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Identities or self-images are multiple, nested, hyphenated, flexible, and instrumental. Culture and identity provide both bridges and walls between Scots and minorities, but what is a bridge for one is a wall for another. For English immigrants, culture is the bridge and identity the wall, while for ethnic Pakistanis, culture is the wall and identity the bridge. Since English immigrants’ identities are primarily territorial, they cannot identify with Scotland despite respecting its traditions. Since Pakistani identities are primarily cultural (Muslim), their territorial identities are flexible and instrumental. They identify quickly and easily with Scotland, despite wishing to change its culture and traditions by adding more variety. The SNP’s welcoming political stance and its opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq has made it even easier for Muslims to identify with Scotland.

Kenneth Strike’s essay on pluralism, personal identity, and freedom of conscience, takes up the concept of identity, and contrasts cultural and religious pluralism. He argues that the issues of affiliational obligation and recognition are often different in these two types of pluralism, and that religious groups are often asking for something very different from cultural groups. Strike makes a case for a more fluid conception of the idea of identity and against its essentialist form; he holds, e.g. that some of his affiliations are stronger than others and more tied to his sense of a larger self, but it is questionable, he argues, whether any of these affiliations could not be re-evaluated without loss of the larger idea of the self. Strike does allow that members of groups more oppressed than his might certainly rally around the attributes that they hold in common, and he is sympathetic to this strategic function of identity. Nevertheless, he wants to hold onto the individualized and phenomenological conception of identity: identity is whatever the agent feels it to be.

Two formulations of civic responsibility are advanced: participating in a way that does not improperly diminish the prospects for peace or the prospect that the inhabitants will come to terms and set up the necessary framework; and participating in a way that pays proper attention to the interests, wishes and opinions of all inhabitants in the country. This chapter addresses the questions that arise when these formulations are filled out in the context of cultural identity in a multicultural society. Aspects covered include compossibility, compleasance (that people strive to accommodate themselves to others), and cultural engagement.

This chapter considers the nationalist underpinnings of late-century musicology by examining the diverse and even contradictory cultural associations that Adler forged through the medium of his work. In his publications on the medieval origins of harmony, Adler distanced himself from attempts to claim exclusively Germanic origins for polyphonic phenomena. But in essays on Bach, Handel, and Mozart, penned in the mid-1880s, he indulged a brand of cultural chauvinism associated with Wagner and his followers. In his work on the Monuments of Music in Austria series of editions, Adler embraced a supranational vision of Austrian cultural identity endorsed by Habsburg officialdom, yet in his 1904 monograph on Wagner he declined to engage the composer's most inflammatory statements on race and identity. Each of these cases illuminates Adler's response to a specific crisis that shook his society, and together they testify to the difficulties of defining the German in the late-century musicological discourse.

Joseph Dunne’s essay begins by examining the ways in which schooling in modern liberal–democratic societies tend to function as the agent of cultural homogenization and alienation, and thus block liberal–democratic efforts to offer meaningful recognition of local cultures and to promote the skills and dispositions required for participatory democratic citizenship. The danger here, Dunne points out, is that when the homogenizing elements of modern schooling become dominant, they might serve to encourage an ‘insouciant cosmopolitanism that may fail to meet people’s needs for identity (and by this failure help open the door to the very xenophobic nationalism it wishes to repudiate)’. The chapter concludes by reflecting on some possible educational responses that might offer some hopeful ways of addressing such dismal extremes. In particular, he is interested in the educational possibilities offered by a reconfiguration of national identities and state institutions in the emerging European Community in the context of national, cultural, and religious strife that currently besets Northern Ireland. Thus, like Waldron, Dunne sees local cultural identities – be they national, religious, or cultural – as complexly related to, but potentially compatible with, cosmopolitan historical forces.

This chapter explores issues on citizenship education. It shows how liberal citizenship is more complicated than often realized, and why schools play a key role in educating children for citizenship. It considers three controversies in ethnoculturally diverse societies: whether citizenship education requires common schooling, whether the promotion of responsible citizenship requires the promotion of personal autonomy, and whether promoting a shared civic identity requires teaching both shared political values and specific national or cultural identities.

Tisdell advocates a way of teaching that is learner‐centered, responsive to cultural identity, and socially transformative. In this kind of teaching, spirituality is always part of the mix, and the spirituality of many students is rooted in religion. The role of the teacher is to allow the diversity within the classroom, including the cultural and spiritual diversity of students, to enhance the learning process. Such learning almost always involves paradox, however, as secular and spiritual approaches interact.

