From the respect of different cultures to the value of cultural difference

Debates on the governance of multicultural societies are still implicitly based on Parsons’ theory of social action. According to this theory, actions are guided by the values individuals subscribe to, and the social and political order is based on their socialization into the values shared by the members of a given group. Culture consists in the values shared by a group and into which new generations are socialized. This notion of culture as a static set of values shared by a given group has been much criticized by many strands of anthropological thought, starting with Geertz’s work. According to these strands, culture rather is a tool kit that enables people to make sense of many situations -- possibly in divergent and inconsistent ways-- and to work out strategies – themselves multiple and inconsistent – to manage them. It is on the basis of this later conception of culture that Ann Swidler distinguishes settled cultures from unsettled ones, the former being non-thematized cultural traditions upholding plural and contradictory behaviors and the later cultures that, struggling to establish themselves, turn into ideologies overtly and strictly observed by individuals. In the light of this insightful distinction, the idea-- shared by both assimilationist and multiculturalist approaches-- that the social order requires reinforcing (hence reifying) a culture, so that it becomes an identity tool, is contradictory and bound to jeopardize the desired goal. I rather suggest that we should favor the rapid transformation of different cultural traditions and ways of relating to them as tacit knowledge. In other words, my own proposal is that it is crucial to pursue policies that do not take the culture individuals grew in as a set of fundamental values (a move which implies reification, since the culture they were born in is surely different from that of their youth’s environment, etc.) but rather advocate an open cultural tradition that can help manage differences and novelties (which do not stem from cultural pluralism alone, but also from scientific innovation and cultural industry). In the concluding paragraph I propose two examples from the Italian region of Tuscany, where a policy based on these principles has begun to emerge. The first, and more simple, one is the debate on the possibility of capitalizing on the massive presence of children from diverse linguistic and cultural environments to promote the learning of those languages and cultures by Italian children, and of turning mixed classes – considered a disadvantage because they cause a slower learning process – into elite classes that can provide children and teenagers with the mastery of two cultures and two languages: Arabic and Italian, Chinese and Italian. The second and much more controversial example is the debate triggered by the proposal to replace infibulation with an alternative ritual consisting of a tiny prick. At first, this debate provoked heated reactions based on the idea that what makes infibulation unacceptable, beyond physical harm, is the very conception of women it conveys. Yet, this debate has opened a wider social reflection, since it has also been stressed that in the name of the psychic health of women, Italy allows abortion, surgery to transform male genitalia in female and vice versa, and aesthetic surgery also on minors—sometimes also affecting genitalia—without, in the later case, requiring any special justification. While this debate did not lead to the implementation of the alternative ritual, it lifted the ban on it and opened the way to discussing many other practices that are considered culturally acceptable (in particular, on minor women’s access to aesthetic surgery).