Multicultural Nation-states Research Articles

Self-determination and Integration: A Site of Negotiation and a Village Named Panbari

The demand for self-determination of various nationalities has been central to the sociopolitical and cultural life of Assam, a northeastern state of India. The Statutory Autonomous Councils formed under the State Act are a non-territorial arrangement to address the question of self-determination without marking boundaries between co-habiting communities and therefore are a unique model of integration. However, this has led to conflicting situations reflecting how ‘integration’ emerges as a site of negotiation, redefines inter-community relationships, and challenges the state’s intervention in the matter. Drawing from a village study, this article endeavours to probe self-determination as a tool of (dis)integration, as a site of negotiation and argues that the various ways of addressing the question of self-determination adopted by the new nation-state ultimately affect the historically produced inter-community relationships. Methodologically, the article seeks to revisit the promises of ‘village study’ through the multicultural habitat named Panbari, a village in the northeast of Assam, and reflects how the every day in a small village establishes a guiding conversation with the everyday in a multicultural nation-state of India.

War in Mali: Destruction of Timbuktu Monuments

The historical and cultural heritage of the region contains a powerful potential for its preservation and development. The more vividly colored the cultural specificity of the region, more precisely, the cultural peculiarity (and isolation) of the people living in the territory of this region, the greater the historical depth of the cultural tradition that determines the specifics of the population of the region, the more stable the local subculture (in this context, the totality of people having common features of culture and corresponding identity), the more cohesive, more stable the social group.
 The destruction of the historical cultural heritage, the discrediting of culture, the destruction of the cultural symbols of a particular social community inevitably entails the blurring of its boundaries, the destruction of stable social ties, and the loss of collectively shared values. During the armed confrontation between government troops and jihadist gangs in the Republic of Mali, jihadists captured the ancient cultural capital of the Sahel, the city of Timbuktu.
 Islamists destroyed ancient mosques and mausoleums, burned ancient manuscripts and libraries in which they were stored. It was an attempt to prevent the formation of a single national community and to prevent the creation of a multicultural nation-state.

PENDIDIKAN PLURALISME DALAM MEMBANGUN JATI DIRI BANGSA (Perspektif Agama Hindu)

A country that has multiethnic and multimental uniqueness like Indonesia is faced with its own dilemma, on the one hand bringing Indonesia to become a great nation as a multicultural nation-state, but on the other hand it is a threat. So it is not an exaggeration to say that multicultural conditions are like coals in husks which are easily ignited and heat up at any time. Indonesia has great potential for conflicts between groups, ethnic groups, religions and ethnic groups. One of the indications is that various social, professional, religious, and organizations or groups have started to thrive and are struggling and acting on behalf of group interests which lead to SARA (ethnic, religious, racial and inter-group) conflicts. To produce valid and reliable data, this paper uses a qualitative writing style. In producing logical data, this paper performs several stages of data sorting in the form of: 1). Data reduction, 2). Display data, 3). Verifying data, and 4). Interpreting research data. In its presentation, measurable analysis becomes the basis for processing the data obtained. The perfection of this paper cannot be separated from the library technique which is carried out through an assessment of the existing literature on Google Scholar. Education is the spearhead that is able to restrain and eradicate all harmful doctrines of non-plural and non- multicultural actions which are very appropriate to be applied in the current era in preventing interests and combinations of intolerant understandings in the name of a religion. Strategies in school and implementing a curriculum that emphasizes pluralism and multiculturalism in the current era are very important to be followed up immediately so that misleading intellectual understanding does not multiply ingrained in students' understanding. The role of parents and teachers must be able and synergized in implementing an understanding of the concept of plurality and the plurality of a life so that later students or students understand differences and are able to re-instill heterogeneity. Hinduism in the scope of analysis of pluralism education highly appreciates social diversity. The concept of Hinduism which incidentally is very plural and in its holy book contains teachings about realizing tolerance, namely Widya, Maitri, Ahimsa, and Santi.

