ON AN UNANTICIPATED SOURCE OF PESSIMISM IN ANTHROPOLOGY OF MULTICULTURALISM: A PRELIMINARY METHODOLOGICAL ACCOUNT

Abstract

The main legacy of twentieth century anthropology was the recontextualization of political and legal notion of the self in socio-cultural terms, yet ethnographic research on consequences of multiculturalism over the last three decades strongly suggests that multicultural policies are widely instrumentalized for the preservation of intracultural oppression disguised in collective rights discourse. As anthropology of multiculturalism started to shift its main research goal from documentation and preservation of cultural variety in humankind to a “postcultural” position, it empirically identified various types of unintended consequences of multicultural policies. Not only did such a change turn out to be heuristically fruitful and theoretically intriguing, since it triggered another episode of the great debate on culture in anthropology, but it also proved to be deeply pessimistic. Multicultural policies now seem to serve as instruments for legitimization of social segregation while anthropological and allied ethnographic research seem to support calls to “end multiculturalism”. The main focus of the project is to develop argumentation that supports the claim that, instead in the political sphere, the cause of current predicament should be looked for in methodological habit of consequentialist pessimism. It is our ethics and our methodology that have mislead us to allegedly support recent uninformed criticism of many of the leading European and American politicians for whom multiculturalism has become the main cause of social instability, openly blamed for ongoing devastation of the welfare state, with derogative consequences for individualistic political doscourse and citizen-oriented public policies.