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CULTURE: Another Shot at the Right to Be Who You Are

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Jul 15 2004 (IPS) - Development can be so much about culture, this year’s Human Development Report of the UNDP argues. It is about the millennium development goals and so on in the poor countries, but it is also so much about “the right to be who you are wherever you are,” Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, lead author and director of the report told IPS in an interview.

“Culture is a very central part of people’s lives,” she said. “If the right to be who you are is not supported by the wider society, it is a big issue.” And that is why the UNDP report has raised it this year.

“It seems mundane to talk about respecting cultures, but public policy has done anything but embracing diversity,” she said. “Dominant cultures have tried to obliterate others.” And that culture, if you like, has been to “build states on the basis of a single identity and obliterate minority cultures.”

The message many immigrants get is that “their heritage is not worthy of being respected,” she said. “Cultural humiliation is deeply entrenched.”

That means a lot of people. One in seven persons, about 900 million in all, “belong to ethnic groups that suffer discrimination,” said Fukuda-Parr. In this, and for other revealing insights into minority experiences of culture the authors of the report rely on a celebrated study by the University of Maryland in the United States.

Putting together the report ‘Cultural Liberty in Today’s Diverse World’ has been a “fascinating process,” Fukuda-Parr said. “This is not an academic report, it is much more dynamic and globally networked. We have tried to concern what concerns different societies here.”

The report brings different strands together through research studies, regional workshops and through studies of statistical studies to see “what data is interesting, what is legitimate, and what dodgy.”

Indian Nobel Prize laureate Amartya Sen was the “guru” of the study and wrote its first chapter, Fukuda-Parr said. The 285-page report proceeds to look at “multitudes of social debates and how to manage culturally diverse societies.”

Matters cultural of this nature are inevitably never far from the political. The report looks also at situations in Afghanistan and Iraq and at how it might be possible to “deal with extreme coercive movements that dominate in the name of culture.”

The report also set out to see how globalisation is dramatically changing the ways in which culture is being shaped.

“We looked at three main issues,” Fukuda-Parr said. “The first is immigration. Now more and more people maintain strong ties with their countries of origin. We say multiple identities are okay, society needs to recognise them. We need a shift away from assimilation to multiculturalism.”

Secondly, the report raises the issue of indigenous people. There is growing recognition of the need to invest in the future of indigenous peoples, and there are issues around a “continual confrontation between indigenous peoples and multinational corporations.”

Finally, the report looks at culture trading groups as a result of globalisation such as the U.S. domination of music and cinema, and fears that “local identities will be wiped out by this force.”

In taking on a subject like this, the report is bound to do a lot of interpreting, and to that extent will be open also to more challenge. Methodologically the report is “a combination of empirical assessment of a problem that exists, and qualitative analysis of what has worked,” Fukuda-Parr said. The report includes therefore contributions from “leading academics who work in political science and philosophy and on the nature of human freedoms and progress.”

The report finds that discrimination in cultural fields comes down largely to discrimination in terms of ethnicity, religion and language. And it looks squarely at discrimination that involves Islam and Muslims.

Some cultures are often seen as being ill-adapted to democratisation, economic progress and gender equity, Fukuda-Parr said. And she agreed that such perceptions about Islam are widespread. “But there is no empirical evidence to support these claims,” she said.

“The majority of Muslims live in functioning democracies like India, Indonesia, Senegal, Mali,” she said. The study shows that “poorer countries tend to be less democratic, but within these, countries with a Muslim majority are democratising faster.”

The view is in line with the Arab human development report released earlier which stressed among other things that Arab culture is not the same as Islamic culture.

The report looks at conflicts over culture worldwide, whether in a developing country like India or in a developed country like Britain.

“But the fact that there are a lot of conflicts is not always a bad thing,” Fukuda-Parr said. “In a democracy people can complain, it is under authoritarian regimes that there is no controversy. Indigenous people have been suppressed for centuries, but today they are speaking up. There is a trend to growing assertiveness in demands for cultural freedom.”

On the other hand, the report looks also at the “use of cultural identity for political mobilisation,” Fukuda-Parr said. Ethnicity is a common tool for “politicians and community leaders who want to keep control.”

There is a “confusing set of trends,” Fukuda-Parr says. But through these the report seeks to emphasise “cultural freedom as an ultimate human end."