Social Analysis, Volume 58, Issue 2, Summer 2014, 108119 Berghahn Journals

doi:10.3167/sa.2014.580206 ISSN 0155-977X (Print) ISSN 1558-5727 (Online)

THE MULTICULTURALISM DILEMMA
Alexandre Coello de la Rosa
Randi Gressgrd, Multicultural Dialogue: Dilemmas, Paradoxes, Conicts
(New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 190 pp.
John L. and Jean Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2009), 236 pp.
We do not classify things because they need to be classied, but because by clas-
sifying, we discover [and perhaps we can add invent] the elements with which
to do it. (Pouillon 1981: 29)
Culture has become the semantic terrain of scientic, social, and political
debates. The notion of culture is today as ubiquitous as it is ambiguous (Stolcke
2011: 6). The economic globalization described by Brazilian lawyer and geog-
rapher Milton Santos (2000: 2336) is associated with the progressive cultural
homogenization of post-national societies that is nonetheless accompanied by an
explosion of local identities centered on cultural, ethnic, and/or racialized axes.
The indigenous peoples of America, Oceania, and the South Pacic demand
respect for their political/ethno-political rights by appealing to a complex web
that threads their native, ethnic authenticity with a salvationist rhetoric (Kuper
2003: 389395).
1
Transnational migrations incite alarm in host countries, whose
natives fear that recent arrivals will erode (or are eroding) their cultural identity
and social cohesion by introducing different cultures.
2
Some analysts see in
cultural intermingling or mestizaje an antidote to identity-based fundamental-
ism, something like the friendly face of the culturalist boom.
3
Literature on multiculturalism is overwhelming. It relates to ideologies and
policies that promote interaction and communication among groups with dif-
ferent cultures within a society. In Multicultural Dialogue: Dilemmas, Para-
doxes, Conicts, Randi Gressgrd looks at multiculturalism as the conictive
co-existence of difference in the same national-political space. Reconciling the
opposites that it generatesdignity and equality, on the one hand, and identity
The Multiculturalism Dilemma | 109
and difference, on the otherleads us to wonder if it is possible to translate
into praxis the theoretical debates on socio-political recognition of subaltern
ethnic groups, generally called ethnic minorities even when they are large
(or majority) demographic sectors. Gressgrd refers to Charles Taylors view
that modernity denes human liberty, dignity, and equality before the law
as universal rights, but at the same time, and perhaps for this very reason, it
suggests that the differences between human groups and the way that they
diverge from modernity itself must be respected (1). Therefore, the cultural
particularities or specic characteristics of human groups and individuals
must be legally protected (4).
This human beings are equal but different debate is not new. Pro-indepen-
dence sectors in Spanish America debated the issue of citizenship and racial
difference as early as the 1810s, and Bolvar at some point declared that there
were no more Indians, simply nationals, only to backtrack a few years later
and reinstitute the legal differences between indigenous and non-indigenous
citizens. In most equal but different nation-states, elites have sought to make
non-whites and non-mestizos invisible in their projects of national construc-
tion, and the latters refusal to accept this invisibility is the historical foundation
behind processes of ethnic revitalization and ethno-genesis that today exist in
practically all of Latin Americaeven in Argentina, long considered a country
of European descent (Kradolfer 2011: 4142). In todays Western democracies,
those regarded (and self-regarded) as nationals still erect barriers to protect
themselvesand their nationfrom ethnic minorities, mostly foreign nation-
als. For their part, immigrants demand citizen rights based on the same liberal
principles of modernity that legitimate the power of ruling elites (whites).
