Category Archives: intercultural relationships

What is multicultural in culturally diverse societies?

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In multicultural societies, people can be in various connections, interactions, and relationships with each other and with other cultural groups. They can coexist in peace or in tension, subordinate cultural groups or respect cultural equality.

Cultures and people in multicultural communities can either recognize the existence of cultural diversity or deny it. They can tolerate cultural differences or accept them as natural and welcoming. Cultural attitudes towards others’ cultural differences and expressions can be respectful or not. They can be appreciative of what different cultures contribute to a community or not.

Two forms of multiculturalism ideologies

Multiculturalism in societies and people can have different psychological attitudes and ideologies. One position admits multiculturalism as simply acknowledging the presence of different cultural groups living in a society. People may like others of a different culture or not, consider them equal to their own group or not. Thus, attitudes toward another cultural group can be positive or negative, benevolent or malevolent, and represent an attitude from a dominant position to a minority or an equality position.

An alternative position acknowledges multiculturalism as the positive and benevolent attitudes towards people of other cultures, which not only admit, but also respect and accept these cultural differences. Such a multicultural society and multicultural people accept the people of other cultures as they are, without the limitations that cultural stereotypes impose. In these multicultural attitudes, attribution to personality prevails over attribution to culture. For example, a person is loud and talkative not because he or she is American, but because he is extroverted and excited.

Such multicultural attitudes also tend to abandon the notions of a (dominant) majority culture and a (subordinate) minority culture. This progressive multiculturalism discards the notions of “majority” and “minority.” Every culture is equal, regardless of its prevalence in a society.

This approach minimizes hot public discussions and formal collections of diversity-specific personal information. Is it really important to ask what your race and ethnicity are, whether you are Hispanic or non-Hispanic? Is it really important to ask about sexual orientation? What if a person does not know who they are or does not want to reveal their identity? What if a person is not willing to come out? I don’t think that institutional and governmental agencies should care about all this.

Scientific committees on ethics often prohibit asking some sensitive questions, such as sexual orientation. Why do social institutions dare to do this? We should respect such personal and confidential information without bringing it into public view. It is not a matter of society to intrude into a personal life. It is not appropriate to sneak into men’s and women’s beds, asking what and with whom they have sex. We must distinguish between the freedom to be and the necessity to reveal.

Multiculturalism and polyculturalism

The liberal form of multiculturalism comes up with the idea of “polycultural multiculturalism,” which is different from “traditional multiculturalism.”

What is multicultural and what is polycultural? The concepts of multiculturalism and polyculturalism are frequently treated as synonymous. Both “multi” and “poly” literally mean many, and they seem similar in their meanings.

The lay theories of multiculturalism and polyculturalism have been associated with quite similar intergroup cultural attitudes and behaviors. Yet, some believe they are different (e.g., Bernardo et al., 2016; Haslam, 2016; Osborn et al., 2020).

The proponents of the polyculturalism ideology assert that multiculturalism considers cultures as static phenomena and practices, emphasizing their differences and coexistence. It is believed that multiculturalism still admits stereotypical cultural attitudes and prejudice. The ideology of multiculturalism can prompt people to perceive cultural diversity as a threat to their ingroup’s status and power. As a result, these attitudes can increase conservative social views (Osborn et al., 2020).

Different from this, these scholars claim that polyculturalism acknowledges cultures as dynamic, interactive, interconnected phenomena and practices that are always in flux. The cultural ideology of polyculturalism focuses on connections and interactions among different racial or ethnic groups. Polycultural attitudes are associated with personal appreciation for and comfort with diversity. People with such attitudes express their willingness to have intergroup contact. They have egalitarian beliefs and positive attitudes towards liberal immigration. They endorse affirmative action policies (Rosenthal & Levy, 2012).

Advocates of polyculturalism oppose this concept to the notion of multiculturalism. They argue that the latter emphasizes differences, divisions, and separations among various cultures.