In the light of a suicide case of a Hindustani woman in the Netherlands in 1988, this chapter enquires whether it is possible to find a concept of autonomy for Asian women that is both worthy of the eyes of Western liberals and compatible with Asian cultural identities, particularly for those transplanted to the West. It also looks at the issue of whether such a modified conception of autonomy might not also be of value in addressing concern over the decline in civic virtue and public spiritedness in society resulting from increasing individualization. The enquiry uses a psychoanalytical approach.

The system of values of the agent's society forms the external standard for judging the relative importance of the agent's commitments. There are three dimensions of value: universally human, cultural that vary with societies and times; and personal that vary with individuals. Each dimension has a standard for judging the adequacy of the relevant values. Human values are adequate if they satisfy basic needs; cultural values are adequate if they provide a system of values that sustains the allegiance of the inhabitants of a society; and personal values are adequate if the conceptions of well‐being formed out of them enable individuals to live satisfying lives. These values conflict and our well‐being requires some way of settling their conflicts, but there is no universal principle for settling the conflicts; it can only be done by attending to the concrete features of particular conflicts. These features vary with circumstances and values.

This chapter examines some of the conceptions of order and justice that are present in the Islamic world. It argues that many Islamic states have been willing to accommodate themselves to an international society based on the idea of sovereign equality. However, one of the impacts of globalization has been to shift the allegiances of some members of these states from territorially based political communities to those based on religious or cultural identity. Some of the radical Islamist groupings that have emerged in recent years and have voiced a range of grievances are seeking nothing less than the overturning of prevailing international and domestic orders. Although the outcome of this complex challenge is impossible to predict, one consequence is that it has created space for the emergence of a new and possibly transformational Islamic civil society, which directs its attention principally to the reform of Muslim societies themselves.

This chapter discusses the philosophical critique of identity. In order to understand the current aversion to cultural identity, one needs to retrace the development of the philosophical treatment of the self in modern, Western philosophy. Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self (1989) is the best recent attempt to do this, and the chapter begins with an overview of some of the main ideas in his philosophical history that relate to the question of identity. Based on readings of Hegel, Sartre, and other key figures, a genealogy of the philosophical critique of identity is developed, which shows that its more fundamental basis is not actually in the Western concept of rationality but in the modern Western treatments of the Other developed in the context of the European colonialism. Finally, it is shown how this legacy lives on today in some aspects of postmodern philosophy.

This final chapter examines the cultural, social, and political factors that could have led African religious traditions mingled with Christianity, and sometimes with Islam, to be superseded by a new Jewish cultural identity. It presents some hypotheses of the meaning and the benefits that these groups derive from their affiliation with Judaism.

Ancient Israel was a nation in the Near East, but it conceived of itself as a unique people. This chapter investigates the ways that Israel constructed its cultural identity in relation to its neighbors, and how its cultural, religious, and ethnic boundaries were contested and reinterpreted in various biblical texts.

This chapter explores two rituals patterns involving women and hair. One is a ceremony prescribed for a married woman accused of adultery by her husband in the absence of witnesses or other tangible proof (Numbers 5:11–31). It is a particularly troubling passage for modern appropriators of biblical material, with its implications concerning men’s abusive power and women’s subjugation. A key symbol of the ritual involves the woman’s hair and the difficult-to-translate term pr‘, explored in connection with heroic hair and the uncut hair of the Nazirite vow. The second symbolic complex involves the treatment of one of the most valuable and vulnerable spoils of war, captured women (Deuteronomy 21:10–14). If an Israelite man desires one of these women as a wife, he may take her, but she is first transformed by ritual actions, among which is the shaving of her hair. Both passages are disturbing, multilayered, and thought provoking regarding gender, cultural identity, and transformation.

Early ‘Asiatic’ writers, seen as exotic and oriental outsiders, were also often expected to embody ‘foreignness’, and provide ‘alien’ perspectives on Britain, usually in prescribed terms. This chapter explores the contrasting modes of ‘domesticating’ and ‘foreignising’ self-translation reproduced respectively in the writings of the self-Westernised Nirad Chaudhuri and M. J. Tambimuttu. After coming to Britain in 1938, the equally anglicised Tambimuttu adopted a self-consciously ‘Asian’ cultural identity that embodied ideas about the East produced in the West. Such assertions of cultural difference, pre-shaped in orientalist terms for Western consumption, do not transform the centre, and offer a marked contrast to Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao's politicised efforts to nativise Standard English and to ‘Indianise’ the European novel. Unlike Anand who moved in radical political circles, on arrival in Britain Tambimuttu gravitated towards counter-cultural aesthetic movements. Tracing Chaudhuri's and Tambimuttu's varied development from the 1940s and 1950s onwards, this chapter shows that ironically Tambimuttu's self-reinvention as an ‘Asian’ allowed him to engage and be absorbed into his new environments to a far greater extent than the self-colonised Chaudhuri.