From this perspective, multiculturalism seems to suggest an opportunity for
so-called minorities to ght inequalitiesof class, race, gender, cultureand
enjoy the same rights and opportunities as the ruling groups. But this is naive
at best. According to the ethical and juridical theory of natural rights (iusnatu-
ralismo), all human beings are equal in nature and so must enjoy the same
juridical-political rights. But this theory is neither universal nor natural, and
it is not necessarily compatible with multiculturalist policies. Authors such as
Foucault and Laqueur, among others, remind us that the equalitarian ideals of
the nineteenth-century Liberal Revolutions were threaded with the belief that
inequality in the political body reected a basic and natural inequality among
humans. This justied the colonization of some groups (blacks, Indians) and
the political and social marginalization of others (women) who did not, and
could not, enjoy the same rights that full citizens (white metropolitan males)
enjoyed. The superiority/inferiority of the different races was the rst inven-
tion that thus undergirded the dominant bourgeois social order; the second was
cultural fundamentalism. Both seemed to justifynaturally and rationallythe
moral and political inequalities between people. Womens inequality was justi-
ed by the inferiority of their sex. In the case of nineteenth-century racism, the
naturalization of gender inequalities had to do with a genealogically indelible
logic (accursed races) tied to modernity and reinforced by the discourse of
scientic racism. However, these inequalities were based not on indisputably
110 | Alexandre Coello de la Rosa
unique and differentiating factors but on the discriminating and essentializing
socio-political will of various groups and individuals.
In the European Community, the discourse on multiculturalism regards
immigrants from outside the community (especially those coming from coun-
tries with Muslim majorities) as bearers of cultures that are incompatible with
the hegemonic Western model (Gonalves Barbosa 2011: 481482). Promising
the theoretical possibility of applying the supposedly universal rights of moder-
nity to all groups, the discourse paradoxically reinforces the binary division
of us versus them (the others) instead. Multiculturalists offer a relativist
discourse that supposedly recognizes and protects the culturally distinct oth-
ers, but the system of social classication transforms these others into the
negation of our cultural identity. Instead of analyzing them as contextual and
historical realities (anti-rationalism), liberal democracies invent these oth-
ers and provide them with an essentialthat is, ahistoricalnature. When
their capacity to adapt to Western public life is questioned, they are indeed
culturally determined, which favors the appearance of all kinds of prejudice.
However, the alternative to multiculturalism does not constitute a better
solution. Standing against ethnocentric multiculturalism, cultural relativism
demands the protection of endangered cultural minorities. Far from elimi-
nating differences, this tension reafrms them through what Gressgrd has
dened as planned pluralism. The case of Norways politics of integration of
ethnic minorities is a case in point. The liberal-democratic rhetoric is measured
in terms of its capacity to integrate minoritiesand their impuritiesinto
the hegemonic cultural order. In this sense, acknowledging them as equal but
different implies an inevitable process of assimilation and/or subordination.
Incorporating their cultural particularities into a normative model means that
non-EC immigrants are transformed into diverse others through national poli-
tics of integration and/or exclusion. Referencing Aleksandra Alund, Gressgrd
states that plurality and cultural diversity are normalized and rationally con-
trolled in order to standardize those very cultural differences that are targeted
for protection, which turns multicultural dialogue into a monologue (11).
It is therefore worth wondering whether a dialogue that does not aspire to
planned pluralism, with its reication of class, race, and gender inequalities, is
even possible (1112).
Gressgrd contends that the politics of recognition presupposes the con-
guration of the Western subject and its universalization as necessary precondi-
tions for the assimilation of different others in a hegemonic cultural order. The
objectifying (and subjectifying) of these others as barbarians or savagesor
simply as uncouth and pre-moderndenes to a large extent the history of
European colonialism. As Foucault has pointed out, it is our categorizations
that allow us to reproduce human subjectivity. Citing Mary Douglas, Gressgrd
states that this is especially the case with regard to notions of purity and impu-
rity (22). The dynamics between cultural order (purity) and cultural disorder
(impurity, chaos), are, according to Gressgrd, tied to liminality (2326). Lim-
inal spaces mark the limits between what Mircea Eliade denes as the sacred
and the profane or, what is the same, a chaos that threatens to engulf the
The Multiculturalism Dilemma | 111
established cultural order. Transnational migrations generate alarm in liberal
democracies whose citizens fear that newcomers can corrupt their cultural
identity and their national social cohesion, as if any change in national cultures
brought about by the different customs of immigrants signied a loss (of self-
identity, of national pride) (Stolcke 1994, 1995). Gressgrd asserts that ethnic
minorities certainly do not constitute a pathological impurity (26), yet liberal
democracies refuse to share with them the privileges acquired by their citizens,
including the privilege of introducing change. With respect to this matter, there
are two ideal types of reaction. While British multiculturalism supports differ-
ence, French universalism openly calls for dissolving extra-communitarian
immigrants into the Republic. In other words, these European governments pre-
fer to integrate, adapt, and assimilate immigrants through a process of cultural
domesticationthat is, culturizationthat dissolves their particularities in a
new symbolic order.
