Multiculturalism Without Culture

"Anne Phillips is a professor at the London School of Economics and gender is given a prominence in this book which is not found in the other books. Actually, when you think about it, many of the specific controversies in relation to multiculturalism involve women and arguments about gender. These are things like the burqa, female circumcision, polygamy, the age of consent and arranged marriages. So it is not in any way surprising that someone coming from a feminist point of view can find a lot to engage with positively and negatively on the multiculturalist front. Some feminists have been critical of multiculturalism because they say that it leads to selling short women’s rights. What is good about this book is that Anne Phillips is a feminist who believes that her position is compatible with multiculturalism and she offers a defence of multiculturalism in her book. She thinks that it is possible to find a path through the kind of controversies I have mentioned, which is respectful of women’s rights on the one hand and of cultural difference on the other – hence, the title of her book. “When you think about it, many of the specific controversies in relation to multiculturalism involve women and arguments about gender” The title of the book itself is intriguing. I would say that one of the critiques beside the gender dimension that people have made of multiculturalism is that people say it talks about groups and culture in some kind of holistic way. But actually these groups don’t exist, this culture doesn’t exist. Culture with a capital ‘C’. We all have all kinds of bits and pieces borrowed and put together from lots of different sources. There is no such thing as the Indian culture, the British culture, the Black culture or whatever. We are a fluid and ongoing mix. What Anne has done in this book is to offer a defence of multiculturalism that works with this argument. She wants to ditch the idea that there are single unified cultures that we can talk of as British culture etc. I agree with many of her positions in the book and I have learnt from them but I don’t accept that we can completely give up the idea of groups or culture, and Anne and I have debated this in print and we don’t agree. I think that one of the key differences between multiculturalism and liberalism is that liberalism is all about the rights of individuals and multiculturalism balances the rights of individuals with the right of people to belong to cultures which may be minority cultures and so on. So we have to have some idea of what it is to belong to a group. Therefore we need some idea of a group even if it is a very watered down one, which is what I favour myself."