Cultural Difference and Social Solidarity

Book excerpt: Cultural Difference and Social Solidarity: Critical Cases engages the paradox of cultural difference and social solidarity within contemporary contexts. Several of the essays in this book focus on individuals negotiating with perceptions of their personal, social, and political identity. Other contributions frame the political perceptions of the individuals and the cultural communities those perceptions construct. In this collection are essays concerning immigrants and the negotiation of sacred, political, and cultural spaces in the United Arab Emirates, the UK, Germany, and Australia as well as analyses of internal cultural differences and solidarity in Québec, Canada and Turkey. Selections include an analysis of language accommodation asymmetry in the Gulf States; ethnopluralism and right wing extremism in Germany; the search of renewed Alevi identity in Australia; and the difference between post-war and post-EU ascension Polish immigrants in the UK. In addition, two essays concern challenges and analysis of Canadian and Québécois multi-culturalism. Finally, three contributions focus on Turkey through an analysis of perceptions of the dead in Turkey’s Kurdish conflict; transformation of urban identities in the Turkish city of Mersin; and how plurality is incorporated into symbolic representations of religious difference in Antakya, Turkey. Each essay in this book describes processes of differences and solidarities within specific contexts, challenging implicitly or explicitly the paradoxical entanglement of the two. Through this collection, the editors intend to begin to demonstrate the possibility of a broader acceptance of solidarities through difference.