Unlike origin myths, the great narratives of history (liberalism, republican-
ism) are projected onto a (utopian) future in which the individual fades into the
ideal of universal equality. Liberalism (Locke, Smith) identied supposedly uni-
versal qualities that dene human beings as such, thus describing and qualifying
the human and the humane. In the eighteenth century, nobody questioned
whether barbarians had souls, but they did doubt that they could rationally
adapt to the standards of civilization. Consequently, it was not possible to rec-
ognize those others if they were not previously incorporated to the cultural
parameters of Western civilization (34). But this does not suggest that, in com-
plying, these others obtain the same rights that the rest of the citizens enjoy,
as the special education classrooms of Norway show (35). The criteria that
determine the creation of such classrooms are monocultural and monolingual.
There are no shared educational formulas that favor interculturality in pedagogi-
cal terms. Ethnic minorities are thus categorized as traditional and inferior,
as the moniker special education itself implies. Far away, in Brazil, a meaning-
ful intercultural perspective in education can be achieved only by engaging the
whole indigenous community, including caciques or lideranas (leaders) and the
elderly, endowed with great knowledge (DAngelis 2012, 2013).
As Manuel Gonalves Barbosa (2011) suggests, it is indispensable to carry
out an ample and profound recomposition of civil societys educational role.
While educational politics in the global village are based on universal values
that supposedly promote integration, in reality they discriminate against all of
those groupsminorities, who are in fact, the global majoritythat do not t
the parameters established by a given European model. Gressgrd argues that
this ethnocentric fallacy (3436) is the result of another multiculturalist para-
dox based on a modern ideal of natural equality that does not match the ethnic
diversity of the others. To understand this foundational paradox between the
French model (i.e., the supposed cultural homogeneity of the citizenry) and the
actual diversity that existed, for example, in the new Latin American republics,
or even within the French empire itself, we have to locate multiculturalism
as a product of modern ideology (4244).
4
In this sense, the work of Louis
Dumont on the centrality of the individual in Western ideology is indispensable
112 | Alexandre Coello de la Rosa
to an understanding of the limits of modernitys ideological logic. In Dumonts
words, the idea that we are part of a culture does not depend only on the
available data, but on our way of interpreting that data and our way of think-
ing more generally (cited in Stolcke 2001: 15; my translation). Counterpoising
the holism of the self associated with ancient India and the individualism
of Western society, Dumont puts modernity into perspective, shedding light
on the ideological conguration of etic, or outsider, anthropology. Gressgrd
tries to do the same with multiculturalism, agreeing with Dumont that the
problem of modernity occurs when holism is confounded with egalitarian
principles, that is, when non-modern idea-values acquire meaning within the
modern political ideologies (52).
At this point, Gressgrd suggests the possibility of individual subjects het-
erogeneity in a community model centered on the virtues of differences instead
of the assertion of identities. She bases this on a Kantian conception of reex-
ive judgment that attempts to dene a universal moral character by establish-
ing connections between the notions of subjectivity and liberty. A theoretical
solution to a real problem, that is, the tension between the guarantee of equal-
ity of rights, on the one hand, and the cultural differences between us West-
erners and those immigrants, on the other, it would allow us to dispense with
tribalism and reach a high level of tolerance through an open, constant, and
constructive dialogue (6365).
5
In contrast, for years indigenous peoples the world over have been reassert-
ing their identities through an intense political activism that often embraces
the essentialization of their cultural uniqueness vis--vis the non-indigenous.