General comment

This conceptual distinction between multiculturalism and polyculturalism is important in several respects. However, because both words mean “many cultures,” they are often used interchangeably in literature.

To me personally, “multiculturalism” sounds like a general term, while “polyculturalism” is rather a specific form of multiculturalism. This is why “multicultural” and “multiculturalism” are words widely used in literature. I think it would be better to oppose “polyculturalism” to some other specific form of multiculturalism.

Polyculturalism, as a general term, can also come in specific forms like biculturalism, triculturalism, and more.

Other articles of interest:

Cultures fuse and connect, so we should embrace polyculturalism (by Nick Haslam, 2017).

What is multiculturalism?

What is the multicultural diversity of countries?

What Is Multicultural Identity?

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In daily life, people frequently need to answer questions about their race, ethnicity, nationality, social class, gender, and age. To those who ask, it looks like a simple question. However, it is less simple for people to answer. Many people have a multicultural identity.

Contemporary understandings of personal, social, and cultural identity appear more complex now than before. In some countries, regions, and neighborhoods, social mixing and cross-cultural relationships happen more often than in other places.

Some modern urban communities have various ethnic and national cultural groups that regularly and routinely contact each other. Some metropolitan residential areas are quite multicultural. Cultural mixing occurs in the same way in communities living near national borders—the cultural borderland. The rate of intercultural relationships in such regions can be high. Men and women of different ethnicities, nationalities, and races marry and have children.

The Challenges of Multicultural Identity for Intercultural Children

For children of such intercultural marriages, it may be challenging to identify themselves with one or another cultural group, such as ethnicity, race, or nationality. Who are they? Similar challenges are experienced by immigrants attempting to integrate into their new culture.

For these children, it may be challenging to identify themselves with one or another cultural identity because they have a mixed identity of two cultures. They have a bicultural identity, which is a kind of multicultural identity.

Bicultural Identity

Bicultural identity is the cultural identity of a person in which she or he combines the cultural features of two different cultures. These can be a mixture of French and German or Mexican and European-American.

For example, the bicultural identity of an immigrant can include the attributes of both ethnic identities acquired from the culture of their origin and the culture where they live now. The same bicultural identity can be experienced by the children of intercultural marriages.

Bicultural Identity Integration

When the personal cultural identities of two different cultures are incorporated, these two parts of bicultural identity can be separated from each other or incorporated into one. Cultural boundaries within a bicultural person can be distinct or blurred.

Here are some examples of how multicultural people who currently live in pluralistic U.S. society yet still have close connections with Korea experience their cultural identity.

Examples of Bicultural Identity Integration

First example:

Jean Kohl, a 9-year-old daughter of a German father and a Korean mother, was born and raised in the United States. Her parents, fluent speakers of German and Korean respectively, adopted English as the primary language at home. “I am an American,” proclaimed she, but she often ended her proclamation with an addendum that she was also German and Korean. For several summers she traveled to visit her maternal or paternal grandparents in Korea or Germany, during which she was exposed to her parents native cultures and languages. The German, Korean and U. S. heritage blended in her cultural repertoire. For Jean, where does the “American” cultural border end and other cultural borders begin?

(Chang, 1999)

Second example:

Carrie Baumstein, a 20-year-old woman, was born in Korea and adopted by a Messianic Jewish-American couple when she was 2 years old. She has lived in the States ever since. She was not exposed to much Korean culture and language when she was growing up, but was instead surrounded by her parents Jewish tradition. Despite her primary identity with the Jewish culture, she was often reminded by her relatives and neighbors of her Korean or Asian linkage. She was in an identity search for Asianness when she was attending a small Christian college on the East Coast. For Carrie, where do the cultural borders lie between the Korean and the American and between the Messianic Jew and the Christian?

