusting
that the reader will be able to draw on
the preceding discussion in exploring
further issues, I leave the problem here,
partly unresolved.
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⌐Thomas Hylland Eriksen 1996
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