Penguatan Nilai Kebangsaan dalam Upacara Hormat Bendera Merah Putih

This article seeks to explain the strengthening of national values in the red and white flag honoring ceremony: the re-actualization of the concept of nationality based on mas}lah}ah. The purpose of the flag salute ceremony is to strengthen love for the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia and realize the common benefit of living together in a pluralistic and multicultural nation-state. Therefore, it is necessary to re-actualize the concept of nationality, especially with regard to respect for the flag based on mas}lah}ah. Furthermore, the concept of nationality in the view of Islam is compatible and does not need to be contradicted. Regarding the pros and cons of information on the article competition respecting the flag in the view of Islamic law, this must be addressed wisely and actually this competition is organized by BPIP in commemoration of santri day, so the right theme is about Islam and nationality. Respect for the flag is the nation's way of showing respect for the symbol of the State of Indonesia and love for the homeland. Regarding the respect for the flag which is reviewed with mas}lah}ah, then this is included in the realm of mas}lah}ah mursalah because there is no clear explanation in the scriptures or Hadith and this practice is included in the realm of d}aruriyat which was originally only the needs of religious people and the state. as well as being a nation on a secondary basis, but by implementing it, national unity and integrity will emerge, this shifts from h}a>jiyat to d}aruriyat. Kata Kunci: Kebangsaan, Hormat Merah Putih dan Maslahah. Abstract: This article seeks to explain the strengthening of national values in the red and white flag honoring ceremony: the re-actualization of the concept of nationality based on maslahah. The purpose of the flag salute ceremony is to strengthen love for the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia and realize the common benefit of living together in a pluralistic and multicultural nation-state. Therefore, it is necessary to re-actualize the concept of nationality, especially with regard to respect for the flag based on maslahah. Furthermore, the concept of nationality in the view of Islam is compatible and does not need to be contradicted. Regarding the pros and cons of information on the article competition respecting the flag in the view of Islamic law, this must be addressed wisely and actually this competition is organized by BPIP in commemoration of santri day, so the right theme is about Islam and nationality. Respect for the flag is the nation's way of showing respect for the symbol of the State of Indonesia and love for the homeland. Regarding the respect for the flag which is reviewed with maslahah, then this is included in the realm of maslahah mursalah because there is no clear explanation in the scriptures or Hadith and this practice is included in the realm of daruriyat which was originally only the needs of religious people and the state. as well as being a nation on a secondary basis, but by implementing it, national unity and integrity will emerge, this shifts from hajiyat to daruriyat. Keywords: Nationality, Respect for Red and White and Maslahah.

Sharia, Legal Pluralism and Muslim Personal Law: Ethnographic Lessons from the Mahallu System of Malabar, India

Contemporary public as well as academic discourse on personal law in India has over the years engaged with the issues of its inadequacies, judicialisation and uniformity. This discourse has paid scant attention to the functioning of the law and the complexities of a multicultural nation-state committed to the idea of political secularism. This paper engages with the mahallu system of Malabar and sheds light on how decision-making in Muslim personal law is a process embedded in quotidian micro-politics, sectarian dynamics, social censure and affect. By tracing a triple talaq case in its ethnographic details we show that love (or lack of it), kinship expectations and community authority come together in resolving a conjugal dispute that does not lead to a straight path of legal interpretation but into a labyrinth of micro-politics of local religious factions and authority. The paper shows that the non-state quasi-legal institutions that come under the rubric of the mahallu system comprise of a particular kind of legal pluralism which is complex and replete with multilayered relations of power. This also brings to fore the binary and the play between what is considered to be legal and legitimate.

BHINNEKA TUNGGAL IKA DAN KONFLIK SOSIAL; (KHAZANAH MULTIKULTURAL INDONESIA DI ERA POST TRUTH)

Indonesia is one of the largest multicultural countries in the world, this can be seen from the sociocultural and geographical conditions of Indonesia that are so complex, diverse and broad. As a plural and heterogeneous country, Indonesia has the potential for multi-ethnic, multicultural, and multi-religious wealth, all of which are potentials to build a large multicultural nation "multicultural nation-state". This nation-state
 
 
 
 
 multicultural can be double charged; integration or conflict, which must be held together with full wisdom and nuances of tasamuh in the midst of society.
 
 As we understand together, the formation of the State of Indonesia on the basis of its country was formulated with a long and bloody struggle until it was proclaimed on August 17, 1945. The proclamation was also preceded by a long debate about the shape of the country - given the reality of Indonesia's plurality as a nation. as the foundation of the State, with the motto of Unity in Diversity.
 
