Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies

The volume argues that liberal democracies face a structural tension between their commitment to individual rights and their professed tolerance of cultural difference, and that this tension cannot be resolved by abstract principle alone. It rejects the assumption that tolerance is a simple virtue that can be extended without cost or contradiction. Instead, through case studies of group rights in India, Muslim challenges to church-state relations in France and Germany, customary marriage in post-apartheid South Africa, and cultural defenses in American courts, the contributors show that the limits of tolerance are negotiated in specific institutional encounters . Some contributors resist broadening tolerance, while others argue that tolerance itself is a confining and demeaning concept that should give way to celebration of difference .

Markus co-edited the volume with anthropologist Richard Shweder and legal scholar Martha Minow, and she contributed two chapters. The first, with Heejung Kim, examines 'Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Silence' as cultural practices, arguing that talking is not universally valued as a mode of expression . The second, with Claude and Dorothy Steele, addresses 'Color Blindness as a Barrier to Inclusion,' arguing that colorblind ideology can impede genuine inclusion of nonimmigrant minorities . Both chapters apply Markus's cultural psychology framework—particularly the independent-interdependent self-construal distinction—to legal and policy questions. This extends her work in volumes like Clash! and Facing Social Class, demonstrating that cultural psychology has purchase on public reasoning about rights, speech, and inclusion.

Reviews were mixed. Douglas Hartmann, writing in Social Forces (2004), called it 'a wonderful new collection of essays' with 'a mountain of rich, stimulating material' but found the organization and theoretical framing 'not particularly memorable' . He was disappointed that the volume did not do more to address how cultural diversity is 'conflated with and complicated by the realities of social inequality,' and he suggested that the concluding chapter on colorblindness, while addressing such concerns, came 'a bit too-little, too-late' . A review in the American Journal of Sociology by Kogila Moodley noted the volume's comprehensive scope across four parts without raising major objections . Foreign Affairs praised it as 'a fresh attempt' that reveals 'complexities, dilemmas, and varied national experiences' .

The case study method is central to the volume's argument that multicultural dilemmas are contextual and resist universal resolution. The twenty-one contributions are primarily case studies grouped into four parts: contested practices and group status, cultural accommodation and its limits, human rights debates, and conceptions of difference . Hartmann observed that the absence of a singular theoretical frame may be 'the ultimate point and contribution of this volume,' forcing readers to recognize that 'there are no easy answers to the omnipresent multicultural challenge' . The limitation is that the volume lacks a unifying analytical framework that might allow comparison across cases, and several reviewers noted that the theoretical apparatus is thinner than the empirical richness.

The distinguishing feature is the editors' deliberate cross-disciplinary composition: Shweder is an anthropologist, Minow a legal scholar, and Markus a psychologist, and the contributors span law, anthropology, psychology, and history . This is not merely decorative. The volume's argument is that multicultural dilemmas cannot be understood from within a single discipline: legal doctrine without anthropological context misses what is at stake for minority communities, while cultural analysis without legal framing misses the institutional constraints within which tolerance operates. The result is a volume that is more empirically grounded than philosophical treatments of tolerance and more theoretically ambitious than doctrinal legal casebooks. It is best understood as an interdisciplinary intervention into public reasoning about difference, not as a comprehensive theory of multiculturalism.

Hartmann's review specifically noted the tension between the title's 'active language of engagement' and the back-cover characterization of the volume as 'concerned with the aims of tolerance' . The title signals a stance that goes beyond passive non-interference: engagement implies encounter, negotiation, and possibly transformation on both sides. Several contributors argue explicitly that tolerance is an insufficient or even demeaning response to difference, and that liberal democracies should aspire to celebrate cultural difference rather than merely permit it . However, the volume does not uniformly adopt this position; some contributors are reluctant to broaden tolerance's scope. The title thus captures an aspiration that the essays collectively interrogate rather than simply affirm.