The internationalization of the so-called indigenous movement has provided
these groups a forum for debate that has strengthened the re-ethnication of
America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. The Declaration on the Rights of Indig-
enous Peoples, adopted on 13 September 2007 by the General Assembly of the
United Nations, boosted the identity revitalization of autochthonous peoples
(the term commonly used by French ethnologists). These communities include
the Mapuche of Neuqun (Argentina) (see Kradolfer 2011: 4451); the Chamor-
ros of the US territory Guam (Mariana Islands);
6
and the Kaiow, Guarani, and
Terena of Mato Grosso do Sul (Brazil),
7
among hundreds of others, who made
increasing appeals to their cultural particularities (cuisines, language, dress) in
their efforts to recover the lands taken from their ancestors.
In Ethnicity, Inc., John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff conceptualize the
relation between ethnicity and culture quite differently from the primordial
and ontological ties that are usually assumed, looking at how groups com-
modify culture for mass consumption (20). In this sense, the identity claims
of minority nations and/or ethnic groupssuch as Scots, Kenyans, Catalans,
Chamorros, or Zulus, to name just a fewcast their differences in terms of
a given set of identifying hallmarks that act as a brand or a copyrighted set of
unique traits. Instead of the traditional, monolithic image that denes the term
ethnic as something that ascribes certain predetermined cultural patterns upon
the individuals that bear it, the Comaroffs see ethnicity as a cultural product
that is in permanent self-construction (9). More than a political recourse that
The Multiculturalism Dilemma | 113
is automatically activated in situations of conict, ethnicity is a labile reper-
toire of signs by means of which relations are constructed and communicated
through which a collective consciousness of cultural likeness is rendered
sensible (38). That is, ethnicity is a mechanism that different peoples and/or
nations use to delimit their identities and project themselves toward the outside.
For the Comaroffs, the commodication of culture is universal, and it is
inserted in the neo-liberal model that paradoxically has allowed said groups to
reinforce and/or construct ex novo their own ethnic categories (e.g., the Zulu,
the San). An entrepreneurial management of their cultural patrimony tout
court through the creation of thematic parks, such as Shakaland, popularizes
the images associated with given ethnicities and allows bearers to sell them for
their own benet. By exploiting traditions to satisfy ethno-tourism, these cul-
tural industries do not dissolve the minority peoples supposed ethnic authen-
ticity; on the contrary, they reafrm their ethnicity at a different levela level
that is not only economic but also political, for it allows ethno-nations of cul-
turally diverse states to exist according to their own terms and ends (4648).
The cultural industries appeal not to multiculturalism and its sanctimonious
progressivism but to the language of legality. The ethnic becomes not only
something that can be bought and sold, but also a juridical language invested
in the attribution of rights (5359).
However, as capitalist enterprises based on the law of supply and demand
transform cultures into commodities, the scientic community becomes appre-
hensive about the effects that this will have on cultural survival. The casino
capitalism of so-called American Indians starkly reveals the transformation of
ethnic groups into corporate owners of a territory and a culture and of their
leaders into administrative boards that manage the material and/or symbolic
capital represented by their customs and land. A legal vacuum regarding fed-
eral lands in state boundaries has permitted American Indian tribes to set up
casinos on reservations, and many tribes have acquired extraordinary economic
power: in 2006, the Seminole tribe of Florida bought the Hard Rock Caf chain
for $965 million. The proliferation of these enterprises has generated a debate
regarding the kind of political and cultural independence enjoyed by casino-
operating tribes, given the control and supervision exercised by the federal
government through the National Indian Gaming Commission over tribes such
as the Navajo and Seminole. Many wonder whether instead of helping native
communities survive by providing them with economic resources, casinos rep-
resent a way of integrating these groups into the capitalist system.
8
Other mat-
ters related to ethno-capitalism are also debated, such as the criteria (blood,
genealogy, property) used to determine who belongs to an ethnic group or
how the ethnic is born or perhaps reborn, precisely through the incorporation
into the ethno-capitalist system. The recovery (or rediscovery) of some tribes
identities (e.g., the Californian Pom o or Me-Wuk peoples) was produced a
posteriorithat is, particular differentiating elements within a dynamic social
space were identied as their traditions, instead of the other way around.