 The effort for Indonesia to survive as a multicultural country continues to be carried out mainly by strengthening education (religion). Because education is believed to have a strategic role to build and restore the way of thinking and attitudes of students into a level that understands pluralism in society

Autonomy Education Beyond Borders

This article examines whether autonomy as an educational aim should be defended at the global scale. It begins by identifying the normative issues at stake in global autonomy education by distinguishing them from the problems of autonomy education in multicultural nation-states. The article then explains why a planet-wide expansion of the ideal of autonomy is conceivable on the condition that the concept of autonomy is widened in a way that renders its precise meaning flexibly adjustable to a variety of distinct social and cultural contexts. A context-transcendent, core meaning of autonomy remains in place, however, according to which a person is only autonomous if she relates to the values and goals that direct her life in a way so that she sees them as her own and is able to identify and critically assess her principal reasons for action. Finally, the article addresses two challenges to the global expansion of autonomy education: the objection that autonomy is presently not the most important educational aim and the objection that global autonomy education is a form of cultural imperialism. It finds both objections wanting.

The Secular Realm as Interfaith Space: Discourse and Practice in Contemporary Multicultural Nation-States

While classically posited as the separation of religion from public life, it is suggested that the contemporary secular public sphere in multicultural contexts has become a habitat for interfaith dialogue. Looking at dynamics in classical secular theory as well as some recent theorists of secularism and multiculturalism, most particularly Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Tariq Modood, and Rajeev Bhargava, it is shown that far from being hostile to religion much of the practice of secularism is often entwined with particular discourses of religious norms. Using spatial theory, especially that of Lefebvre, four cameos from the UK, USA, Singapore, and India are used as indicative of the way that interfaith discourse is embedded in various aspects of the secular public sphere from governmental, through official Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), to grassroots levels such that as forum externum religion is accepted in this space as interfaith dialogue. It is argued that a conceptual linkage of interfaith motifs is, if not inherent, then at least embedded in the secular realm in the contemporary multicultural context.

The Flag of Refugees: Critical Ethnography of a Vietnamese Canadian Community Conflict

The Flag of Refugees: Critical Ethnography of a Vietnamese Canadian Community Conflict Anh Ngô This case study illustrates the complex consequences of the pressure for political representation within a diasporic community. In 2015, an internal conflict disrupted a local Vietnamese women’s agency in Toronto, Canada, over the issue of political representation. This case study describes a conflict between the senior members of this agency and their 1.5 generation counterparts who made up the agency’s board of directors. The conflict arose as a consequence of the latter’s failure to display the flag of the Republic of Viet Nam (rvn) at its events and office. The rvn flag, visualized as three red stripes on a yellow background, represents the lost nation of South Vietnam following the civil war, which became part of the larger Cold War, lasting nineteen years and resulting in massive civilian losses (Lau 153). While to non-Vietnamese persons, the display of the flag may seem trivial, it is the chief political issue in the diaspora because the flag is charged with a complex history, memory, and transnational politics. The conflict that arose in response to an agency’s decision not to fly the rvn flag shows how Vietnamese refugees negotiate their sense of identity and community in a multicultural nation-state like Canada and how larger political forces such as the Cold War legacy and Canadian nation-building exert pressure on understandings of who and what is a refugee. I [End Page 73] argue that the multiple issues presented by the key players in this conflict became elided as the diaspora became hyper-focused on the single sole issue of political representation and overlooked other significant concerns. This case is important for it demonstrates how the often-inevitable act of community-making in an official multicultural society results in a flattening of the multiplicities and complexities of intra-group refugee relations. Previous studies have highlighted the importance of intra-community conflicts to signal the need for the literature to resist the flattening of identities. Recently, Yan, Wong, and Lai interviewed thirty-nine self-identified Chinese persons in Vancouver and noted that for their participants, who differed in place of origin and time period of migration resulting in distinct social, political, and economic systems, “transnational political tensions among the different places of origin are a factor that further divides them, representing an obstacle to generating mutual trust” (456). Contributing to the call for an awareness of multiplicity of communities’ identities, this article traces the events of a specific conflict among the Vietnamese in Toronto. I argue that this conflict, which originally emerged out of some significant complaints by the seniors, which point to deep material and structural challenges Vietnamese seniors face in Canada, became shaped and overshadowed by the larger political context so that the only issue to be addressed was that of political representation. This political context is shaped, on the one hand, by anti-communism, whose persistence attests to the lingering aftermath of the Cold War in shaping diasporic identities and, on the other hand, by the pressures of a Canadian multiculturalism which forces diverse groups of people related by ethnicity to present themselves within a boundary of static culture (Dang, Le, Nguyen). In particular for the Vietnamese community, this static representation is entangled with the events of the war in Vietnam. To some in the Vietnamese community the rvn flag is the symbol of their political purpose and identity. Particularly for those involved in formal Vietnamese associations, most identify as South Vietnamese refugees and as political exiles, having left Vietnam after the end of the war in 1975, in political protest and fear of political persecution. However, in 2015, the younger staff and board of directors of the agency contended that the display of the rvn flag is divisive, as it has come to only represent the loss of the civil war for the South Vietnamese and not the full range of subject and political positions in the diaspora. The diaspora, now over forty years post the war in Vietnam, contains a multitude of identities and sociopolitical affiliations, yet this group continues to present as one community under one flag. After...

