Book Notes

Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies. Edited by Richard A. Shweder, Martha Minow, and Hazel Rose Markus. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002. Pp. 485. $49.95, cloth.

Does a commitment to liberal principles entail respect for cultural differences? If so, how far ought that respect extend, and what shape should it take? Should it include culturally justified exemptions from otherwise valid, generally applicable laws? Should it include the availability of a “cultural defense” to criminal prosecution? A right to the “free exercise of culture”?

What would such a right look like? What would it include? What would be its limits?

These and other difficult—at times seemingly intractable—questions are explored with depth and nuance in a new collection of essays fittingly entitled Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies. The essays are the work of participants in the Social Science Research Council Working Group on Ethnic Customs, Assimilation, and American Law—an interdisciplinary group of legal scholars, political theorists, social psychologists, and anthropologists who have come together to try to understand the many kinds of challenges that multiculturalism poses within liberal democracies.

Given the interdisciplinary nature of the group, it is no surprise that the collection of essays reflects a diversity of perspectives, approaches, and foci. Many of the essays examine the challenges posed by cultural differences in the United States; several others examine the ways in which such challenges have played out in other liberal democracies, most notably Norway, France, Germany, India, and South Africa. Some of the essays in the collection describe in vivid detail particular instances of cultural clashes and explicitly refrain from coming to any normative conclusions; others aim quite directly at articulating the principles according to which such cultural clashes ought to be thought about and resolved. Some of the essays investigate the ways in which demands for cultural accommodation may conflict with a commitment to liberal principles; others look at the ways in which a commitment to liberal principles may itself be illiberal when it leads to an unwillingness to take seriously the importance of culture and the difference it makes. Other important themes addressed in the collection include an examination of the ways in which human rights discourse has been used and shaped—and at times resisted—by those engaged in struggles for cultural accommodation; of how the development of a language of human rights has complicated anthropology’s privileged relationship to culture; and of how the framing of the demand for cultural accommodation in terms of a contest between human rights and the right to culture is fundamentally misguided and singularly unhelpful in illuminating the critical issues at stake in thinking about and responding to the challenges posed by demands for cultural accommodation in liberal democracies.

It would clearly be impossible to summarize accurately and concisely a collection of essays written from as diverse an array of disciplinary backgrounds as those contained in Engaging Cultural Differences. Still, some general comments can be made about the collection as a whole. To begin with, it speaks eloquently to the complexity of the challenges that demands for multicultural accommodation pose in liberal democracies. As such, it makes clear that the question of whether and to what extent cultural differences ought to be accommodated cannot easily be answered in the abstract, but must be tackled with a keen appreciation of the particular facts of each situation in which the demand for accommodation is made. At the same

time, the collection invites us to think more deeply about the ways in which we approach those particular “facts”—that is, to question how we frame and understand particular cultural differences, which ones we are willing to accommodate, and on what grounds.

Perhaps most significantly, however, Engaging Cultural Differences invites us to think hard about what our approach to the challenges posed by multiculturalism in liberal democracies reveals about us—about our conceptions of, among other things, what it means to be a person, what it means to be a part of a culture, how gender relations and relations between parents and children ought to be structured, how we ought to define “public” and “private” and the line separating them, and how the strangers among us ought to be treated. As Martha Minow, one of the collection’s editors, writes in her reflective and thoughtful essay, “About Women, About Culture: About them, About us,” we “will have to acknowledge that debates over cultural conflict and assimilation are not just about women, and not just about immigrants, minority groups, or Third World nations; they are about all of us.”

Indeed, that these debates over cultural conflict and assimilation are essentially debates about who we are, and who we want to be, will become increasingly clear as globalization brings more and more of “us” into contact with more and more of “them”—and an ever more diverse group of “them” to boot. Crucially, how we resolve the cultural conflicts, how we understand and respond to demands for cultural accommodation, and how we define the limits of such accommodation will not only reveal who we are, but will also inevitably shape who we will be for decades to come. This is the promise, as well as the peril, of “engaging cultural differences.” And, as the collection of essays makes inescapably clear, the path between the two—if it exists at all—is far from clearly marked. Thus, our challenge is to recognize the complexity of the issues posed by demands for cultural accommodation in liberal democracies. Our obligation is to walk carefully and with due humility in the face of that complexity.

—Sandra J. Badin

Copyright © 2003 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Harvard Human Rights Journal / Vol. 16, Spring 2003