Appeared in revised form in Writings on Dance (Sydney, Australia), volume 13 (1995), pp. 56-61. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Making Difference Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Not only does one term, multiculturalism, signify disparate positions, but also every position is easily three--itself, its version of the distortions of itself, and its version of opposing positions. At the risk of being schematic, I have identified six broad types of multiculturalism, and several subtypes within them. I. Universalist Multiculturalism Variations on the paradox "the universal is multicultural" appear in defense of ballet, opera, and symphonies, whose audiences are declining and whose costs are high--$500,000 to bring a symphony orchestra from abroad to Los Angeles for a week. A. Appropriation Updating the old argument that Western elite art forms really are best, by singular and universal standards, art critics claim that Western elite art forms already meet multicultural objectives. Furthermore, they do so better than the sources they appropriate-- Martha Graham proudly referred to herself as a thief. Arlene Croce, dance critic for The New Yorker, explains: "There may be a need to promote the accessibility of Asian, Hispanic, and African dance companies, many of which lead a marginal life. But the dance forms themselves are hardly inaccessible--they're part of every dance tradition the West knows." This line of argument naturalizes the process by which "the West" separates forms from their performers, converts those forms into influences, brings those influences into the center, leaves the living sources on the margin, and pats itself on the back for being so cosmopolitan. Croce defends the process: "In dance, high art has always needed to be nourished by folk art, and folk art has always needed the mediation of the theatre. Without the theatre, dance isn't a medium; it's the preserve of anthropologists, not artists." Where, we might ask, are the performers in this equation? New York Times music critic Edward Rothstein attributes the crisis in Western musical tradition to "an ethnic division in musical culture as a whole" that has relativized standards. "How," he asks, "can cultures be compared once a standpoint outside them all is rejected?" This is the price of "submission to the systems of judgement employed by the culture being studied." In contrast, he continues, "the impulse to universality helps explain why the West has been so open to the possibilities of other cultures," why no other civilization has produced fields like anthropology and ethnomusicology. These discipines then are themselves evidence of the multiculturalism of Western Civilization. B. Elevation Lincoln Center was upfront about its plan "to elevate jazz to the same level as opera, ballet and symphony." Nathan Leventhal, president of Lincoln Center, confessed: "I had the same prejudices about jazz that opera lovers or ballet lovers might have.... But I've learned a lot, and now I am a convert. There is as much richness and as much vitality in Duke Ellington as there is in Mozart." Mozart was the standard that jazz had to meet if it was to be accepted by the artistic academy. In allowing jazz to squeeze through the narrow aperture it opened for a moment, Lincoln Center reaffirmed the elite culture it represents. The asymmetries of power in the relationship that kept jazz, and much else, out of Lincoln Center until now remain obscure. C. Apologetics of Inclusion When a music department meets the diversity mandate by hiring one ethnomusicologist to teach the one world music course, it reinstates the relationship between the West and the rest. A remedial approach, the apologetics of inclusion fills in the blanks, but without changing the picture. The very conceptual and institutional structures that produced the exclusions in the first place are replicated, even as inclusions appear to do just the opposite. II. Common Multiculturalism "Paradoxical as it may seem, the United States has a common culture that is multicultural," declares educator Diane Ravitch. This position is voiced by advocates of public education, who are charged with producing citizens, scarred by bitter curriculum wars, and in competition with private (and parochial) schools. After rooting common culture in democratic values and our "historical experience as a nation," Ravitch identifies good multicultural with pluralism, by which she means "the commingling of diverse cultures in one nation." She identifies bad multiculturalism with particularism, by which she means "loyalty to a particular group"-- echoes of the fear of divided loyalties. The beauty of Black History Month and Women's History Month," in her view is that their purpose is to demonstrate that neither race nor gender is an obstacle to high achievement...if they [all children] aim high and work hard." Difference, here, is not an asset, but an obstacle to be overcome in a land of equal opportunity. In placing the entire responsibility for success (and failure) upon the individual, we need look no further than the public schools as the instrument for advancement. Ravitch's notion of "ethnocentrism," which she uses synonymously with xenophobia, is not what anthropologists generally mean by the term. Indeed, if it were, the anthropological project, whjich affirms the variety of ways of being human, would be over. For Ravitch, the opposite of ethnocentrism is the "commingled" or "larger culture." For contemporary anthropologists, the opposite of ethnocentrism is not the "larger culture," but its decentering. III. Avant-gardist Multiculturalism Embarked on its own decentering operation, avant-garde movements, from the end of the nineteenth century, launched one attack after another on "bourgeois conformism." "No more masterpieces," declared Antonin Artaud in 1938. We need, in his view, an idea of culture that is first of all "A protest against the senseless constraint imposed upon the idea of culture by reducing it to a sort of inconceivable Pantheon." We can see these ideas in action in the 1990 Los Angeles Festival of the Arts, an anthology of performances from the Pacific Rim. The approach here was not quite the synthesis and hybridity of a Peter Brook or Jerzy Grotowski, of Eugenio Barba's "theatre anthropology," Victor Turner's "performing ethnography," or Richard Schechner's interculturalism, or what counted as ethnosyncr‚tisme in "Magiciens de la Terre" at the Beaubourg in Paris. Rather, the Los Angeles Festival restaged their sources, so to speak, within a new masterwork, the FESTIVAL. Here the gate opened through which the rest of the world could enter, for once the avant garde said that the art world doesn't belong to the academy, everyone--well, almost everyone--can come in. Anyone, that is, who will yield to the experience--not because art is universal, but because the reception of avant-garde and experimental performance is based on the assumption that one can sit and watch and enjoy something one does not "understand." Sellars wanted to avoid not only avoided the stiff etiquette of the opera house, but also, he said, "I want to remove anthropological and ethnographic labels. With their implied superiority of Western culture, those labels are out of date." It could be said that