The Holocaust, Memory, and Race in Natacha Appanah’s Le Dernier Frère

The Holocaust, Memory, and Race in Natacha Appanah’s Le Dernier Frère Nanar Khamo On August 13, 2016, I visited The Beau Bassin Jewish Detainees Memorial and Information Centre in Mauritius for the first time. Standing in front of the rows of even, grey gravestones at the Jewish section of Saint-Martin Cemetery, I asked a museum guide if there was a tombstone that marked the death of a little Jewish boy named David. She laughed indulgently and explained that the David in question, from Natacha Appanah’s 2007 novel Le Dernier Frère, is a fictional character. Appanah’s text is so rich, she went on, that one has the impression that David will actually be at the cemetery, which is why I was not the first person to ask her that question. Of course, Appanah borrowed from reality, the guide conceded, raising the question of where the lines between reality and fiction, history and literature, begin and end. Appanah participates in a growing conversation with other writers from Mauritius with regard to national memory and history. Srilata Ravi explains: “Since the 1990s Mauritius has seen the emergence of a new generation of writers who questions the validity of the nationalist narrative of multiculturalism and seek to ‘re-image’ Mauritian society” (Ravi 29). By retelling histories of colonial Mauritius within the realm of fiction, Appanah destabilizes conceptions of competitive memory through the creation of dialogues among different groups of people, an important and significant gesture in the multilingual, multicultural nation-state of Mauritius. In Le Dernier Frère, Appanah brings together two unexpected groups in conversation to consider questions of traumatic experience and memory. In the novel, the protagonist Raj remembers his childhood friend, David Stein, brought to Mauritius with other Central European Jews during World War II by the British Colonial Office. The 1,581 Jews were detained in an old colonial prison in Beau Bassin, where Raj meets David after being [End Page 149] taken to the hospital by Raj’s abusive father. His father relocates Raj and his mother from their small town to take a job as a low-grade prison guard, after suffering from a double tragedy. In the same day, Raj loses both of his brothers in a flash flood in the village of Mapou, creating a traumatic wound from which he has trouble recovering throughout the novel. In many ways, as Raj meets David and forges a close relationship, his friendship with David promises to recreate a brotherly bond. Yet David’s untimely death, following the two boys’ desperate flight into the woods to escape their respective entrapments, reopens Raj’s wounds as David’s ghost haunts him throughout the rest of his life. The adult Raj recounts this childhood story with an anxious earnestness to express the truth of past events. His anxiety haunts his narrative as he frequently expresses the inability to recall the exact details, as well as his ignorance as a child, of both history as it was unfolding (notably in Europe) and Jewish religion and culture, which he connects to “white” culture in general. Appanah moves beyond Eurocentric perspectives to examine the repercussions of the Holocaust along with other forms of violence in Mauritius. I argue that Raj’s inherent loss is an allegory of the loss experienced by both the slave and indentured servant populations of their homelands, families and other such irreplaceable aspects of life. The loss of David too is a way to mourn the six million who perished during the Holocaust. For even if David did not die in a gas chamber, his displacement from Central Europe and subsequent death by tropical disease are direct results of policies implemented by the Third Reich. This particular episode of Holocaust history might have continued to remain in relative obscurity had Genevieve Pitot not published in 1998 her seminal text The Mauritian Shekel: The Story of Jewish Detainees in Mauritius, 1940–1945, which explains the history of Jewish detention in Mauritius. At times, Appanah’s narrative resembles that of Pitot’s text through its attention to historical detail. The link between history and literature is clear when Appanah begins with a description of the cemetery...

