Paradoxes of Cultural Recognition

Sharam Alghasi is a PhD fellow at the University of Oslo, Norway Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology and Research Director of CULCOM at the University of Oslo, Norway. Halleh Ghorashi is Professor at the VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

• 1: Introduction; 1: Uneasy Categories; 2: Engaging with Diversity; 3: Race and the Dutch; 4: Should Integration be the Goal? A Policy for Difference and Community 1; 5: National Identity and the Sense of (Non-) Belonging; 2: Cultural Categories in Practice; 6: Discrimination and Cultural Closure at Work; 7: Ethno-Nationalism and Education; 8: Avoiding Culture and Practising Culturalism; 9: Disentangling Culture as Explanatory Factor; 10: What Difference Does it Make? Transnational Networks and Collective Engagement Among Ethnic Minorities in Norway; 3: The Migrant's Positioning and the Public Space; 11: The Process of Hybridization; 12: ‘Mix, Just Mix and See What Happens'; 13: Fallen Angels; 14: Rethinking National Constellations of Citizenship; 15: Representations of the Other in Norwegian Debate Programmes 1989–1997; 16: From Obsessive Egalitarianism to Pluralist Universalism? A Normative Epilogue

'This volume compares multiculturalist reasonings with national realities, mainly in Norway and the Netherlands, and it thus cuts a critical edge. Focusing on two proverbially liberal welfare states and civil societies, it contrasts them by factors ranging from moral (or moralizing) public policies to popular(-izing) moral panics. Importantly, its well-grounded ethnographies locate themselves in current conceptual and globally comparative contexts.' Gerd Baumann, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands '...Paradoxes of Cultural Recognition gives the reader an accurate and disturbing update on the position of immigrants in Northern Europe and the need to tackle their alienation with future hope for a form of inclusion.' Nations and Nationalism