Post-Culturalists and Minorities within Minorities

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to defend group integration against two critiques. The first comes from scholars who believe that the present understanding of culture is profoundly flawed. Their main argument is that rigid, essentialist, and fixed notions of culture lead to policies that do not permit groups to express their true diversity, or to engage in meaningful debates about what practices their group ought to endorse. This problem creates an interesting puzzle: can we protect cultural groups without putting them in a straightjacket that impedes their ability to change? I call scholars that opt for this attack of multiculturalism ‘post-culturalists’, since they do not believe that culture ought to be treated as something tangible. The purpose of the first part of this chapter is to show that the post-culturalist critique of studying culture, like in the project of group integration, is overstated. To make this argument, I first survey some definitions of culture in the literature from post-culturalists and then from liberal multiculturalists. Next, I look at two different ways to avoid the critique of essential ism in the work of Alan Patten and then David Peritz. I argue that Peritz’s way of defining culture, that is, as both consisting of fluid and contested practices, and rigid and well-defined practices, ultimately addresses both problems brought up by, and within, the critique of essentialism. I then conclude the section by defending the proposal of group integration against the criticisms that it would lead to the stereotyping of less integrated groups, and that arguing for group integration necessarily means treating groups as uniform and static entities.