The Religiosity, Nationality, and Sociality of Pancasila: Toward Pancasila through Soekarno’s Way

Pancasila is the five principles of the Indonesian state’s philosophical foundation. Its existence reflects the characteristics of Indonesia as a multicultural nation-state, one which has to absorb and transform all elements of the nation into a strong, permanent foundation, and a dynamic guiding principle. The five principles are viewed as the crystalisation of the core values and ideals of the nation, as idealised by the existing “trilogy ideology”: religious ideologies, nationalist ideologies and socialist ideologies. All of the ideologies had been synthesized in order to find a common ground that realises the common good (al-maṣlaḥah al-‘āmmah) for the life of the nation. The history of the conceptualisation of Pancasila had been a long process featuring the “seeding” phase, “formulation” phase, and “commencement” phase. Each phase involves the participation of various actors and elements. However, in a joint work of the nation, one of the most prominent actors is Soekarno. To understand Pancasila, one needs to understand his life and thoughts.DOI: 10.15408/sdi.v25i2.7502

Hacia una educación superior inclusiva

El proyecto de Estado-nación multicultural promovido por las sociedades contemporáneas se basa en el reconocimiento de la diversidad, en los derechos diferenciados y en la igualdad como condición estructural de la vida en comunidad. Este reconocimiento significa legitimar las luchas históricas de los grupos étnicos vernáculos y las minorías sociales, que han sido temas paradigmáticos de las luchas por la participación económica, social y política. El análisis de las perspectivas de diversidad y multiculturalismo para la construcción de un Estado-nación inclusivo y equitativo implica el reconocimiento del derecho a la identidad cultural de los grupos étnicos y culturalmente diferenciados, apreciando y aprendiendo sobre ellos y determinando su ubicación territorial mediante la construcción permanente de un diálogo intercultural. Este artículo es un estudio histórico que analiza la importancia del reconocimiento constitucional de la multiculturalidad para comprender los conflictos étnicos y culturales en la sociedad colombiana en el marco del estado social de derecho como mecanismo de construcción de diálogos interculturales, que haría posible formar una sociedad más inclusiva y equitativa, que trascienda el modelo de Estado monocultural sobre el cual se han construido las repúblicas latinoamericanas desde su fundación.

Homing Sorrow: Bharati Mukherjee’s “The Management of Grief” as Metadiasporic Narrative and Inscription of Political Empowerment

This paper reads Bharati Mukherjee’s short story “The Management of Grief” as an uncompromised critique of Canadian Multiculturalism at its early stage in the 1980s. Without neglecting the crucially humanist component of Mukherjee’s investment in writing this story, the article demonstrates how, through subtle strategies of representation, “The Management of Grief” presents Canada as a country where whiteness-as-power is pervasive, and where ethnic minorities are perceived by mainstream society as exogenous, and made to feel as such. Together with this, the story as an archetypical representation of the predicament of diasporas, understood, pace Vijay Mishra and others, in the sense of the diasporic condition perceived as dominated by melancholia. The story evokes the diaspora experience in several other ways, most notably with its emphasis on the in-between status of such communities in an identitarian, affective and political sense. The analysis eventually focuses on how the story underscores and subtly illuminates the process of a political empowerment, an awareness-raising process which, accompanied by a coming-into-political-agency, marks a turning point in the increasingly relevant political role played by diasporas within the multicultural nation state.

Faulkner’s Quixotic Picaresque: Carnival, Tricksters, and Rhizomatic Intertextuality in The Reivers

Abstract Faulkner’s The Reivers exemplifies the Quixotic Picaresque-a conflation of the narrative modes exhibited in Lazarillo de Tormes and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. This essay explores the correlation between Spain’s transition from feudalism to a modern mercantile society and the United States’ transition from an agrarian society based on slavery to a modern industrial nation within the cultural contexts of these novels. In each of these works, a series of trickster figures undertake performative acts of deception, particularly the masking tradition of Carnival, in order to endure the hardships of modernity. However, whereas most tricksters tend to be solely focused on pragmatic individual objectives, quixotic pícaros maintain a sense of idealism that leads them to consider the Other and thus act in the name of communal prosperity. These selfless tricksters meta-theatrically parody the generic social conventions in which they reside in order to subvert the hegemony that seeks to oppress and marginalise them and fellow members of their communities. In performing an array of identities and social roles, these quixotic pícaros contribute to the opacity of modern multicultural nation-states, and thus, disrupt all social hierarchies leading to the regeneration of the public body, mobility, and a more utopian world.

