Multiculturalism in Asia.

MULTICULTURALISM IN ASIA. Edited by Will Kymlicka and Baogang He. Oxford (UK), New York: Oxford University Press. 2005. xi, 364 pp. (Tables.) US$99.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-19-927762-9; US$35.00, paper, ISBN 978-0-19-927763-6.

This very valuable volume uses a large range of case studies to address the contemporary and pressing issue of ethnocultural diversity in South, Southeast and East Asia and the political and policy responses to the existence of minorities, whether ethnic, cultural or religious, as a permanent part of the social fabric of these societies. The assumption during the period of "nation building"--that the new states were unitary and homogenous and that minorities would accommodate themselves to this unity through assimilation--has long since unraveled. Every modern state in Asia has found itself forced to grapple with its permanently plural character and to evolve policies--political, cultural, educational, and linguistic--for managing this multiculturalism. Independence movements, demands for recognition of cultural autonomy, resistance to discrimination, struggles for some kind of federal state in which minority interests are fairly represented, demands for citizenship and, in some cases, armed struggles have characterized the postcolonial political and cultural landscapes of the region's societies.

The essays in this book address these issues, in almost every case starting from the well-known conceptualization of multiculturalism by one of the editors, Will Kymlicka. The majority of the essays are detailed case studies of the ways that ethnocultural diversity is conceptualized and managed across the region, in China, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Japan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and India. One essay is devoted to the neglected issue of foreign domestic workers. The essays are mostly of a high standard, with the weakest and least theorized one being on Malaysia, although naturally a reviewer familiar in detail with some of the societies discussed would find contentious elements in many of them. For example, the chapter on Singapore includes an argument for the virtues of a communitarian model which greatly downplays the immense political and social costs of that experiment for its critics and dissenters, and the chapter by Lam Peng-Er on Japan, which makes its central thesis the idea that Japan is a state in which the government is liberal-democratic but the society is reactionary, seems to me to be just about a direct reversal of the actual facts.

The individual chapters can be read as very useful summaries and introductions to the specific conceptualizations and policy debates regarding minorities in each of the countries surveyed. The book as a whole and its common theme is the interesting and politically volatile issue of the applicability of the Western liberal model to Asia. This is both its strength and weakness: the book on the one hand raises important comparative theoretical questions, but on the other, as several of the contributors point out and contest, to frame the book in terms of the conceptual priority of the Western liberal model rather than start from Asian realities is a distortion. As minority issues become increasingly internationalized and publicly visible, it is certainly true that contending models are employed by minorities themselves--the Ainu people or Okinawans in Japan, for example--drawing simultaneously on a vocabulary of universal human rights and of cultural particularism. But my main unease with the book is that the whole volume is structured as a response to Kymlicka's own, arguable (in the full sense of the word) theory, multiplied through a range of case studies--a sort of self-induced congratulatory volume in which the senior editor's own position becomes the central point of debate. There are a few very avoidable editorial errors, such as the appearance in the bibliography of Thongchai Winichakul twice; in a book on Asia one would have hoped that the editors could at least have got Asian names right.

JOHN CIAMMER

Sophia University, Tokyo