8 - Education for living in pluriethnic societies

Summary

Perspective

Living in a multicultural and multiethnic society like the United States or the European Union (EU) requires dealing with multinomy, the coexistence of many, possibly divergent norms. Moreover, every culture in our contemporary complex societies is subdivided into so many subcultures and lifestyles that quite a few social scientists wonder if such a thing as a culture – a system of meaning shared by people of a given population – really does exist. The term postmodern condition is sometimes used to indicate this multinomy.

Nevertheless, Hannerz (1992) rightly states that culture remains a reality. This type of reality, however, is far removed from the uniform, monolithic systems we are accustomed to meet in the descriptions of the so-called primitive tribes by the anthropologists of generations gone by. At closer sight, every single culture appears to be internally pluralistic and unevenly distributed over social categories and groups. In the contemporary world, mass media and power relations play an important role in the dissemination and distribution of culture.

Subcultures and lifestyles are in permanent flux. A culture is not a monolithic thing, a package inherited from one' ancestors, as is often suggested in popular political discourse.

In the context of this continuous cultural flow and instability, a considerable number of political leaders and groups are struggling to maintain or create a multitude of ethnic, ethnonational, national, hypernational, and cultural identities, and are trying to express and organize these forms of auto- and hetero-identification (Hobsbawm, 1993; Moynihan, 1993; Schlesinger, 1991; Smith, 1986). Ethnicity is fashionable.