Failed Citizenship and Transformative Civic Education

Global migration, the quest by diverse groups for equality, and the rise of populist nationalism have complicated the development of citizenship and citizenship education in nations around the world. Many racial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious groups are denied structural inclusion into their nation-state. Consequently, they do not fully internalize the values and symbols of the nation-state, develop a strong identity with it, or acquire political efficacy. They focus primarily on particularistic group needs and goals rather than the overarching goals of the nation-state. I conceptualize this process as failed citizenship and present a typology that details failed, recognized, participatory, and transformative citizenship. I describe the role of the schools in reducing failed citizenship and helping marginalized groups become efficacious and participatory citizens in multicultural nation-states.

Human Rights and Schooling: An Ethical Framework for Teaching for Social Justice by Audrey Osler, and: Restoring Dignity in Public Schools: Human Rights Education in Action by Maria Hantzopoulos

Reviewed by: Human Rights and Schooling: An Ethical Framework for Teaching for Social Justice by Audrey Osler, and: Restoring Dignity in Public Schools: Human Rights Education in Action by Maria Hantzopoulos Nancy Flowers (bio) Audrey Osler, Human Rights and Schooling: An Ethical Framework for Teaching for Social Justice (Teachers College Press, 2016), ISBN 9780807756768, 177 pages; Maria Hantzopoulos, Restoring Dignity in Public Schools: Human Rights Education in Action (Teachers College Press, 2016), ISBN 9780807757420, 180 pages. Although written well before the Trump Presidency, Human Rights and Schooling gains new relevance as educators address a regime that seems to violate basic principles of human rights and to endorse discrimination, violence, disrespect for truth, and a narrow national if not nationalistic perspective. Audrey Osler sees in human rights the necessary principles for living together in multicultural nation-states and communities and a framework for realizing equitable and just learning communities.1 Her book is both aspirational and highly practical, offering an ethical framework as well as solid, concrete advice for education in a heterogeneous democracy. Informing the book is Osler's vision of human rights education (HRE) as "education for cosmopolitan citizenship," grounded in human rights and transcending the traditional "civics" course based exclusively on national history and legal frameworks. Such citizenship education would encourage young people to go [End Page 765] beyond exclusive identification with people like themselves to develop a sense of affinity with all humanity, recognizing the equal dignity of all people and the global community as interconnected and interdependent. Osler eloquently describes the potential of HRE to build democracy and social justice and to create a culture "whereby human rights violations are not simply addressed through legal mechanisms but are prevented."2 She emphasizes HRE as an essential component of the right to education, an enabling right that secures access to other rights. However, HRE is no political panacea. Human Rights and Teaching makes graphic the potential of HRE to be a tool for state manipulation and social control. At best HRE may encourage commitment to others' struggles for justice. At worst, when the dominant story taught in schools portrays an uncritical, sanitized version of "We the Nation," it can promote nationalism or feelings of moral superiority. HRE may be used for a "21st century civilizing mission" that reinforces the views of the powerful in the name of the nation or national values, by "managing student behavior and achieving compliance; insisting on blind obedience to the law or school rules; and encouraging students . . . to deny aspects of themselves, their cultures, and their languages, which distinguish them from the mainstream."3 Nor is HRE easy to implement in the real world of US educational bureaucracy with its fifty state departments of education and 13,506 school districts, each fiercely resistant to top-down mandates and threats to local autonomy. Because schooling systems are inherently conservative and national, they are necessarily in tension with HRE, which is based on cosmopolitan perspectives and agreed-upon international principles of human rights.4 Although this cosmopolitan vision may seem like a perfect counterbalance to the current shift towards isolationism and nationalism in the name of "making America great again," how is it to be achieved? Osler affirms Eleanor Roosevelt's famous assertion that human rights must begin "close to home." She states: "This human rights vision is not primarily about international politics but about everyday living. It is about challenging micro aggressions, overcoming everyday racism, and everyday sexism."5 She exhorts educators to explore universal human rights within diverse contexts. Otherwise, without dialogue and consideration of people's specific social contexts, human rights, which are designed to be liberating, can be "part of a hegemonic discourse, used instead to control."6 This wise book challenges all of us to persist in seeking new ways to bring human rights into US education so that both the curriculum and the culture of our schools reflect the multicultural nation that we are. ________ Maria Hantzopoulos's Restoring Dignity in Public Schools: Human Rights Education in Action provides a valuable [End Page 766] counterpoint to Osler's book. Osler provides the theory; Hantzopoulos shows the practice. While Osler establishes an ethical framework for HRE from a global...

