In a few short sentences it is implied that ‘culture’ equates to a language group,
an ethnic group and an ethnonational group. Kymlicka goes on to define the kind
of culture with which he is concerned as an ‘intergenerational community, more or
less institutionally complete, occupying a given state territory, sharing a distinct
language and history’ (1995: 18) and further suggests that a culture provides
‘meaningful ways of life across the full range of human activities’ (1995: 76). The
problem is that there is a proliferation of concepts with which culture is equated
but this simply shifts the strain of definition on to these other, equally problematic,
concepts.
In popular discussion culture is frequently run together with race, ethnicity and
religion; while there are important connections between these concepts they are not
synonyms. The structure of a religion is quite different to the structure of, say, a
linguistic community, and each generates distinct political claims. How we define
culture has significant implications for our understanding of multiculturalism and
the relationship of multiculturalism to other ideologies.
If we want to find a serious discussion of culture we have to turn to
anthropologists, for whom arguably culture is the central, defining concept of their
discipline. We can characterise the anthropologists’ discussion of culture as an
attempt to answer the question: given a shared biological nature and largely similar
physical needs, why is there such cultural diversity? Responses have fallen into two
categories: universalist and relativist. Universalists include Marxists, who argue that
culture is to be explained by underlying material forces, and most nineteenth-century
liberals. Mill, for example, argued that human beings have innate rational capacities
that can only be realised under particular cultural conditions (Mill, 1991: 231).
Universalism need not take an evolutionary form: functionalists argue that very
diverse cultural practices can be explained by underlying, universal needs
(Malinowski, 1965: 67–74). Relativists, on the other hand, take culture to be
fundamental and not derivative. Ruth Benedict maintained that a culture is an
integrated pattern of intelligent, albeit often unconscious, behaviour. Pattern theory
implies that there can be no cultural diversitywithin a society, for culture is integral,
and it is perhaps not surprising that those political theorists, such as Tully (1995),
who make explicit their anthropological commitments, appeal to an alternative and
more recent form of cultural relativism, that advanced by, among others, Geertz
(1993). Culture for Geertz is a complex of signs, whose meaning is dependent upon
perspective, not in the sense that an ‘outsider’ cannot understand the signs, but
rather that such understanding – interpretation– must make reference to the context
of the participants. For Geertz one does not ‘have’ a culture in the sense that culture
is predicated upon a subject, but rather culture is a shorthand for a ‘multiplicity of
complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into
one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit’ (Geertz, 1993: 10).Race (and ethnicity)
Critics of multiculturalism on the radical (white nationalist) right argue that
multiculturalism is a Western ideology intended to allow minority racial groups to
continue their distinctive practices, including, importantly, endogamous (that is, in-
group) biological reproduction. Evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald argues338 Part 3 Contemporary ideologies