Arjun Appadurai - Bio

What is the nub of the problem of diversity and the state? Public diversity poses two sources of anxiety to modern nation-states. The first is that organized cultural minorities whose practices and preferences are granted legitimacy in the public sphere become potential claimants on a variety of institutional spaces and practices regulated by the state.

The very idea of cultural rights (by definition, group rights) represents a radicalization of liberal social theory and moves significantly beyond the ideas of tolerance and recognition. It recognizes that the right to culture in everyday life is fundamentally political and requires a significant degree of autonomy: legal, juridical and spatial. It puts the state under a strong obligation to provide the spaces for cultural expression.

Although the symbolic core of cultural dignity is an end unto itself and thus cannot be reduced to matters of wealth and stratification, dignity as a part of the public sphere must be placed within the wider context of inequality, both political and economic.

The democratization of cultural debate about what constitutes acceptable practice and what ought to change depends on the economic dignity and financial enfranchisement of ordinary people in as many cultural communities as possible. Thus, apart from the direct ethics of suffering, justice and equality, there is another reason to support all reasonable means of poverty reduction: this is the only way to secure the ability of ordinary people to participate in debates about culture within their own communities.

For all these reasons, it is not meaningful to speak of cultural rights or, more broadly, of sustainable pluralism outside of a linked commitment to the political economy of dignity. This means that cultural rights and even human rights more generally, should be integrally connected to the welfare and well-being of all citizens and to the reduction of poverty as a global priority.