Author: T K Oommen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 189
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195657764
Description
This collection of essays concerns issues of seminal importance in understanding the modern world. A rich and diverse collection of empirical data from across the world is presented, and analyzed with reference to history and classical and contemporary social and political theory.
This book will be especially useful to scholars of sociology, political science and cultural studies.
Should the near-unquestioned ideal of equality necessarily create the ground for greater and greater cultural homogeneity? Oommen argues for pluralism-a positive value-orientation to cultural heterogeneity, in keeping with the spirit of democracy. He casts his net wide-this collection of essays concerns issues of seminal importance in understanding the modern world.
Oommen recognizes that modernity has created sharp cleavages; that, in fact, not homogeneity but a more restless, intolerant heterogeneity but a more restless, intolerant heterogeneity is emerging. He explores the importance of identity-conferring differences, and primordial allegiances that are often recalcitrant. A rich and diverse collection of empirical data from across the world is presented, and analysed with reference to history and classical and contemporary social and political theory. These issues, of concern to any thinking person, are discussed by Oommen with clarity and precision.
Contents
Introduction: The Conceptual Tools
Contested Boundaries and Emerging Pluralism:
The New Social Order
Reconciling Pluralism and Equality:
The Dilemma of Advanced Societies
Inter-cultural Communication in Multinational Settings:
For Linguistic Pluralism in the European Union
Combating New Racism in West Europe:
From Equality to Solidarity
From Plural Society to Pluralism:
The Cruciality of Religion in South Asia
The Changing Trajectory of Constructing the other:
West Europe and South Asia
Ethnicity, Immigration, and Cultural Pluralism:
India and the United States of America
Citizenship and Nationality in India and Italy:
Fission versus Fusion
Some Concluding Remarks
References
Author Index
Subject Index