Conformist Cultural Praxis or `oh my god, we are all racists`

This piece, which was written by Radu Ioviţă (a.k.a. The Hairy Carpathian Sheep), will be read in an adaptation of "Conu Leonida faţă cu reacţiunea" (Mr. Leonida faced with the Reaction) by Ion Luca Caragiale. I think, it is a very insightful and novel look on the issue of multiculturalism. Enjoy.

55 years have now passed since Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled their now famous list of the then available 164 definitions of the term "culture", and we still haven't arrived at a satisfactory one. In fact, the degree of variation found in this set of definitions necessarily renders a statement that could satisfy everyone of them so general and vague that most anthropologists have ceased trying to define culture, and have limited their activities to merely studying the thing in itself. If one were, however, to enunciate such a general and broad definition, it would be something like this: "Culture is the set of all socially learnt and socially transmitted behaviours." Note that this definition does not exclude a number of non-human animals from its application, nor does it specify a group size or longevity in terms of generations across which the said behaviours are transmitted, but it does exclude idiosyncratic stereotyped behaviours of particular individuals. The culture concept as defined above, therefore, is a very flexible and yet somewhat abstract one, which departs in a number of important ways from folk definitions of culture, most of which only refer to a minuscule component of institutionalized and curated behaviors, such as religion, language (langue as opposed to langage), and music, literature, and the arts and sciences. It must be said here that not only is this scientific definition at odds with the folk understanding of culture for semantic reasons, but also because the latter lends itself much more easily to political manipulation in the scope of the formation of new group identities.

The term 'multiculturalism' emerges, in light of the above, as a purely politically-motivated discursive label which denotes the alleged desire of a society to promote the existence on equal terms of multiple 'cultures,' in the folk sense I have described earlier. Usually, it is employed at an institutional level by the dominant members of that society and their affiliated representatives in order to categorize, catalogue, and control cultural expression that does not conform to otherwise acceptable norms of behaviour. It stands to reason that a system where the dominant group determines the forms of culture that subaltern groups are allowed to display for the edification of the general public is little more than a cultural petting-zoo, featuring one's own neighbours and friends. Thus, the creation of the foreign Other serves not only the function of raising mainstream awareness of It but, in that process, of taming it and reducing it to an unthreatening entity.

Because the premise is that two or more 'cultures' must have equal status, multiculturalism naturally presupposes that forms of behaviour can be evaluated according to lists of criteria in order to determine their inclusion or exclusion from the policy. In most countries, multiculturalism tacitly refers to the acceptance of ethnic groups and their behavioural manifestations, but fails to incorporate the majority of other groups which may be linguistically or religiously similar to the mainstream, but otherwise play by radically different rules. It follows naturally that artists, academics, farmers, punks, sailors etc. are forced to align themselves with the group identity as defined by the policy itself if they wish to benefit from it. In the case of artists and intellectuals, this is a kind of mild yet stern censorship, which forces their creativity to conform, at least outwardly, to norms that can be parsed by the policy machine.