Original scientific paper
The notion of culture in papers on multiculturalism
Milan Mesić
; Department of sociology, Faculty of humanities and social sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The notion of culture is one of the most complex notions in the humanities and in social sciences. At the same time, culture is the key element of every comprehension of multiculturalism. Actually, the way in which a theoretician will develop (his/her) ideas of multiculturalism largely depends on the understanding of culture, especially on the individual’s relationship between him/her and (his/her) culture. That is why we, firstly, briefly outlined the traditional anthropological understanding of culture - in the sense of static, unchangeable, comprehensive entity which completely identifies a certain community, mostly linked to “its own” territory. On the other hand, new approaches are being developed, some of them postmodern. They emphasize precisely the reverse: dynamism, internal heterogeneity and mutability of cultures. From this point of view, culture does not refer only to artefacts and objects as such, but primarily to the ways in which people relate to them (especially in a symbolic sense), how they experience and interpret them. Finally, on the example of eminent theoreticians in this field of society research, we showed the connection between defining culture and the conception of multiculturalism.
Keywords
culture; multiculturalism; cultural hybridization; translation; transculturation; deterritorialisation of culture
Hrčak ID:
174682
URI
Publication date:
17.4.2007.
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