Political Theory and Australian Multiculturalism by Geoffrey Brahm Levey

Author:Geoffrey Brahm Levey [Levey, Geoffrey Brahm]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9780857456298
Google: VLtf5_XmmlMC
Goodreads: 15864720
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2008-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

TWO CASES OF ARRANGED MARRIAGE IN AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES

One way to respond to the flattening tendencies of human rights discourses is to endorse the idea of group or cultural rights, that is, to signal respect for cultural difference by recognizing diversity in traditions, beliefs, and practices. In the context of multicultural liberal polities, Will Kymlicka has offered a cogent argument for why group-differentiated rights that protect minority cultures are not only consistent with liberal values but actually promote them. The force of his argument depends on the strong link he posits between freedom and access to what he calls “societal culture.” A societal culture “provides its members with meaningful ways of life across the full range of human activities, including social, educational, religious, recreational and economic life, encompassing both public and private spheres” (Kymlicka 1995: 76). It is “a shared vocabulary of tradition and convention” that grounds one’s sense of belonging and self-worth and provides the necessary context for one’s ability to reflect on, and act in, the world.

However, as Kymlicka is aware,3 and as feminist theorists continue to remind him, granting group rights to minority cultures may support discriminatory treatment of individual girls and women within the relevant groups.4 Insofar as group rights take the group as their focus, they risk overriding the rights of individuals. Group rights, in other words, may strengthen oppressive gender norms within minority cultures. However, by their very nature, group rights expose the potential for dissent that is present in every group and so may function to provoke reflection on and debate about intragroup norms. Reflection and debate need not be seen as destructive of a shared way of life. Rather, they may be seen as indicators of a dynamic, living culture. This view of dissent within groups is particularly pertinent to indigenous peoples who are too often taken to be preserving an all but dead or frozen-in-time culture that is destined to disappear under the burden of the “modernizing” forces of colonization and the increasing reach of international law. Disagreement and debate drive normative change, and normative change is necessary if a culture is to adapt to new circumstances and endure.

The indigenous challenge to European conceptions of property rights and the demand for recognition and rectification of the many and continuing injustices of colonization5 opens a path of communication through which contemporary notions about the just treatment of women and girls also may travel: cross-cultural recognition of difference inevitably will include a bilateral (albeit unequally so) component. To portray indigenous women’s struggles for change in their own communities as “selling out” to the colonists, or succumbing to “Westernization,” amounts to denying indigenous agency and self-determination. Indigenous women, no more or less than indigenous men, desire to contribute to the re-creation, as well as preservation, of indigenous values and practices over time. Indeed, as I will show, the re-creation of tradition is one way of preserving culture. Controversial cases of traditional arranged marriages in Australian indigenous communities have shown the degree to which challenges

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