Session 7: Base Questions: Understanding Cultures

Session 7: Base Questions: Understanding Cultures
Chair: Melissa Styn

Culture, Contact and Contagion
Nicole Ridgway
Wits School of Arts, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa

In the nineteenth-century the anthropological idea of culture emerged as a category-concept with enormous explanatory power. Whether founded on a paradigm of evolutionism, organicism, or relativism it was culture, rather than, for example, theology, which gained ascendancy in explaining the affinities of people within groupings and the differences between groupings. While culture as a concept never completely coheres around something, as a category of interpretation it is often deployed as if it did. While what exactly constitutes culture yields scores of rival definitions, in each of these culture appears as something one gets and is possessed of.
This paper presents one history of culture, from its first anthropological proponents, via colonial and Apartheid policies, to the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa . Disease and contagion literally and metaphorically infect the histories of contact between Europeans and Africans, as well as the intellectual discipline given explanatory hegemony with regards to Africans; namely, Anthropology. Communities in South Africa had historically been circumscribed through an ontological shared substance, initially race and ethnicity, later culture. The reification of difference which Apartheid so violently tried to make consistent with reality, is dissolved and consolidated in the AIDS crisis as groupings are identified as vectors of contagion and, in turn, distance themselves from contagion. We are told, for example, that “AIDS is a white person’s (or African) disease, you can only get AIDS from having sex with people of other cultures, and blacks can’t get AIDS because homosexuality is not part of African culture.”
This paper revisits “culture” to explore the resonances between, and implications of, a “culture” that is transmitted in a disease-like way, “culture” that is a source of disease, pathology that results from “cultural contact”, “culture” as protection against contagion, and “cultural difference” as a barrier against sameness and communality.

Multi/Inter/Mono/Trans? What are we Talking About: Some Theoretical Explorations of the Culture Debate
Rob Imre
Department of Politics and Sociology, College of Arts, University of Notre Dame Australia, Fremantle, Australia

In this paper I shall explore the variety of meanings attached to the definitions of multiculturalism, interculturalism, monoculturalism and transculturalism. I will explicate the theories of Will Kymlicka and draw upon a variety of perspectives including some postmodern and postcolonial concepts of culture. I shall also rely on the works of thinkers such as Zygmund Bauman in order to develop a critical position regarding our contemporary notions of culture. This is a theoretical paper in which I seek to question the relevance and understanding of concepts of culture and how the nexus of the multi/inter/mono/trans-cultural debates form our current conceptions of human societies and how they/we interact.
Kymlicka has developed an intricate theory of multiculturalism in which he defends a version of liberal pluralism that supports a multi-faceted Canadian version of multiculturalism. Bauman speaks of culture in a number of different ways but in the context of this paper, I seek to delineate his views about the dispersal of global culture and the insidious nature of globalisation itself. Further, I will discuss some of the postmodern aspects of problematizing the definitions themselves, as well as the postcolonial demands to recognise the inherent power relationships in definitions about culture.

Multiculturalism and Interculturalism: A Basic Philosophical Approach
Francesco Belfiore and Rosanna Belfiore
University of Catania, Italy

Coping with cultural heterogeneity requires the distinction-relationship between universal rights, pertaining to all groups, and right of minorities, linked to the recognition and respect of the various cultural identities. We will discuss this issue by referring to our recent book The Structure of the Mind (University Press of America, 2004). Mind consists of the unity-distinction of intellect (producing ideas), sensiti­veness (producing sentiments), and power (producing actions), which, considered in their unity, form a higher-level entity, the consciousness; mind is a continuous becoming or evolving entity, i.e., it tends towards evolution. Men are instantiations of the mind, i.e., they are members of the class of men, and as such they possess common properties, shared with all members of the class, and individual properties, specific of each individual or group.
The common properties of men consist of their ability to undergo evolution (or involution) of intellect, sensitiveness and power; mind evolution is the objective human good, and promoting mind evolution (i.e., the development of knowledge, sentiments, and wealth/social status) is the fundamental moral rule and the source of the universal human rights.
On the other hand, each man or group of men, by enjoying the universal human rights, develops his own individual properties (degree and specificity of evolution of intellect, sensitiveness and power), which define his identity and give rise to his individual or minority rights, i.e., rights of having recognized and respected one’s unique properties (referring to culture, religion, desires, behaviour, etc.). Yet, no group can claim the so-called bad minority rights (e.g., rights to deny education to children, freedom to women, or to inflict cruel punishment, etc.), because these would restrain evolution.
Diversity in the degree of evolution can only be claimed if all individuals or groups equally enjoy universal rights. Diversity in the specificity of evolution of individuals and groups is to be encouraged, as it makes the richness of human world.