Government
Testing the Limits of Tolerance
Clashing cultures will test tolerance in tomorrow's democracies.
By Clifton Coles
In Miami, Cubans and Haitians who practice Santeria, a religion that
involves animal sacrifice, encounter laws prohibiting killing animals for anything other
than food consumption and activists protesting against cruelty to animals.
In New York, police arrest a Sikh priest wearing a ceremonial dagger for
violating a law prohibiting carrying an exposed knife in a public place.
In Berlin, Turk parents question why Islamic classes cannot be made
available as an elective in public schools in Germany, a country that has a long practice
of public school religious instruction.
These three instances demonstrate frictions that occur when cultural and
religious practices of some residents clash with the majority culture in a democracy.
Future governments will need to seek legal and balanced solutions to these conflicts as
globalization continues, warn scholars contributing to a new book, Engaging Cultural
Differences.
In the past, "immigrants left country A to settle in country B,
more or less permanently," says Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, an education professor at
Harvard University. "Immigrants today are more likely to be at once here and
there, articulating dual consciousness and dual identities." The traditional
immigrant progression from societal separation to marginality to incorporation and
assimilation is no longer clear-cut.
This presents challenges to governments in the immigrants' new
homelands. The newcomers may continue to engage in practices or express ideas that clash
with the views of the dominant culture. And it's not just immigrant groups that spawn such
clashes: Resident groups with religious, cultural, gender, and other differences also
present unique problems for modern democracies.
"Requiring that individuals change their identities is problematic
in a democratic society that purports to allow individuals the right to choose their own
life plans," says Alison Dundes Renteln, political science professor at the
University of Southern California.
Culture Collision
An example of the clash between government and culture is over the issue of
female circumcision in Egypt, Mali, Sierra Leone, and other African and Middle Eastern
countries. While recognizing and addressing moral and ethical sides of the debate,
University of Chicago anthropologist Richard A. Shweder examines what he calls a mutual
"yuck" response. In the West, the practice is disparaged as disfigurement. In
certain parts of Africa, the response to uncircumcised Western women is one of equal
disgust: Unmodified female genitals are "ugly, unrefined, uncivilized, and hence, not
fully human."
Quoting a 1999 study by anthropologist Carla Obermeyer, Shweder reports
that widely publicized medical complications are the exceptions, not the rule; that female
genital alteration is not incompatible with sexual enjoyment; and that the claim that
untold numbers of girls and women have been killed is not well supported by evidence.
Furthermore, it is a ritual purely for the women who practice it, one that men do not and
have no business participating in, signifying maturity, cultural acceptance, and female
solidarity.
What happens when this African institution collides with Western
ideology? In the United States, for example, Congress passed a law in 1996 that penalizes
with fines or prison anyone who knowingly engages in surgery on the genitals of a female
under 18 years of age (with some exceptions). "The law explicitly states that in
punishing offenders no account shall be taken of their belief that the surgery is required
as a matter of custom or ritual," says Shweder.
Furthermore, argues Shweder, the law targets female circumcision--a
mostly African practice--while remaining silent on male circumcision, a socially
acceptable custom practiced by religious groups as a cultural ritual in an analogous way
to female genital alteration.
No Easy Answers
There are no easy answers to this and other cultural conflicts. Cultural
differences generate anxiety and incite xenophobia. One-way assimilation is no solution
since it can preserve racial and ethnic alienation while seeking to overcome it, according
to Amherst College political science professor Austin Sarat. Separation does not work
either. "Exile groups can become more introverted and radical if they are
excluded" from political dialogue, says Eva Østergaard-Nielson, leader of an
Economic and Social Research Council study investigating the political activities of Turks
and Kurds living in four western European countries.
Tolerance and acceptance are crucial to striking a balance.
"Working through frictions in the public sphere by reasoned debate and compromise is
central to the idea and practice of democracy," says Suárez-Orozco.
Source: Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in
Liberal Democracies, edited by Richard Shweder, Martha Minow, and Hazel Rose Markus.
Russell Sage Foundation, www.russellsage.org. 2002. 485 pages. $49.95. (Order online from www.wfs.org/specials.htm.)