(Chang, 1999)

Third example:

Peter Lee, a 15-year-old, was born in the States to immigrant parents from Korea. His parents own and operate a dry cleaning shop in a suburb of Philadelphia. Their English is functional for the business but they prefer speaking Korean on all other occasions. Peters family attends a Korean church regularly, which usually serves as a cultural community as much as a religious one. Peters Korean is so limited that he usually speaks English, although his parents speak Korean to him. He is definitely an American in his mind and heart, perhaps a Korean-American occasionally. But his preference of Korean-American peers to others is a curious phenomenon. Where lies the cultural border that divides the Korean and the “American” for Peter?

(Chang, 1999)

Fourth example:

Elaine Sook-Ja Cho, 50 years old, immigrated to the States 30 years ago to marry a Korean bachelor 10 years her senior. Her husband came to the States as a student and found employment upon completion of his study. Elaine was a housewife for 20 years before undertaking a small grocery business. She speaks “Konglish” (a mixture of Korean sentence structure and English words) but she seems to be at ease speaking English. She is Korean in her heart but “Americanized” in her own words and by her life style. For Sook-Ja how far does the Korean cultural border stretch to meet the “American” culture?

(Chang, 1999)

What Does It Mean to Have a Multicultural Identity?

Thus, these men and women experience their multicultural identities in various ways. They cross cultural borders daily. They turn out to be culturally Korean in the morning, German during lunch, “American” in the afternoon, and Korean once again in the evening. Amazing transformations within their cultural identities.

What Is a Multicultural Community?

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People in the modern world are exposed to a variety of cultures, some of which are more or less compatible with one another. Many countries have mixed cultures that shape multicultural people and mixed cultural identities. These mixed cultures are more conducive to the development of multicultural personalities and multicultural community (Karandashev, 2021).

In the modern world of increasingly mixed cultures and multicultural societies, people encounter other cultures more frequently than ever before. In some countries and regions, it’s more likely for people from different cultures to meet.

Monocultural and Multicultural Countries

Some countries are homogeneous in the races, ethnicities, and religions of their population and in the languages they speak. They can be called relatively monocultural societies. According to the data of 2013, among those are the Comoros, the Dominican Republic, Argentina, Haiti, Rwanda, Uruguay, Sweden, Japan, North Korea, and South Korea (Rich Morin, 2013).

Some other countries, on the other hand, are quite heterogeneous in terms of the ethnicities, races, and religions of their population and speak a variety of languages. They are highly multicultural societies. Among those are many African countries, such as Chad, Cameroon, Congo, Nigeria, Togo, and South Africa; several Asian countries, such as India, Indonesia, and Singapore; and many countries in other parts of the world, such as Switzerland, Spain, Canada, and the United States.

See more: How regional is the cultural diversity of countries?

Within-countries’ Diversity of Cultures

In many countries, different regions, states, and provinces have substantially different cultures. Among those are the United States, Canada, Germany, Spain, and France. For example, some scholars think that the southern states (the Deep South) and the northern states of the USA have somewhat different cultures in many respects. The northern industrialized regions of Germany culturally differ from Bavaria and other regions of Germany. The southern and northern parts of France have quite different regional cultures.

Besides, some regions of the country can be more multicultural than others. For example, the west and northeast regions of the United States are much more multicultural than the Midwest.

Hawaii is the most multicultural state in the US. The northern parts of Germany are more multicultural than others. The large and densely populated urban areas, such as New York City, Toronto, and Paris, are more multicultural than rural or urban areas, such as the Midwest of the USA.

See more: What is the multicultural diversity of countries?

Culture Mixing in Multicultural Communities

Nowadays, cultural mixing has become widespread. Such cultural mixing is evident in the coexistence of various representative symbols of different cultures at the same time and place (Hao, Li, Peng, Peng, & Torelli, 2016; Harush, Lisak, & Erez, 2016; Martin & Shao, 2016).

The dynamic communities of some regions have large variations in the national and ethnic origins of people living there together for quite a while (e.g., Van de Vijver, Blommaert, Gkoumasi, & Stogianni, 2015).

