Cultural Diversity: Challenge and Accommodation

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates the multiple challenges thrown up by ethnic and cultural diversity, and the consequent problems of balancing rights and accommodating claims involving asymmetries of power. Racism and xenophobia are part of the environment in which issues about culture and cultural diversity enter into the law and the courtroom. Accommodation is a wide-ranging process operating at many levels and in many different sites, and does not only involve those engaged in legislation or in managing cases in the courtroom. Sensitization of judges and legal actors is representative of approaches which puts the onus on the receiving society and its institutions to adapt and accommodate. The concept of interlegality is consistent with anti-essentialist accounts of culture predominant in post-modern anthropology where it is seen less as a body of lore, than as a set of frequently highly contested principles and practices.