Abstract
This chapter offers an overview of multiculturalism theories and explains the main lines of criticism that this monograph develops. Most approaches to multiculturalism and intercultural communication are inherent of an ideological theory of culture, termed culturalism. This doctrine uncritically presumes that culture overwrites individual freedom and collective capabilities for social organization, portraying human individuals and societies as captives of their culture and language seen as one holistic, historically inherited superstructure. This concept of culture is identified as originating, first, in early American anthropology, and also in American pragmatism, and as entrenched during the 20th century by the assumptions of the linguistic turn. The main arguments that recommend biosemiotics for an unbiased theory of culture and multiculturalism, namely its biocentrism and detachment from the linguistic turn, are explained.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Alcock, John. 2001. The Triumph of Sociobiology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
American Anthropological Association 1947. Statement on human rights. American Anthropologist 49 (4): 539-43.
Arnett, Jeffrey J. 2014. Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties, 2nd ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Bankov, Kristian, and Paul Cobley (eds.). 2017. Semiotics and its Masters, vol. 1. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.
Barthes, Roland. 1972 [1957]. Mythologies. Trans. A. Lavers. New York: The Noonday Press.
Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image Music Text. Trans. S. Heath. London: Fontana Press.
Benedict, Ruth. 1934. Patterns of Culture. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Berry, John W. 1980. Acculturation as varieties of adaptation. In Acculturation: Theory, Models, and Some New Findings, ed. A.M. Padilla, 9–25. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Berry, John W. 1997. Immigration, acculturation, and adaptation. Applied Psychology: An International Review 46: 5–34.
Berry, John W., U. Kim, S. Power, M. Young, and M. Bujaki. 1989. Acculturation attitudes in plural societies. Applied Psychology: An International Review 38: 185–206.
Bernstein, Richard. 2015. Cultural pluralism. Philosophy and Social Criticism 41 (4–5): 347–356.
Bhabha, Homi K. 1990. DissemiNation: Time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation. In Nation and Narration, ed. H.K. Bhabha, 291–322. London: Routledge.
Bisin, Alberto, and Thierry Verdier. 2000. “Beyond the melting pot”: cultural transmission, marriage, and the evolution of ethnic and religious traits.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 115 (3): 955–988.
Boas, Franz. 1938 [1911]. The Mind of Primitive Man. New York: The Mac-Millan Company.
Bosma, Harke A., and E. Saskia Kunnen. (2008) Identity-in-context is not yet identity development-in-context. Journal of Adolescence 31 (2): 281–289.
Brubaker, Rogers, Margit Feischmidt, Jon Fox, and Liana Grancea. 2006. Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Bruner, Jerome S. 1957. Going Beyond the Information Given. New York: Norton.
Bruner, J.S. 1966. Toward a Theory of Instruction. Belknap: Cambridge.
Bruner, Jerome S. 1999 [1960]. The Process of Education, 25th ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Burch, Robert. 2010. Charles Sanders Peirce. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved November 2, 2018, from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/.
Bundgaard, P., and F. Stjernfelt (eds.). 2009. Signs and meaning: 5 questions. NewYork: Automatic Press.
Campbell, Cary. 2018. Educating semiosis: Foundational concepts for and ecological edusemiotic. Studies in Philosophy and Education, aop.
Cobley, Paul. 2010a. The cultural implications of biosemiotics. Biosemiotics 3: 225–244.
Cobley, Paul (ed.). 2010b. The Routledge Companion to Semiotics. New York: Routledge.
Cobley, Paul. 2014 [2001]. Narrative, 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge.
Cobley, Paul. 2016. Cultural Implications of Biosemiotics. Dordrecht: Springer.
Cobley, Paul. 2017. What the humanities are for—A semiotic perspective. In Semiotics and its Masters, ed. Kristian Bankov and Paul Cobley, 3–23. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.
Cobley, P., and F. Stjernfelt. 2015. Scaffolding development as the human condition. Biosemiotics 8: 291–304.
