Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

Transversal study on the theme of cultural policy and cultural diversityreflecting on the immense creativity that results from the friction of conflictingidentities experienced by artists and musicians who are black, Caribbean, andBritish – and all three at once, refusing to jettison one position in favour of the others– insists that, instead, the identities that people have of themselves, and the culturesto which they see themselves as belonging, have always to be seen as multiple,complex and contradictory.It is from perspectives of this kind that debates about culture as a condition ofhybridity and in-betweeness have taken their cue. While by no means resolved – tothe contrary, the debates around the concept of hybridity are hotly contested 1 – onefairly clear by-product of these debates is that it is no longer adequate to think aboutthe relations between cultures in a society in the form of their compartmentaliseddivision into separate ways of life and identities. It is rather the flows and crossoversbetween cultures that has to be attended to, and the patterns of their interminglingthat are produced by the movement of peoples and, of course, the restless culturalmixing that now characterises the organisation of all developed cultural markets.Arjun Appadurai’s doubts about the continuing value of “culture” as a noun bearson my point here. Used as a noun, Appadurai argues, culture invariably taxonomises,reifying divisions between cultures as classificatory divisions betweenways of life whose boundaries are fixed in the administrative gaze that constitutesthem. Expressing his preference instead for the adjectival “cultural” as being moreopen to “a realm of differences, contrasts, and comparisons”, Appadurai(1996: 13) – keen to place a limit on the language of cultural diversity by seeingonly some forms of difference as being culturally significant – suggests that weshould regard as cultural “only those differences that either express, or set thegroundwork for, the mobilisation of group identities”.Why does this matter? Because Appadurai argues, it means that we have to thinkthe configuration of the cultural field differently; still as a field of differences, yes,but one in which differences, rather than being conceived taxonomically as separatedways of life, are thought of as overlapping trajectories, cultures in movement,curving in and over one another – plaited, if you like – in mutually refractiverelationships.It is, then, ways of thinking of culture along these lines that need to be developedand thought through if cultural diversity policies are to be guided by conceptualbearings that will avoid some of the difficulties discussed earlier. This will not providea way round the more immediate and sometimes intractable difficulties facingcultural diversity policies which – in whatever context, but in ways that areprofoundly affected by the different histories that impact on them – are, to recallmy earlier argument, concerned with in some way mediating and balancingnationalist projects, social justice principles and principles of difference connectedto emerging transnationalist formations. But it might help in thinking new waysthrough them.__________1. For a helpful review of these, see Caglar, 1997.53