Recently I had the opportunity to listen to the annual oration on multiculturalism at Deakin University. On this occasion it was delivered by Tony Burke who is the government’s new minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs. Burke strikes me as a sensible and sentimental person.
He is legally trained and constantly reminds all his roots in Sydney’s Western suburbs. In a previous government Burke was also the minister for the arts and culture. I once sat opposite him at a dinner and he confessed: ‘coming from where I come from, the closest I ever got to arts and culture was when my mates and I got a bit agricultural’.
Burke is a down to earth and a rare example of an earnest politician. He regards the text that he composed for the citizenship ceremonies as the highpoint of his political year. He acknowledges that there are bottlenecks in the visa processes but resists the accusation that there is unfair bias in the system. His analysis, commentaries and observations all come across as logical, astute and genuine. However, there was a fundamental flaw in his oration on multiculturalism.
Burke began his oration by reiterating the claim that Australia is, in demographic terms, is a very diverse state. The majority of Australians are either immigrants, or at least have one parent that was born overseas. Burke then noted that this demographic diversity does not automatically turn Australia into a multicultural society. For that to happen a lot of work needs to be done. A multicultural society would certainly never materialise if the policies of assimilationism continued.
Burke was clear about the harm that assimilationism produced. It promoted an undeserved arrogance amongst the dominant Anglo-centric community, humiliated migrants, stultified cultural growth, narrowed people’s capacity to engage with others and constrained their understanding of their place in the world. In short, it shortchanged the nation and fed a narcissistic fantasy of splendid isolation. The ‘melting pot’ metaphor that was used to justify assimilationism in America did not have the same appeal in Australia.
The failures of assimilationism are now obvious. It is also customary to salute the bold steps that were taken in the 1970s to produce policies to support multicultural initiatives. This led to innovations such as bi-lingual health and legal services, an expansion in welfare and education programmes, the introduction of funding for multicultural artistic projects, and the globally unique Special Broadcasting Service (SBS).
If assimilationism was aiming to produce a uniform identity and singular cultural code, Burke argued that multiculturalism gave Australia the license to appreciate that diversity could enrich our outlook and enhance vitality. Assimilationism would flatten our differences, whereas as for Burke, multiculturalism allowed all the different segments to be ‘mixed like a salad within a distinctive Australian bowl’.
The salad metaphor is commonplace in multicultural discourse. It has served as the counterpoint to the ‘melting pot’ metaphor for assimilationism. In my mind, and if you connect the dots in Burke’s argument, the salad metaphor is inadequate and counterproductive – it suggests that migrants bring culture into Australia like the way you drop lettuce or tomatoes into the bowl. The metaphor is meant to be celebratory and invigorating – the salad is after all colourful and healthy. Yet, the metaphor also has an underside. The vegetables have been pulled out of the ground, transported and are then cut and cleansed. From this perspective culture has been uprooted, diced and sterilised. It not only suggests that minority culture has a limited ‘use by’ date but it also directs the dominant perception of culture down the digestive tract. You can see where this is going to end.
Of course, Burke was staying with the affirmative end of the metaphor. He celebrated the way minority communities promote their heritage and retain their ties to their respective homelands. He is right to note that this widens our cultural horizons and creates important economic and political links across the world. In this sense, multiculturalism is good for global trade and a boon for soft power. However, this potential is often missed. As Burke concluded, ‘we are not that good at learning from each other’. In fact, he also claimed that when most people go to a multicultural event the most memorable aspect is the consumption of food.
Is there a link between the salad metaphor for government policy and the observation that the most enduring memory from multicultural events is the experience of eating other people’s food? I suspect there is a link, and this is why metaphors and models matter. The position from which we see things, and the vocabulary we use to describe them can have dramatic consequences on what and how we see and act. This is something that was noted by the American anthropologist Gregory Bateson when he quipped: from the perspective of a pedestrian a fish is a lousy walker.
The salad metaphor of multiculturalism is clearly an advance on the bland assimilationist models, but it is still stuck inside the integrationist worldview. In the integrationist model the minority cultures were not prohibited from displaying their cultural heritage and support was provided to facilitate their participation in the mainstream society. However, it was assumed that diversity would eventually fade away as migrants found their way. The foreign culture, like the exotic ingredients in the salad, would be eaten up by the dominant culture.
It is now more than fifty years since we have claimed that multiculturalism has arrived and come to stay in Australia. However, in the past few decades it has been increasingly taken for granted. Policy initiatives have stalled, funding dramatically reduced, and worst of all, a ‘divide and conquer’ mentality has crept in. At the question-and-answer period of the oration, leaders from different communities complained that other minorities were getting preferential treatment. In this context I think that the metaphors and models for representing multiculturalism are in desperate need of renovation. For decades artists, activists and scholar have argued that integrationist perspectives are just assimilationism by stealth.
The salad metaphors have a pleasant ring, but they may also be blocking the way forward. How are we to overcome the impasse that Burke noted and start to learn from each other? Hospitality is a good beginning, but after the sharing of bread, we then need to really learn how to listen and engage. This would mean we go back to the first principles of learning different languages and seeing culture as a dynamic process.
The dynamism in multiculturalism is not comparable to the aggregation of cut up bits of salad, but more like the mutating of viruses. This is not a comforting metaphor, but it is time to move on and put the robustness of multiculturalism back on the table. We need metaphors that acknowledge that the cultures in multiculturalism are constantly adjusting as they come into contact and interact with different hosts.
Professor Nikos Papastergiadis is the Director of the Research Unit in Public Cultures based at The University of Melbourne – has authored many books such as The Turbulence of Migration (2000), Cosmopolitanism and Culture (2012) and most recently, John Berger and Me.