Committee on Bioethics. 1998. Female genital mutilation. Pediatrics 102 (1): 153–156.
Cutsinger, James (ed.). 2004. Paths to the Heart: Sufism and the Christian East. Bloomington: World Wisdom.
Danesi, Marcel. 2002. Understanding Media Semiotics. London: Arnold.
Danesi, Marcel. 2008. The medium is the sign: Was McLuhan a semiotician? Media Tropes 1: 113–126.
de Saussure, Ferdinand. 1959 [1916]. Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York, Toronto, London: McGraw-Hill Book Company.
Deacon, Terrence. 1997. The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company.
Deacon, Terrence. 2012. The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution, ed. Maggie Tallerman and Kathleen R. Gibson, 393–405. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dearden, R.F., P. Hirst, and R.S. Peters (eds.). 1972. Education and the Development of Reason. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Deely, John. 1982. Introducing Semiotics. Its History and Doctrine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Deely, John. 2001. Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Deely, John. 2009. Augustine & Poinsot. The Protosemiotic Development, Volume 1 in the Postmodernity in Philosophy Poinsot Trilogy: Determining the Standpoint for a Doctrine of Signs. Scranton, London: University of Scranton Press.
Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. 1987 [1980]. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1978 [1967]. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge.
Dewey, John. 1937. Education and social change. Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors 23 (6): 472–474.
Dewey, John. 1997 [1938]. Experience and Education. New York: Touchstone.
Eco, Umberto. 1976 [1979]. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Eichas, K., A. Meca, M. Montgomery, and W. Kurtines. 2015. Identity and positive youth development: Advances in developmental intervention science. In The Oxford Handbook of Identity Development, ed. K.C. McLean and M. Syed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Erentaitė, Rasa, Lannegrand-Willems, L., Negru-Subţirică, O., Vosylis, R., Sondaitė, J., and Raižienė, S. 2018, forthcoming. Identity development among ethnic minority youth: Integrating findings from studies in Europe. European Psychologist, 23 (4): 324–335.
Eriksen, Jens-Martin, and Frederik Stjernfelt. 2010. Culturalism—From idea to un-conscious presupposition. Sociologija II (4): 359–376.
Eriksen, Jens-Martin, and Frederik Stjernfelt. 2012. The Democratic Contradictions of Multiculturalism. New York: Telos Press.
Erikson, E.H. 1968. Identity, Youth and Crisis. New York: W. W. Norton.
Favareau, Donald. 2010. Essential Readings in Biosemiotics: Anthology and Commentary. Dordrecht: Springer.
Fiske, John. 1990. Introduction to Communication Studies, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.
Foucault, Michel. 1988 [1961]. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books.
Gaines, Elliot. 2010. Media Literacy and Semiotics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Goodman, N. 1976. Languages of Art. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co.
Gudykunst, W.B. (ed.). 2003. Cross-Cultural and Intercultural Communication. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Guiora, Amos N. 2014. Tolerating Intolerance: The Price of Protecting Extremism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Halliday, M.A.K. 1978. Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. Maryland: University Park Press.
Herskovits, Melville J. 1958. Some further comments on cultural relativism. American Anthropologist 60 (2): 266–273.
Hirst, Paul. 1974. Knowledge and the Curriculum. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Hirst, Paul H. and Richard S. Peters. 1970. The Logic of Education. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Hodge, R., and G. Kress. 1988. Social Semiotics. Cambridge: Polity.
Hoffmeyer, Jesper. 1996. Signs of Meaning in the Universe. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Hoffmeyer, Jesper. 2008a. Semiotic scaffolding of living systems. In Introduction to Biosemiotics: The New Biological Synthesis, ed. M. Barbieri. Dordrecht: Springer.
Hoffmeyer, Jesper. 2008b. The biosemiotic body. Biosemiotics 1: 169–190.
Hoffmeyer, Jesper. 2015. Introduction: Semiotic Scaffolding. Biosemiotics 8: 153–158.