For example, the cultures of countries along their national borders frequently mix with each other on the same territory. That is sometimes called the cultural borderland (Chang, 1999; Foley, 1995). The Mexican-American borderlands of Arizona, California, and Texas in the US represent such examples of Mexican-American culture.

What Is Multiculturalism?

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Multiculturalism in a society is not simply the presence of various cultural groups living in a country but also the manifestation of positive attitudes by the society and its people towards individuals of other cultures. Such multicultural societies acknowledge and respect their diversity (Karandashev, 2021).

However, multiculturalism is not only about respecting the dominant majority culture toward minority cultural groups. In my opinion, true multiculturalism lies in the abandonment of such notions as “majority” and “minority”, in abandoning public discussion, and in the formal collection of diversity-specific personal information. Society and people should accept the people of other cultures as they are, without the reservations that cultural stereotypes can impose.

Examples of Multicultural Strategies

Some cultural policies in France present good examples of multiculturalism. In many cases, it is prohibited to ask about the ethnicity and sexual orientation of people. It is personal information that is often not pertinent to the reality of public life. Why, then, should they ask? For some reasons, some individuals may not want to identify themselves with their formal ethnicity. Children of multicultural couples simply cannot identify with any ethnicity. Should they do this?

Hawaii presents another good example of multiculturalism. They accept race and ethnicity as natural, not paying much attention to these individual characteristics. The more we see diversity and the less we talk about racial and ethnic differences, the more natural people look. Hawaiians just do not care about the ethnicities of people; they accept people as individuals, not as members of ethnic groups.

In the United States, however, many officials have another cultural policy regarding multiculturalism. In their fight for racial, ethnic, and sexual diversity and equality, they strive to highlight and accentuate these cultural attributes of individuals. Many American surveys obsessively ask about race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, presumably with the good intention of reaching and extending the cultural diversity of cultural representation. Sometimes, this looks like an intrusion into a confidential personal life. Why does society strive to sneak into the private lives of couples? Why are surveys interested in who a person’s sexual partner is and what they do in bed when they are alone?

The more we highlight and talk about ethnic differences, the more likely we are to pay attention to them. Therefore, we are more likely to differentiate rather than appreciate people as individuals. They are people with personalities, rather than members of ethnic groups. Hawaiian culture can teach us a lot.

Multicultural Ways of Living

Fair multicultural attitudes in society imply that all races, ethnicities, and cultures deserve special acknowledgment of their cultural differences. These multicultural beliefs are based on the idea that people in the cultural majority don’t think they are the dominant culture and that they treat minorities’ cultures as equal to their own.

Multicultural societies are open to others and inclusive (Karandashev, 2021).

Socially fair attitudes and actions are those that:

(1) acknowledge the multiculturalism and diversity of cultures,

(2) tolerate others’ cultural differences,

(3) respect each other’s cultural differences,

(4) recognize that different cultural expressions are equally valid,

(5) appreciate different cultures as valuable parts of multicultural society,

(6) celebrate cultural differences,

(7) encourage cultural groups to contribute to the common good.

Equity and Equality in Multicultural Societies

Many countries in the world have multicultural diversity. They live in multicultural communities and often follow the policies of multiculturalism.

The ultimate ideal of multiculturalism is equality, which treats people of other cultures as equal. Cultural equality is a great idea and an ideal of multicultural society! Yet, in my opinion, the best form of equality is equity. Equity, as providing equal opportunities for people of different cultures, can help achieve the goal of polyculturalism better than the simple equality of equal distribution.

Equal rights must not entail equal needs and obligations. People have the freedom “to be or not to be”—to give and take certain roles. Individual freedom of rights is not the same as a personal commitment to give and take on roles.

Offering people from different cultures equal opportunities and possibilities could be more beneficial for polyculturalism than simply pushing cultural minorities into positions and giving them priority over the cultural majority. In social justice, we should distinguish between social equity and social equality.