MULTIKULTURAL DALAM PERSPEKTIF ISLAM: STUDI KASUS NOVEL AYAT-AYAT CINTA DAN BUMI CINTA KARYA HABIBURRAHMAN EL SHIRAZY

Indonesian is a multicultural nation-state, consisting of different ethnicities, races, traditions, religions and cultures. However, the difference is a form of diversity that complement each other, thus enriching the repertoire of Indonesian culture. Although the Indonesian people are multicultural, but can live side by side, mutual respect, mutual respect, and mutual tolerance, so that people can live in peace and happiness regardless of ethnic, racial, cultural, and religious differences. Multiculturalism contains three basic principles, namely tolerance, equality, and equality of rights for other cultural groups. In the novel Ayat-Ayat Cinta and Bumi Cinta by Habiburrahman El Shirazy many reflect multicultural in Islamic perspective, meaning that in the novel many depicted activity, behavior, and speech language that reflect multicultural characters related to Islamic teachings. Although they are different nation, race, culture, and religion, they can live side by side, mutual respect, mutual tolerance, and help each other for those who need help regardless of difference, ethnicity, race, culture and religion. They help for the sake of their love for Allah to keep the commandments of Allah SWT.

Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan by Joseph D. Hankins (review)

Reviewed by: Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan by Joseph D. Hankins Ian Neary (bio) Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan. By Joseph D. Hankins. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2014. xxii, 277 pages. $65.00, cloth; $29.95, paper; $29.95, E-book. It is no longer the case that most buraku communities have a connection with either the leather industry or meat production, and some historians argue that it never was, but nevertheless many Japanese and those non-Japanese who know something about buraku mondai assume there was and still is a close connection. While there has been more work published by a wide range of social scientists and historians on issues of status discrimination in Japan over the last five years, none of it has turned its attention to the leather industry. This book goes some way to filing that gap and uses a discussion of that industry as a starting point for an examination of a wide range of issues facing burakumin and policymaking in Japan in the twenty-first century, many of them previously undiscussed in the English-language material on the topic. Joseph Hankins is a trained anthropologist who clearly originally intended to focus on language use, gender, and sexuality in Japan but ended up researching buraku mondai. Nevertheless, he makes good use of his sensitivity to language use as one of the tools for his research. He explains the intellectual background to his research project, also taking us through the times and places of his fieldwork. He spent a year and a half, 2005–7, in Tokyo as an intern with the International Movement Against Discrimination and Racism (IMADR, a UN-recognized organization that is the international face of the Buraku Liberation League [BLL]). Later he worked as an apprentice in a tanning factory in north Tokyo. He also participated in events sponsored by both the BLL and IMADR and took part in trips from Japan to India by burakumin visiting Dalits. All of this activity he describes economically, effectively, and reflexively. What is particular to his account is the way he interrogates and explicates each situation, the circumstances, and the participants he is describing within “two transitional conditions of political argument and economic practice” and within the particular context of Japan in the early twenty-first century beginning to think of itself as a “multicultural nation-state in spite of itself” (p. 240). [End Page 178] In all of this, he is strong on description and his reflexive anthropological analysis seems to this nonanthropologist both exemplary and thought provoking. He is rather less reliable or informative, however, on some aspects of what he is describing. So, for example, although he provides a very rich description of everyday life in the Tokyo tannery where he spent six months, we do not find out very much about the state of the Japanese leather industry today or how it has fared since (say) 1945. Or perhaps what little he does give us left this reader wanting to learn more. No doubt he would respond that that is not the book he set out to write and that such questions reflect my interests, not his. Still, as the title seems to suggest that it will tell us something about leather making in Japan, it would seem not unreasonable at least to alert readers early on about what his book will not do. In a similar vein, we can only find a very brief description of the formation and evolution of Japan’s policies toward multiculturalism. Provocatively Hankins defines what he considers multiculturalism as a “form of governance,” although I was not always clear exactly what he meant by that. Again, given that it is a key word in the title of his book, we are perhaps entitled to expect a little more about the content and timing of the relevant policies. I was also concerned by some of the errors that crept into his description of dōwa policy. On page 112 we are told that a 1965 report produced by “a BLL deliberative council” repudiated “a racial understanding of its situation.” A little later that, “The Dōwakai was tasked with...

‘Settling’ the multicultural nation-state: Little Mosque on the Prairie, and the figure of the ‘moderate Muslim’

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