Hofstede, Geert, Gert Jan Hofstede, and Michael Minkov. 2010. Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. Intercultural Communication and its Importance for Survival, 3rd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Husserl, Edmund. 1976a [1900]. Logical Investigations, vol. 1. London: Routledge; London: Kegan Paul.
Husserl, Edmund. 1976b [1900]. Logical Investigations, vol. 2. London: Routledge; London: Kegan Paul.
Ichheiser, Gustav. 1949. Misunderstandings in human relations: A study in false social perception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
James, William. 2008 [1909]. A Pluralistic Universe. Rockville: Arc Manor.
Kagitcibasi, C. 1997. Whither multiculturalism. Applied Psychology: An International Review 46: 44–49.
Kallen, Horace. 1956. Cultural Pluralism and the American Idea: An Essay in Social Philosophy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Kallen, Horace. 1996 [1915]. Democracy versus the Melting Pot. In Theories of Ethnicity, ed. W. Sollors. 67–92. New York: New York University Press.
Kiesling, Scott F., and Christina Bratt Paulston (eds.). 2005. Intercultural Discourse and Communication. Malden, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Koopman, Colin. 2009. Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kotthoff, Helga, and Helen Spencer-Oatey (eds.). 2007. Handbook of Intercultural Communication. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kress, Gunther. 2010. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. London: Routledge.
Kress, G., and T. Leeuwen. 1996. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge.
Kress, G., and T. van Leeuwen. 2001. Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold.
Kuhn, Thomas. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. London, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kull, Kalevi. 2005. Semiotics is a theory of life. In Semiotics and National Identity, ed. Rodney Williamson, Leonard Sbrocchi, and John Deely, 15–31. New York, Ottawa, Toronto: Legas.
Kull, Kalevi. 2007. Biosemiotics and biophysics—The fundamental approaches to the study of life. In Introduction to Biosemiotics, ed. M. Barbieri, 161–177. Dordrecht: Springer.
Kull, Kalevi. 2009. Biosemiotics: To know what life knows. Cybernetics and Human Knowing 16 (3/4): 81–88.
Kull, Kalevi. 2011. Foundations for ecosemiotic deep ecology. In The Space of Culture—The Place of Nature in Estonia and Beyond, ed. Tiina Peil, 69–75. Tartu: Tartu University Press.
Kull, K., and C. Emmeche (eds.). 2011. Towards a Biosemiotic Biology. London: Imperial College Press.
Kymlicka, Will. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kymlicka, Will. 2001. Politics in the Vernacular. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lähteenmäki, Mika, Piia Varis, and Sirpa Leppänen. 2011. Editorial: The shifting paradigm: Towards a re-conceptualisation of multilingualism. Apples—Journal of Applied Linguistics 5 (1): 1–11.
Lankshear, Colin, and Michele Knobel (eds.). 2008. Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies and Practices. New York: Peter Lang.
Levesque, Simon. 2016. Two versions of ecosophy: Arne Næss, Félix Guattari, and their connection with semiotics. Sign System Studies 44 (4): 511–541.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 2003 [1961]. Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1977. Structural Anthropology 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984 [1979]. The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge [La Condition Postmoderne: rapport sure le savoir]. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Máiz, R., and F. Requejo (eds.). 2004. Democracy, Nationalism and Multiculturalism. London and New York: Frank Cass Publishers.
Martinelli, Dario. 2016. Arts and Humanities in Progress: A Manifesto of Numanities. Cham: Springer.
Märtsin, Mariann. 2014. Self regulation by signs: A social semiotic approach to identity. In Multicentric Identities in a Globalizing World, ed. Sergio Salvatore, Alessandro Gennaro, and Jaan Valsiner, ix–xx. Charlotte: Information Age Publishing.
Menand, Louis. 2001. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Merleau-Ponty, M. 1995. La Nature. Notes. Cours de Collège de France. Paris: Seuil.
