THE CHALLENGES OF CULTURAL DIVERSITY

. T he I mportance of C ommunity I dentity Every human being needs a sense of stable identity to operate in this world. Questions like — Who am I? How am I different from others?

How do others understand and comprehend me? What goals and aspirations should I have? – constantly crop up in our life right from childhood. We are able to answer many of these questions because of the way in which we are socialised, or taught how to live in society by our immediate families and our community in various senses.

(Recall the discussion of socialisation in your Class XI textbooks.) The socialisation process involves a continuous dialogue, negotiation and even struggle against significant others (those directly involved in our lives) like our parents, family, kin group and our community. Our community provides us the language (our mother tongue) and the cultural values through which we comprehend the world. It also anchors our self-identity. Community identity is based on birth and ‘belonging’ rather than on some form of acquired qualifications or ‘accomplishment’.

It is what we ‘are’ rather than what we have ‘become’. We don’t have to do anything to be born into a community – in fact, no one has any choice about which family or community or country they are born into. These kinds of identities are called ‘ascriptive’ – that is, they are determined by the birth and do not involve any choice on the part of the individuals concerned. It is an odd fact of social life that people feel a deep