But what does being Indian really mean? And what is a traditional or
native people? Facing the autochthonous illusion of aboriginal purity (see
114 | Alexandre Coello de la Rosa
Grnewald 1999: 140, 172), R. Radhakrishan wondered: Por que eu no posso
ser indiano sem ter de ser autenticamente indiano? A autenticidade um lar
que construmos para ns mesmos ou um gueto que habitamos para satis-
facer ao mundo dominante (Why cant I be an Indian without having to be
authentically Indian? Authenticity is a place that we build for ourselves, or
a ghetto that we inhabit to satisfy the dominant world) (cited in Little 2001:
2223; see also Pacheco de Oliveira 1999c: 37). In Brazil, one of the most eth-
nically diverse countries on the planet, culture has become an instrument of
self-afrmation that allows access to political rights without dependence on
the kindness of entrepreneurial corporations. In the northeast, the inhabitants
of Sergipe, a long-standing single rural community, have splintered into two
separate ethnic groups: the Xoc Indians and the Mocambo, a Maroon commu-
nity. In 1991, the Xocs were dened as Indian and were thereby granted the
protection of the Fundaao Nacional do ndio (FUNAI, National Indian Founda-
tion). Almost a decade later, in 2000, the Mocambo were ofcially recognized
as a Quilombo and also obtained a secured land base. In both cases, territorial
conquests were at the root of their ethnic claims and their newly acquired vis-
ibility in the public sphere (Maurcio Arruti, cited in Montero 2012: 82, 8385).
In Serra do Um, in Pernambuco (Brazil), tor (ancient Indian knowledge) is
considered the determining mark of Indiannessthat which distinguishes the
indigenous from the civilized folk (Grnewald 1999: 166167). Anybody in
Serra do Um who actively participates in tordescribed by Grnewald (ibid.:
167) as un corpo de saberes dinmicos sobre o qual fundamenta-se a segredo
da tribu (a set of dynamic knowledge and understandings upon which the
secrets of the tribe are founded)is considered indigenous, whereas those who
do not know tor are not. In the early twentieth century, the Atikum, one of
the many indigenous groups in the area, had abandoned the indigenous ethos,
adopted the Portuguese language, intermarried with non-indigenous settlers,
and were referred to (and self-identied) as caboclos. But in the mid-1940s, this
peasant community sought to have their lands recognized as an indigenous
territory and thus become exempt from municipal taxation and safe from hacen-
dado incursions. They were told by an ofcer of the Servio de Proteo aos
ndios (SPI, Indian Protection Service) that they had to perform a tor ritual to
demonstrate their ethnic consciousness (PIB 2013).
9
The Atikum asked the
Tux to instruct them in tor, and after performing the ritual, they obtained their
traditional territory, which encompassed land, environment, and biodiversity.
Thus, not only some anthropologists but also some indigenous groups reject
the notion that ethnicity exists as an a priori attribute; indeed, it constitutes
an instrument of identity construction produced through social practice. On
the other hand, not all groups have commodied their traditional knowledge
or customs, although they are probably reafrming the traditional patterns of
capturing and absorbing external cultural elements. Prior to the attempts of
the Western world to eat up their culture, Brazilian ethnic groups, such as
the Matis people, aimed at pacifying or taming the White man through
ritual (Calavia Sez and Arisi 2013: 206207). In any case, historical perspec-
tive becomes an indispensable tool for understanding the dynamics of the
The Multiculturalism Dilemma | 115
self-recognition of ethnic groups that live in ethnically (or nationally) diverse
states such as Brazil, where ethnic projects are included in a national identity
model that excludes or limits any attempt at claiming sovereignty (Calavia Sez
2011; Carneiro da Cunha 2009: 330332).
The Comaroffs offer two illuminating examples of how identities are trans-
formed into legal instruments and the consequences that can result. The rst
involves the San hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana. This
group, originally designated as Bushmen, reconstituted their identity around
the industrial exploitation of the Hoodia gordonii, better known as xhoba
(a cactus with medicinal properties), used as both an invigorating and a
weight-loss supplement.