Modood, Tariq. 2007. Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 2010. Not for Profit—Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ogden, C.K., and I.A. Richards. 1923. The meaning of meaning: A study of the influence of language upon thought and of the science of symbolism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Olteanu, Alin. 2015. Philosophy of Education in the Semiotics of Charles Peirce: A Cosmology of Learning and Loving. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Papastephanou, Marianna. 2016. Editor’s introduction. In Cosmopolitanism: Educational, Philosophical, and Historical Perspectives, ed. Marianna Papastephanou, 1–17. Cham: Springer.
Peirce, Charles S. 1931–1935 and 1958. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. I–VI, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vols. VII–VIII, ed. Arthur W. Burks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Randviir, Anti, and Paul Cobley. 2010. Sociosemiotics. In The Routledge Companion to Semiotics, ed. Paul Cobley, 118–134. New York: Routledge.
Rorty, Richard M. (ed.). 1967. The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method with Two Retrospective Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rudmin, Floyd W., and Vali Ahmadzadeh. 2001. Psychometric critique of acculturation psychology: The case of Iranian migrants in Norway. The Scandinavian Journal of Psychology. 42: 41–56.
Said, Edward. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage.
Schmidt, Paul F. 1955. Some criticisms of cultural relativism. The Journal of Philosophy 52 (25): 780–791.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 1986. I Think I am a Verb: More Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs. New York: Springer.
Sebeok, Thomas. 1991. A sign is just a sign: Advances in semiotics. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Sebeok, Thomas A. 2001. Signs: An introduction to semiotics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Semetsky, Inna (ed.). 2010. Semiotics, Education, Experience. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Shannon, Claude E., and Warren Weaver. 1964. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana: The University of Illinois Press.
Sharov, A., T. Maran, and M. Tønnessen. 2015. Organisms reshape sign relations. Biosemiotics 8: 361–365.
Shumsky, Neil Larry. 1975. Zangwill’s “The Melting Pot”: Ethnic Tensions on Stage. American Quarterly 27 (1): 29–41.
Stables, Andrew. 2006. Sign(al)s: Living and learning as semiotic engagement. Journal of Curriculum Studies 38 (4): 373–387.
Stables, Andrew. 2012. Be(com)ing Human: Semiosis and the Myth of Reason. Rotterdam, Boston, Taipei: Sense Publishers.
Stables, A., and S. Semetsky. 2015. Edusemiotics: Semiotic Philosophy as Educational Foundation. New York: Routledge.
Stables, A., W. Nöth, A. Olteanu, S. Pesce, and E. Pikkarainen. 2018. Semiotic Theory of Learning: New Perspectives in the Philosophy of Education. New York: Routledge.
Stjernfelt, Frederik. 2007. Diagrammatology. An Investigation on the Borderlines of Phenomenology, Ontology and Semiotics. Dordrecht: Springer.
Stjernfelt, Frederik. 2010. What is culturalism?—The anatomy of a contemporary disease in academia and politics. Lexia. Rivista Semiotica 5–6: 369–400.
Stjernfelt, Frederik. 2011. Signs conveying information. On the range of Peirce’s notion of propositions: Dicisigns. International Journal of Signs and Semiotic Systems 1 (2): 40–52.
Stjernfelt, Frederik. 2014. Natural Propositions: The Actuality of Peirce’s Doc-trine of Dicisigns. Boston: Docent Press.
Taylor, C., Appiah K.A., Habermas, J., Rockefeller S.C., Walzer M., Wolf, S. 1994. Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Gutman, Amy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
von Uexküll, Thure, Werner Geigges, and Jörg M. Herrmann. 1993. Endosemiosis. Semiotica 96 (1–2): 5–52.
Vygotsky, Lev Semyonovich. 1978. Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press.
Werbner, Pnina. 2012. Multiculturalism from above and below: Analysing a political discourse. Journal of Intercultural Studies 33 (2): 197–209.
Wilson, Edward O. 1980 [1975]. Sociobiology: The Abridged Edition. Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Olteanu, A. (2019). Multiculturalist Discourse and Theory. In: Multiculturalism as Multimodal Communication. Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17883-3_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17883-3_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-17882-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-17883-3
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)