In a truly multicultural society, individuals of other cultures should be appreciated not because of their culture, race, ethnicity, gender, or age, but regardless of their culture, race, ethnicity, gender, or age, because of who they are.

Unfortunately, cultural stereotypes still play a role in forming cultural stereotypes. Many individuals in modern societies, as well as in the past, are multicultural persons.

What Is the Multicultural Diversity of Countries?

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Cultures are commonly associated with certain territories and countries. These are national cultures. And cultural borders are viewed as clearly recognizable national, state, or tribal boundaries. These are not quite correct representations of what cultures are. Multicultural diversity exists in many countries around the world.

The multicultural diversity of nations shows how culturally diverse people live in their countries. People living in some countries have long historical traditions of residing together in those territories. Throughout their history, they have maintained homogeneous or heterogeneous populations.

Multicultural Diversity Around the World

The variety of tribal groups in many African countries, such as Chad, Cameroon, Congo, Nigeria, and Togo, are culturally diverse in their origins. Some Asian countries, such as India and Indonesia, and Switzerland in Europe, are also diverse in their ethnic populations. They have long historical traditions of living as close neighbors in those territories.

A modern era of cultural diversity has emerged due to increased mobility, the availability of social media, and mass migration. It is because of these new trends that societies in many European countries, Canada, the United States, and Singapore have become culturally much more diverse than before.

Multiculturalism and multicultural diversity in countries can characterize various characteristics of people, such as racial, ethnic, religious, gender, age, sexual orientation, and the languages they speak. Cultural diversity also encompasses various ways of being for people, such as their cultural values, norms, rituals, dispositions, emotions, and patterns of behavior.

Monocultural Societies

Many countries’ populations are quite homogeneous in their ethnicity, religion, language, and cultural traditions. Due to their historical roots, they have common beliefs, values, norms, and customs of behavior. These countries have monocultural societies. Examples of such monocultural countries are Argentina, Uruguay, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Rwanda, Sweden, Japan, the Comoros, North Korea, South Korea, and some others (The most (and least) culturally diverse countries in the world, Pew Research Center, 2013).

People in such monocultural countries speak their common languages. However, many national societies are less homogeneous than researchers could expect. Besides, individuals have significant typological differences that extend beyond their cultural similarities.

Multicultural Societies

The populations of many other countries are heterogeneous in terms of the languages, ethnicities, religions, and cultural traditions of the people who live there.

Some countries are culturally diverse from their origins, such as, for example, Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, the Congo, Togo, South Africa, and some other African countries, due to the historical variety of their tribal groups and languages.

The populations of several Western countries, such as Canada, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, are also multilingual, and people in different regions may speak different languages.

The societies of other countries are heterogeneous because of migration. Canada is the most diverse in this regard. The United States, Russia, and Spain are also quite culturally diverse, though to a moderate degree (The most (and least) culturally diverse countries in the world, Pew Research Center, 2013).

Many multicultural countries, such as Indonesia, India, Nigeria, Singapore, and the United States, have multiethnic populations. People converged on these territories due to migration and other historical events.

A Variety of Relationships in Culturally Diverse Countries

Cultures and people in such multicultural societies may have various relationships with each other. In some cases, they live peacefully in neighboring territories. In other cases, they clash with each other. Sometimes they invade, conquer, and dominate each other. Sometimes, they respect their equality. Human history has witnessed a variety of such intercultural relations.

In some cases, people coexist in certain territories, yet they live in different neighborhoods. In cases of ethnic inequality, they can be segregated. The tendency of people of the same culture to live in proximity to each other and separate from people of other cultures is well-known (Karandashev, 2021). Similarities are attractive.

Generally, cultures and people in multicultural countries can recognize the existence of cultural diversity or not. They can tolerate cultural differences or celebrate them. They can respect each other’s cultural differences and acknowledge that all cultural expressions are valid, or not. They can either appreciate what different cultures contribute to a society or not.