10
After the renowned American talk show host Oprah
Winfrey
11
announced in 2006 that Southern Africa might hold the answer to
defeating obesity, various pharmaceutical companies raced to commercialize
xhoba, and the rst to release it on the market (under the name of P57) was
Phytopharm. However, the San demanded compensation, arguing that they
held a cultural copyright over the product. In 2001, under the tutelage of the
Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA), the San
established a council that looked after their intellectual rights and the equitable
sharing of benets (8698).
12
After two years of legal disputes, the San signed
an agreement that guaranteed them royalties amounting to 6 percent of the
prots made from xhobas commercialization. Through the establishment of an
ethno-corporation that provided them with collective coherence, the dispersed
and nearly extinct Bushmen became the proud San people. No longer the poor
Bushmen who languished in the Kalahari ghetto, they now performed before
tourists as a people who bore a traditional ethnic identity (Calavia Saez 2011).
The second example, also from Southern Africa, is a very different case
because the group identity of the so-called Royal Bafokeng Nation, a Setswana-
speaking people who live in the North West Province of South Africa, was
already constituted when, in the 1960s, their king, Edward Lebone Molotlegi I,
began receiving substantial benets from Bafokeng Minerals. The Bafokeng
Nation held 25 percent of the exploitation rights to the rich platinum reserves
found in their territory, but Molotlegi, who as the Bafokengs representative
obtained and managed the benets, did not comply with the traditional meth-
ods of redistribution and instead enriched himself and those closest to him.
The problem that the people faced, therefore, was not so much the construc-
tion of an ethnic identity, but how to adapt to the introduction of modernity
and its political and social strains. Their solutionthe invention of a tradi-
tional (albeit modern) monarchywas considered suspect by anthropologists.
As Calavia Saez (2011) points out, when Europeans invent a tradition accord-
ing to the logic that the older a custom is, the more authentic it is, we call it a
renaissance, but when Africans or Indians do it, we accuse them of falsica-
tion. In any case, the modern Bafokeng ended up becoming Bakofeng, Inc.,
a rich nation of poor people (110), reminding us that the socio-political and
economic dimensions of ethnicity cannot be underestimated.
In any case, it is clear that ethno-national construction can be separated from
the corporatization of ethnicity and the commodication of culture. Cultures
116 | Alexandre Coello de la Rosa
shared by hundreds, thousands, even millions of people, who become consum-
ers of copyrighted ethnic or national symbols with which they become emo-
tionally identied, are seen as essentialized cultures and ethnicities with notary
registries (Calavia Saez 2011). The recent nationalist claims in Catalonia are a
clear example of this essentialization of culturethat is, the canonization of
certain rituals, languages, and customs upheld to the detriment of others that
are looked on as less ethnic.
13
The Comaroffs point out that these sentiments
of national belonging are (re)formulated in the interior of neo-liberal politics
that project corporate images as the ideal types for all human groups, with
little or no concern for social costs. Nostalgia for the return to the reication
of ethnic identities should lead us to consider the following questions, follow-
ing Manuela Carneiro da Cunhas example:
14
Who owns culture? How does
the reication of these identities relate to the ethnic pluralism that character-
izes the social space shared with others, and who owns that culture? More
specically, do ethno-futures guarantee the integration of cultural differences,
or, on the contrary, do they reproduce such differences by engendering new
mechanisms of exclusion?
To sum everything up, these two reviewed books intertwine with each other.
While Gressgrds Multicultural Dialogue tackles the multiculturalist paradox
from a modern ideal of natural equality that does not match the ethnic diversity
of the others, the Comaroffs Ethnicity, Inc. analyzes ethnicity as the creative
result of ethnic others who are autonomous subjects with political, economic,
and social aims. This ethnic self-fashioning is based on the commodica-
tion of culture, which, according to the authors, is a universal pattern. It is a
component of the neo-liberal model that has allowed many groups to reinforce
and/or construct ex novo their own ethnic categories. However, in reshaping
ethnicity, we should not forget that most ethnic groups have not commodied
their culture but rather a folklorization of their traditional knowledge or
customs. Despite such a commodied culture, indigenous people struggle
to reshape a way of being in the world and of reinterpreting both the world
and their culture. In so doing, many of Brazils indigenous peoples are still
struggling for their territorial rights while reafrming traditional patterns and
absorbing external cultural elements that soon will be their own.
