[Bilimsel Haber] Review: Multiculturalism without Culture

[Gonul Pultar]

*Anne Phillips.* /Multiculturalism without Culture./ 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691129444> Princeton: Princeton 
University Press, 2007. 168 pp. $30.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-691-12944-0.

*Reviewed by* Anna Yeatman (Citizenship and Public Policy, University of 
Western Sydney)
*Published on* H-Ideas (March, 2009)
*Commissioned by* Magdalena Zolkos

*Multiculturalism without Culture?*

This is a very good book written in Anne Phillips’s inimitable 
conceptually precise, theoretically acute, fair-minded, and plain 
English style. Phillips operates as a political theorist who seeks to 
clarify the quagmire of issues that beset contemporary multiculturalism. 
She argues that attacks on multiculturalism have been fueled by what we 
might call a "culturalist" conception of multiculturalism, one that 
privileges a group-based notion of cultural identity. A group-based 
notion of group identity positions those said to belong to the group as 
simple instantiations of the group identity. For reasons of their group 
membership these people seem unable to realize the possibilities of 
autonomy that inhere in the standing of the individual citizen within a 
liberal democratic type of polity. Not only does this approach to 
cultural difference subsume the individual within the group, it 
essentializes cultural identity for it is presupposed as already 
existent and not subject to the dissonance, incoherence, and 
contradictions of an identity that is negotiated within the everyday, 
complex, and multiple (thus not only cultural) entanglements of 
individuals. When cultural identity is essentialized, autonomy as a 
political value is transformed into the automatic attribute of a culture 
that is said to value autonomy. Thus, those who belong to such a culture 
do not have to think about or struggle for their own individual 
autonomy, and they enjoy the group-based privilege of rescuing others 
who are perceived as belonging to cultures that do not value autonomy, 
especially if they are that prototypical victim--women. As Phillips 
notes, "Activists have observed wryly that a lot of people not 
previously known for their support for gender equality now seem to get 
very agitated about the abuse of women, so long as it is abuse of women 
within minority or non-Western cultural groups" (p. 25).

When culture is essentialized, the policy of multiculturalism must 
appear dubious for it will seem to be a policy that gives group identity 
a privilege it would not otherwise have. This group identity is always 
already a minority group identity for it makes no sense to develop a 
policy of multiculturalism for the majority group identity, and, 
accordingly, multiculturalism appears as a policy that legitimizes 
cultural difference that is antagonistic to autonomy. In this framework, 
then, multiculturalism comes under justified attack.

Multiculturalism approached in this way, then, as Phillips puts it, must 
appear not "as a cultural liberator but as a cultural straitjacket, 
forcing those described as members of a minority cultural group into a 
regime of authenticity, denying them the chance to cross cultural 
borders, borrow cultural influences, define and redefine themselves" (p. 
14). Yet there is a good deal at stake here. If the attacks on 
multiculturalism are permitted to stand without questioning, then one of 
the most important achievements of liberal democracy in recent times is 
dismantled. Phillips’s simple but brilliant conceptual intervention is 
to ask if it is "possible to have multiculturalism without culture" (p. 
15). She argues that it is crucial to recognize that culture matters and 
that it enters into how power, opportunity, and status work just as 
class, gender, and race also do. Her background in feminist political 
theory allows her to suggest that just as gender is a category that has 
to be used to enable a political valuing of equality, it is a 
contradiction in terms for such a politics to essentialize gender. The 
point in recognizing that those who share the gender determination of 
women can be disadvantaged by this aspect of their subject position is 
to open space for these people /as individuals/ to negotiate and arbiter 
what gender means, how it enters into institutional life, and how it 
affectstheir lives.

To make her argument,Phillips offersan alternative view of culture than 
an essentialist one and she argues that the values of equality and 
autonomy are political rather than cultural in nature. These arguments 
are linked. She argues against the classical anthropological view of 
culture as an "internally coherent whole" where it is also assumed that 
there is little mutual exchange between cultures and that the members of 
a culture have been successfully inducted into it such that there is 
consensus on its values. She might be said to be offering a political 
conception of culture by arguing that it is always historically 
contextual, always contested, and often subject to a political agenda 
"when people make their claims about the authoritative interpretation of 
their culture" (p. 45). In offering consistent advocacy of the values of 
equality and autonomy as political values, Phillips refuses those who 
reduce these values to cultural identity--that of the West understood as 
a hegemonic and imperialistic force. "Autonomy" she defines as "the 
capacity to reflect on, and within the limits of our circumstances, 
either endorse or change the way we act or live--thus, in some 
significant sense, to make our actions and choices our /own/" (p. 101, 
emphasis in the original). It is because autonomy is valued that 
equality is valued--people share equality in their right to be treated 
as subjects who have this capacity for autonomy.

In making this argument, Phillips is situating multiculturalism as an 
emancipatory discourse. Individuals cannot be released from culture 
because it deeply enters into the nature of their habitus, but if they 
are to be "free" (autonomous), then they must be free to figure out how 
they want to live with this determination as with the others. From this 
it follows, as Phillips argues, that it is not enough for liberal 
theorists, such as Will Kymlicka, to propose that culture and autonomy 
are reconciled if individuals have freedom of "exit" in relation to the 
culture in which they find themselves. She suggests that "voice" may be 
even more important than "exit." The rationale for multiculturalism 
resides in public recognition of the importance of culture to people’s 
lives and in the public provision of opportunities for voice especially 
in cases where individuals may be subject to group coercion. It also 
resides in public protection against discrimination on the basis of 
supposed cultural difference. Phillips offers this rationale in the 
context of consideration of how these issues play out especially in 
Britain at this time so that her argument acquires concrete and specific 
relevance to policy debates there.

The weakness in the book is that it goes only so far theoretically. As I 
have indicated, in effect, Phillips is pitting "the political" against 
culture, and this offers a splendid opportunity for re-interrogating the 
nature of the political. I am not sure that Phillips takes this 
opportunity nor do I think she shows how and why the value of autonomy 
is central to the nature of the political. All said, however, this is an 
excellent and considered argument for multiculturalism at a time when it 
has come under attack from all quarters.


*Citation: * Anna Yeatman. Review of Phillips, Anne, /Multiculturalism 
without Culture/. H-Ideas, H-Net Reviews. March, 2009.
*URL:* http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24107