The Multicultural Riddle Zones of Religion Peter van der Veer, editor Previously published in the series: Conversion to Modernities Peter van der Veer Border Fetishisms Patricia Spyer Appropriating Gender Patricia Jeffery and Amrita Basu The Multicultural Riddle Rethinking National, Ethnic, and Religious Identities GERD BAUMANN ROUTLEDGE New York and London Published in 1999 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE Copyright © 1999 by Routledge All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The multicultural riddle: rethinking national, ethnic, and religious identi- ties/Gerd Baumann. p. cm.—(Zones of religion) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-92212-7 (hc.)—ISBN 0-415-92213-5 (pbk.) 1. Ethnicity. 2. Multiculturalism. 3. Human rights. 4. Civil rights. 5. Religion and culture. I. Title. II. Series. GN495. 6. B38 1999 305.8—dc21 98–49911 CIP ISBN 0-203-90663-2 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-90741-8 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-92213-5 (Print Edition) Contents About This Book vii 1. “I Have a Dream”—but Who Is It For? 1 Civil Rights, Human Rights, or Community Rights? 2. From Dreaming to Meaning: 17 The Multicultural Triangle National Culture, Ethnic Culture, Religion as Culture 3. The Nation-State, I: Postethnic or Pseudotribe? 29 Why Nation-States Are Not Ethnically Neutral 4. The Nation-State, II: Business or Temple? 41 Why Nation-States Are Not Religiously Neutral 5. Ethnicity: Blood or Wine? 57 Not Biological Essence, but Cultivated Ferment 6. Religion: Baggage or Sextant? 69 Not Immutable Heritage, but Positioning in Context v The Multicultural Riddle 7. Culture: Having, Making, or Both? 81 From an Essentialist through a Processual to a Discursive Understanding 8. Multicultural Theory, I: 97 The Sales Talk and the Small Print Are You Same Enough to Be Equal? 9. Multicultural Theory, II: 107 The Values and the Valid What Is It Prof. Taylor Should “Recognize”? 10. Multicultural Praxis: The Banal and the Best 121 From Culti-Parading to Multi-Relating 11. From Dreaming to Meaning: A Summary 135 Multiculturalism Is a New Understanding of Culture 12. From Meaning to Practice: What Students Can Do 143 New Understandings Require New Projects References 159 Index 173 vi About This Book A RIDDLE IS A PARADOX that can be solved by rethinking the terms in which it is posed. When Oedipus was asked what walks on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three at night, he cracked this famous “Riddle of the Sphinx” by rethinking the meaning of the riddle’s crucial term. A leg meant any support on the ground—toddlers move on all fours, adults walk on two legs, and the old may use a walking stick—thus the riddle was about human beings, and the day was their lifetime. The answer seems simple, but it required rethinking the terms of the question. Multiculturalism, too, is a riddle. It asks how we can establish a state of justice and equality between and among three parties: those who believe in a unified national culture, those who trace their culture to their ethnic identity, and those who view their religion as culture. To solve the riddle, one needs to rethink what is meant by nationality or the nation-state, by ethnic identity or ethnicity, and by religion as a basis of culture. What all three acts of rethinking have in common is a new concern with the meaning and making of culture. Multiculturalism is not the old concept of culture multiplied by the number of groups that exist, but a new, and internally plural, praxis of culture applied to oneself and to others. This is what this book tries to show. The book is concerned with North America and Europe for two reasons. First, these two parts of “the West” have been in constant vii The Multicultural Riddle interchange about the meaning of the multicultural riddle: They are like two, or maybe two hundred, different people who are busy with the same riddle, each trying to solve it their own way. Comparing their approaches allows us to study the riddle in all its different contexts, for as we will see, there is no such thing as a multicultural society within the boundaries of one nation-state. Secondly, the multicultural riddle is North American in its origins, but the most varied attempts to tackle it are found in Europe. To say this is not to adjudicate high grades in virtue, but to point to some astonishing historical shifts between the two continents. An alertness to comparison is the lifeblood of all multicultural thinking. The first ideal readers I kept in mind for this book were my second-year students in political anthropology at the University of New Mexico. Two further rounds of student critique at Brunel University, London, and the University of Amsterdam convinced me that the third multicultural focus, on religion, should be sharpened by concentrating on one faith. I have chosen Islam in the West because this is the most contentious and thus the most revealing site of the multicultural riddle across the two continents. The ideal critics for the first and second draft were my colleagues at the Research Centre Religion and Society of the University of Amsterdam. I thank Peter van der Veer, Patricia Spyer, Peter van Rooden, Birgit Meyer, and Peter Pels. I further thank Marie-Benedicte Dembour (Sussex University), Marie Gillespie and Tom Cheesman (Swansea University), Steven Vertovec (Oxford University), and Bryan Mohamed (Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam), as well as the staff at Routledge, all of whom gave me their generous help and advice. For ease of use, the literature is divided into two parts: There are some two hundred references that I have used and therefore need to credit at the end, and there are recommendations for further reading appended to each chapter. I have been ruthless in keeping these short to guarantee page-for-page value: When there viii About This Book was no summary article, I have selected only parts of the best books I know. I thus recommend the Further Reading sections to anyone who wants to come to their own conclusions in this search for the basics of multicultural thinking. Gerd Baumann Research Centre Religion & Society The University of Amsterdam ix 1 “I Have a Dream”— but Who Is It For? Civil Rights, Human Rights, or Community Rights? So I say to you, my friends, that even though we must face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed— we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal…. I have a dream my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by content of their character. I have a dream today!… I have a dream…that one day, right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today! (King [1963] 1968, 16–17) MARTIN LUTHER KING’S vision of a future without ethnic or cultural discrimination is rightly regarded as programmatic for the past thirty years and the next fifty. Its sentiments have been echoed in dozens of struggles across the globe to obtain equality for all, regardless of ethnic, cultural, or religious differences. Whether this 1 The Multicultural Riddle meant equality in treatment, rights, recognition, life chances, or success was a moot question then. Yet in hindsight, King rallied the troops, but they did not follow his strategy. The leader of the Civil Rights Movement wanted exactly that: equal rights based on civil rights, that is, based on the premise of equal and individual citizenship. In some ways, this line of argument had been overtaken even as it was being cast into its visionary form. The struggle against ethnic or cultural discrimination took on an entirely different logic within a few years of King’s murder: The Civil Rights Movement lost its combative edge to the Black Consciousness Movement, and this and its many successors put forth a different argument altogether—discrimination, and for that matter emancipation, was not a question of individual civil rights, but of collective rights, that is, rights assigned to groups, be they real or imagined. There were two transformations in this process. The first transformation was to translate present-day civil rights, that is, the rights of citizens regardless of color, religion, or parents’ culture, into ethnic rights.1 The most outspoken of these ethnic translations was the Black Power Movement, concerned not with the rights of Americans as such, but with the rights of African Americans as a community. This community had to be styled into a community of culture, as well as color, but the act of restyling failed on two counts: On the inside, there were too many people who refused to develop a specifically “black” consciousness, rather than an American one or a Christian one.