Alexandre Coello de la Rosa is a Professor and Ramn y Cajal researcher at
the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona. He is the editor of a reissue of
Luis de Morales and Charles Le Gobiens Historia de las islas Marianas (2013);
the author and editor (with Doris Moreno and Javier Burrieza Snchez) of Jesu-
itas e imperios de ultramar (siglos XVIXX) (2012); and the author of Historia
y ccin: La escritura de la historia en Gonzalo Fernndez de Oviedo y Valds
(14781557) (2012). His expertise lies in colonial Latin America and the Philip-
pines, modern Latin America, chronicles of the Indies, and cultural anthropol-
ogy. He is currently working on a book manuscript on the Jesuit evangelization
of the Mariana Islands during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The Multiculturalism Dilemma | 117
Notes
1. As regards this ethno-political revitalization, Brazil is a paradigmatic example (see
Pacheco de Oliveira 1999a).
2. In European Parliament elections in May 2014, far-right and Euroskeptic parties
made sweeping gains. One of the most signicant winners was Frances far-right
National Front party, which was the outright winner in France with 26 percent sup-
port, or 4.1 million votes. See http://www.theguardian.com/ world/2014/may/25/
france-national-front-win-european-elections.
3. The context of the investigations of the group Antropologa e Historia de la Con-
struccin de Identidades Sociales y Polticas (Anthropology and History of the
Social and Political Construction of Identities) of the Department of Social and
Cultural Anthropology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona was a result of
this confusing movement between the celebration of identities and difference, on
the one hand, and the celebration of mestizaje, hybridity, and syncretism, on the
other, which permeated the socio-cultural frontiers.
4. The new constitutions of Bolivia and Ecuador that identify the countries as plurina-
tional are an attempt to resolve this problem through the reication of ethnicities.
5. On this issue, see also Montero (2012: 90).
6. As Prez (2005) contends, todays Chamorros are airing their claims not as mestizos
or hybrids, but as descendants of the ancient settlers of the Mariana Islands.
7. As Pacheco de Oliveira (1998: 45) points out, both the land loss and the
deterritorialization of the indigenous peoples of Brazil have promoted the states
administrative recognition of their lands.
8. A similar debate was generated around the Kaiap or Mebengokr, an indigenous
group living on the banks of the Xingu River in central Brazil, who managed to
build the rst airport in the jungle after obtaining part of the funds from exploit-
ing the Mara Bonita gold mine. While this economic activity revealed the adaptive
practices of these Mato Grosso natives, their traditional ways of life were inevita-
bly transformed. Their popularization of images of feathered Indians carrying video
cameras on their shoulders and writing e-mails on laptops, on the one hand, was
balanced by dancing for tourists, on the other (see Turner 1991).
9. Criteria today are a bit more institutionalized. According to the Constitution of
1998, indigenous territories were to be declared only when their Indian inhabitants
demonstrated a regular and stable traditional occupancy of the land (see Montero
2012: 89; Oliveira 1999: 111).
10. It was in fact considered a natural Viagra, or virility aid.
11. A recent international affair that demonstrates Oprahs global inuence was her
public denunciation in August 2013 of a Swiss store that refused to serve her
because they doubted her economic solvency. This was a disaster for Switzer-
lands international image and prompted the government agency Suisse Tourisme
to apologize to Winfrey (BBC Mundo 2013).
12. In the 1990s, some ethnic groups in Brazil claimed intellectual rights over the use
of the hallucinogen ayahuasca, as well as an equitable distribution of the benets
(Carneiro da Cunha 2009: 314317).
13. On the problematic issue of multiculturalism as applied in Catalonia, see Delgado
(1998).
14. While culture has been a concept that anthropologists have patronized for a long
time, in the last several years ethnic groups have turned customs and traditional
knowledge (i.e., culture) into strategic elements aimed at political ends (Carneiro
da Cunha 2009: 311368).
118 | Alexandre Coello de la Rosa
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