Slippery Definitions

Where’s the Culture in Multicultural?

Definitions are slippery things, often over-ruled by the shear weight of expectations. In responding to ‘yourfriend’ about multiculturalism in China I have relied on what is by and large an academic definition of ‘multicultural’ rather than what has more recently become a popular description of multiple cultures in the same political space. My multicultural country is one in which the majority culture absorbs, pays deference to and systematically tends to the health of minority cultures – an unrealised and perhaps unrealisable ideal, if the policies and presumptions of multiculturalism are anything to go by. ‘Yourfriend’, in contrast, has defined – a least implicitly – a ‘multicultural’ country as one in which multiple cultures exist: a statement of fact.

This is an interesting divergence not so much because it shows our different viewpoints (although that it does) but because it’ll allow me to consider some of the implications of what we haven’t quite managed to discuss, touching on the points that ‘yourfriend’ has covered and considering some of the things we’ve both missed. And, as ‘yourfriend’ implies in his final comment from last week, both sides are lacking useful definitions of ‘nationality’ and ‘culture’. These, unfortunately, aren’t really evident in the post by Professor Crane that I originally wrote about.

Ethnicity and Nation

I can, however, start by accepting the assertion that minzu, which I put forward as ‘nationality’, is more accurately translated into English as ‘ethnicity’. That doesn’t necessarily rule out xenophobia in China of the sort I described in my last post – as ‘yourfriend’ mentions of America, the creation of “ethnic people” can be debasing by itself. But leaving that particular issue aside as something I can neither prove nor disprove here, I’m interested in how ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nationality’, or at least the concept of the nation, start to merge into one another in discussions about multiculturalism, and how the notion of culture floats on by, curiously abandoned.

Who ever talks about a multicultural nation? In English we usually discuss multicultural countries, even though we would refer to nations and nationalities at most other times, especially when comparing countries. But that shift isn’t apparent in, for instance, Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Melayu, and neither is it in Tagalog, in which the words for nation, ‘bangsa’ and ‘bansa’ respectively, seem to have shifted in another way – from describing something similar to ‘race’, itself a slippery term, to meaning ‘nation’ and thus the many differences that the nation may contain. There are probably many non-Malay languages for which this is also true, and the politics of nation-state building are never far away it, so why not English? We might use Benedict Anderson’s notion of the nation as “an imagined community”, but it seems that the community, the nation, is often imagined as mono-cultural, or of one broad ethnicity.

So the notion of ethnicity sneaks in anyway, but what is it? As ‘yourfriend’ points to in China, the Han ethnic group includes distinguishable subgroups. In my original post I mentioned the incongruity of defining Cantonese people as Han, and in the Philippines, with which I am familiar through my family, there are 10 Malay ethnic groups and very many subgroups. Most people will accept a definition of ‘ethnicity’ as a distinct biological group, in which the members have similar ways of self-identification, share a language or use dialects of a common language and, at least originally, lived in geographical proximity. But then again that’s the same sort of definition many people will use for ‘race’, perhaps without the compulsion to include language. Webster’s dictionary, intriguingly, includes ‘racial’ background as part of its definition for ‘ethnic’.

Ethnicity, it would seem, is what you make of it – or in line with my earlier comment, what the state that controls your equally ill-defined nation makes of it.

Ethnicity, Race and Nation

To address one important point that ‘yourfriend’ made, this sliding between categories is probably what allowed Professor Crane to discuss the sometimes ‘racial’ and sometimes ‘ethnic’ designations of ‘Black’ and ‘White’ in relation to the possibility of multiculturalism in China. My reading of his post was that if China really is multicultural in the way I described above, then the ultimate test of that ‘fairmindedness’, to use an awkward shorthand, would be to see how foreign ethnicities/racial groups, or at a stretch ‘nationalities’, are likely to fare in perceptions of what it takes to be Chinese. Given the elusiveness of all the terms involved, I’m no longer sure that such is the case, regardless of whether it would be legitimate to include foreign and local ‘ethnicities’ in the same test.

Now that leads me to the possibility of a Hong Kong Australian mayor of Beijing, which spends more time at the intersections of ‘ethnicity’, ‘race’ and ‘nationality’ than ‘yourfriend’ might imagine. I originally wrote “Hong Kong Australian” and not “Australian” alone, because I was writing whimsically about my daughter who is an Australian citizen of convenience but has a Filipino mother. My ancestry is English and Irish, and my wife’s ancestry is indigenous Filipino, Malay Filipino (on one side of her family) and Spanish and Chinese (on the other). So what is her ethnic group, her race, her nationality?

She was born in Hong Kong, will most likely speak fluent Cantonese well before adulthood, will probably never live in Australia and might even take Chinese citizenship if we remain here long enough. That’s not as uncommon as you might think. Of course, politically she could never be the mayor of Beijing, because to be a Chinese official at that level she would have to be ‘ethnically Chinese’, as is the case for high officials here in Hong Kong. But if she spent most of her life in Beijing, spoke the language and knew the people, there is no reason why she shouldn’t be as qualified as anyone else to be mayor.

Finally, Culture

Now we all know that none of this is going to happen, but my point is that certainties break down when you look closely at how a situation might evolve. The sticking point, again, is ‘ethnicity’, defined as how the state (and the Party) wants it to be defined. And there is a lurking shadow of culture, or rather the likelihood that an outsider, a foreigner, will not understand the culture as deeply as someone truly born into it. This is probably true, or at least perceived to be true, in all countries. But what is culture?

I originally defined ‘culture’ as:

a common system of signs and signals by which a group of people can function as a group of people. In a sense, culture is the sum of our presumptions, the net of our possibilities.

Now that’s not particularly helpful any more, is it? Clearly it overlaps too much with ‘ethnicity’ to make it a viable, standalone definition. Perhaps when the terms are boiled down they are synonyms, although culture seems to focus more on communicating rather than just being. Perhaps culture is the way that ethnic or racial difference is communicated daily, in ways made possible by imagining the nation as a community, as controlled to a greater or lesser degree by the state, depending on the locality.

What then, of a ‘multicultural’ nation? In my sense of the term it’s close to impossible, as I mentioned before, but all ideals are. Unfortunately, I now think it’s far closer to impossible than I previously imagined. And if we take the way that ‘yourfriend’ defines ‘multicultural’, as merely the existence of multiple cultures in the same space, then it suggests that differences will always outweigh similarities, and that the state will be more heavily involved in maintaining the situation than either of us has yet considered. In both cases the dominance, or attempted dominance, of the state over individual perception is daunting.

In closing I want to thank ‘yourfriend’ again for raising the points I’ve covered here, and those in the last post that I missed today. I’m not sure that we’ll agree on what I’ve discussed, but I very much appreciate the chance to develop my ideas further, to go out into the unknown and realise that there is yet more to consider, always. Many, many implications are rushing through my head, but they’ll just have to wait for another time and fewer words.

More than ever, it’s a puzzling world.