MULTICULTURALISM AS THE NORMAL HUMAN EXPERIENCE

The view of culture and the individual which I present here is one I have arrived at in the context of thinking about the contributions anthropology can make to programs for social and cultural change (Goodenough 1963). A major problem in the course of all such programs is the emotional investment of individual persons in preserving or changing existing customs and institutions. Why is the same individual distressed at one kind of change and unconcerned about another? Why do individuals in the same community differ so markedly in their feelings about the same situations? Why do some segments of a population, for example, express little interest in having their children learn to read and write, while other segments are distressed that their children are not learning to read and write better? Applied anthropology’s recognition of the crucial importance of wants and felt needs—of the role of motivation—in social and cultural process inevitably forces theory to come to terms with how individual, purposeful, human beings relate to that process. Anthropologists traditionally have acted on the assumption that most societies are not multicultural, that for each society there is one culture, They have seen multicultural societies as developing only in the wake of urbanism, economic specialization, social stratification, and conquest states.