The micropolitics of identity/difference: Recognition and accommodation in everyday life

Daedalus

Volumn 129, Issue 4, 2000, Pages 147-168

  Sarat, Austin ^a  

^a AMHERST COLLEGE   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33748159714     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. John Jay, The Federalist (New York: The Modern Library, 1941), 9.
2. Justice William Brennan, Michael H. v. Gerald D., 491 US 141 (1989).
3. People, 20 January 1992, 71-75.
4. People, Ibid., 75.
5. People, 75. Ibid.
6. See "The Cultural Defense in Criminal Law," Harvard Law Review 99 (1986): 1293;
7. also Alison Dundes Renteln, "Culture and Culpability: A Study of Contrasts," Beverly Hills Bar Association Journal 22 (Winter 1987-1988): 17-21.
8. See, e.g., People v. Helen Wu, 235 Cal. App. 3d 614, 634-46 (1991); Eduardo Trujillo-Garcia v. Rowland, 1992 US Dist. Lexis 6199; State v. Aires Correia, 600 A2d 279, 286-87 (1991); People v. Kimura, No. A-091133 (Los Angeles Cty. Super. Ct., 24 April 1985). But see People v. Moua, No. 315972-0 (Fresno Cnty. Super. Ct., 7 Feb. 1985) (mitigation of a sentence for kidnapping based on a recognition of the Hmong tribal practice of "Zij poj niam," or "marriage by capture").
9. Opponents of multiculturalism and ethnic plurality, for example, often frame the debate in these terms. See, e.g., Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1992).
10. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (Boston: John Allyn, 1876), 425. As Tocqueville observed at the start of the nineteenth century, The human beings who are scattered over this space do not form, as in Europe, so many branches of the same stock. Three races, naturally distinct, and, I might almost say, hostile to each other are discoverable amongst them at the first glance. Almost insurmountable barriers had been raised between them by education and law, as well as by their origin and outward characteristics; but fortune has brought them together on the same soil, where, although they are mixed, they do not amalgamate. . . .
11. See Michael Kammen, People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization (New York: Knopf, 1972), 128.
12. The term "identity/difference" is borrowed from William Connolly, Identity\Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991).
13. Austin Sarat and Roger Berkowitz, "Disorderly Differences: Recognition, Accommodation, and American Law," Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 6 (1994): 285-316.
14. For an important discussion of the challenge of recognizing and accommodating difference through the law, see Martha Minow, Making All The Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990).
15. For a discussion of the various meanings of the "everyday" in social and political thought, see Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns, "Editorial Introduction," in Law in Everyday Life, ed. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 1-20.
16. Jeffrey Alexander and Neil Smelser, "Introduction: The Ideological Discourse of Cultural Discontent: Paradoxes, Realities, and Alternative Ways of Thinking," in Diversity and Its Discontents: Cultural Conflict and Common Ground in Contemporary Society, ed. Neil Smelser and Jeffrey Alexander (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 17.
17. Amherst Bulletin, 5 November 1999, 1. Amherst, a racially and ethnically diverse college town of about 35,000 residents, is situated at the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains about one hundred miles west of Boston. As described in a recent article in the Boston Globe, "on the multiculturalism meter [it] is close to overheating. The UN flag flies on the common, and officials regularly pass international resolutions."
18. See Beth Daley, "A Community Divided: Amherst Reflects," Boston Globe, 2 December 1999, B2. The discussions that follow include quotes from interviews I conducted during the fall of 1999. Unless otherwise noted these interviews were given with the understanding that the speakers' names would not appear in published material.
19. Gus A. Sayer, interview by author.
20. Ibid.
21. Almost at the same moment, in what some saw as a bitter irony, the town celebrated Puerto Rico Day on November 19. As part of this annual event, which is designed to honor the town's Puerto Rican residents and their heritage, the Puerto Rican flag is flown over the town hall.
22. "National Speech Advocates Enter the Fray," Amherst Bulletin, 3 December 1999, 1.
23. "National Speech Advocates Enter the Fray," Amherst Bulletin, 1999, 1. Ibid.
24. Amherst Bulletin, 19 January 1996, 1.
25. Amherst Bulletin, 1996, 1. Ibid.
26. Interviews by author.
27. Interview by author.
28. Interviews by author.
29. Interviews by author.
30. Interviews by author.
31. See Susan Moller Okin with respondents, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? ed. Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha C. Nussbaum (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).
32. Alexander and Smelser, "Introduction: The Ideological Discourse of Cultural Discontent," 15.
33. See Kammen, People of Paradox, 128.
34. As Allison Renteln puts it, "Anarchy would reign if each person could claim a different cultural immunity from prosecution." Renteln, "Culture and Culpability," 26.
35. See Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 189-191;
36. see also Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 32-90.
37. Some point out what they see as the defining inadequacies of tolerance. For critics, though it appears relativistic, tolerance is also hierarchical. See Kristie McClure, "The Limits of Toleration," Political Theory 18 (1990): 362-391.
38. See also Herbert Marcuse, "A Critique of Pure Tolerance," in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965).
39. Connolly, Identity\Difference, 43.
40. Todorov, The Conquest of America, 247.
41. Interview by author.