Hispanic/Latino Identity

Thu, 01 Jun 2000 00:00:00 -0400

The controversy in the United States over multiculturalism in and beyond education has now faded”perhaps because Nathan Glazer is right that “we’re all multiculturalists now.” Yet that controversy was merely the leading edge of an intellectual movement exalting ethnic culture and affiliation, oftentimes as the core of the self and its identity. Against liberal neo“Kantian proponents of epistemological “veils” and other devices for abstracting us from our ordinary entanglements, communitarians insist that each of us must do his thinking from within, and as a member of, a particular community and tradition. Sometimes they embrace the strong ethnic ties that undergird many of the most familiar communities and traditions.

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Culture: the Anthropologists’ Account

Wed, 01 Mar 2000 00:00:00 -0500

Culture is everywhere: moral (read: cultural) relativism; social (read: cultural) construction; multiculturalism; cultural identity, cultural diversity, and cultural imperialism; Cultural Studies and culture wars; high culture, mass culture, and “sub altern” culture; the cultures of instant gratification, of poverty, of death, and (aspirationally at least) of life. And so on. One helpful way of understanding postmodernism is that it makes cultures”always in the plural”do the work previously thought to belong to biology, human nature, or reason: ordering experience, validating ideas, grounding value, rendering human life intelligible and meaningful.

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Hispanic/Latino Identity

Culture: the Anthropologists’ Account