the ethnographic labels, and the categories associated with them, posed a challenge to the Festival's working concept of art and that the Festival organizers transformed this challenge into a provocation by restaging the "ethnographic" as art. The Los Angeles Festival began precisely at the point where the ethnographic and the avant-garde converged and it forged its own path by undoing the ethnographic--it not only removed ethnographic labels, but also withheld explanation, asserted the primacy of experience over hermeneutics, demanded attention to form as content, and pleasure in the incomprehensible. In the absence of "ethnographic labels," performances chanced upon in unfamiliar places became objets trouv‚s, assembled on the surrealist principle of "blend and clash." IV. Transnational Multiculturalism World Beat, discussed by Steven Feld is a case in point. Some define this music as "syncretic hybrids, fusings." Others as "rip- offs disguised as collaborative synthesis." World beat is distinguished from world music, which is the historic stock-in- trade of ethnomusicology. Time does not permit an extended discussion of how multiculturalism is played out here, except to offer Feld's observation that "As the discourse of authenticity becomes more militant and nativistic, more complicated, and more particularized with interest and taste groups trying to hang onto patches of pure turf, the activities of appropriation will get more overt and outrageous, as well as more subtle, legally sanctioned, accepted and taken-for-granted." V. Encyclopedic Multiculturalism I take this term from John Comaroff. Here too I distinguish several subtypes--modular, paradigmatic, essentialist, centrist, and aggregative--on the basis of how they structure difference. A. Modular The modular nature of encyclopedic multiculturalism can be seen with special clarity in national folkloric ensembles--indeed in any medium that represents the nation through an inventory of its constituent regions and groups and their distinctive attributes, their housetypes, costumes, songs, dance, language. The most literal examples can be found in the Ellis Island gift shop, where souvenirs have been produced in modular series, a mug for each nation. B. Paradigmatic Paradigmatic approaches proceed as variations on a theme, by asserting structural sameness in the face of difference--a kind of anti-essentialism. Plimoth Plantation and the recent Ellis Island Restoration offer evidence that we are witnessing an era of historical identification by consent (and dissent), rather than descent. Sites long associated with a discrete historical experience and exclusive set of participants, whether Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock or immigrants coming through Ellis island, compete for the status of definitive master narrative. How shall the founding of the nation be told? Which site can be more inclusive, which is to say, more "democratic," more "total"? At Ellis Island, virtually anyone, no matter when he or his relatives arrived in the United States or through which port, can pay $100 to have his name or the name of an ancestor inscribed on the American Immigrant Wall of Honor that rings the island--and that includes the Pilgrims and their descendents! Ellis Island, in a slick taxonomic move, has absorbed Plimoth. The rock is just another port of entry for just another group of immigrants. C. Essentialist In contrast, the essentialist version of encyclopedic multiculturalism gives primacy to descent, to the facts of birth, to the primordial. For this reason, essentialist multiculturalism elides culture and race and speaks with ease about "racial and cultural groups." Essentialist diffuses the force of the very difference it affirms because it pluralizes it in modular fashion. Recognizing the power in the monolith of "whiteness," "diversity consultants" are taking steps to dismantle it by encouraging everyone, not just "minorities," to recognize that "we are the children of many different and distinct cultures--Irish, Jewish, Spanish, Armenian, Syrian, Hungarian...." This turning of the tables, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, radicalizes pluralism by extending it in all directions and multiplies the categories to include gender, sexual preference, age, disability, class, and if one cannot identify with any of the above, with a social cause. In other words, essentialize all the way. No one is exempt. D. Centrist Multiculturalism. Centrist multiculturalism, which is also essentialist, is perhaps most familiar because it has provoked such heated opposition, specially in the case of Afrocentrism. I will not go into detail here, except to clarify how I distinguish essentialist and centrist approaches--again, on the basis of how they structure difference. Centrist multiculturalism is about "infusion," not "inclusion," according to Asante. It challenges the location of reigning centers and rejects modular structures of inclusion. And it is threatening among other reasons because of the potentially uncontrollable proliferation of particularisms, of centrisms, and their racialist, if not racist, underpinnings. E. Aggregative Multiculturalism Here there is vision an "American folklife repertory" from which "the American people" create new aggregates along regional, ethnic, occupational, and other lines. The opposite of essentialist multiculturalism, this approach affirms an easy disaggregation of cultural ideas and limitless possibilities for distinctive reaggregations. There is no field of social forces to determine what will circulate and what path it will follow. Since there is no reference to hierarchy (and the relations of power that determine its configuration), the crucial question--how hierarchies are formed--cannot even be asked. The more persuasive such texts, the greater the temptation to believe that a discursive success is also a conceptual one and a conceptual one is a material one. VI. Critical Multiculturalism I distinguish two type of critical multiculturalism. The first entails a critical examination of the varieties of multiculturalism and how they structure difference, which is what I have attempted here. The second is modelled on the anthropological project itself--on decentering one's own assumptions through an encounter with more or less radically different ways of being human. Here then is a clue to why multiculturalists are generally not inclined to listen to anthropologists. Multiculturalism, in its many varieties, is basically a centering operation, whether that means making the center more inclusive or contesting its location or creating multiple centers. But, I would argue, anthropology's real challenge--the real threat that it poses--is not to multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is a diversion. Rather, it is the still relatively impregnable center, that which has the power to not be defined as multicultural, that most urgently demands analysis. As Stuart Hall has noted, the hegemonic does not represent itself as ethnic, or in Croce's terms, as the preserve of anthropologists--or in my terms, as multicultural--but rather speaks from the center in universalist terms, making "transcendent claims to speak for everyone, while being itself everywhere and nowhere"--even when coded as multicultural.