Christian Giordano

Imagined Multiculturalism in a Malaysian Town: Ideological Constructions and Empirical Evidences

Penang in Malaysia and the city-state of Singapore ought to be considered emblematic of the UK’s colonial legacy of planned immigration for economic reasons, involving Southern and Southeast Asia. After independence, he notes, a compromise between different ethnocultural components was achieved by discarding the European-like political model of national state and adopting a model in which both the autochthonous population and the immigrants are regarded as members of a consociation characterized by power sharing and by a differentiated citizenship. Giordano’s ethnography shows that in a situation marked by highly conspicuous ethnocultural differences, power sharing and a policy of unity in separation stemming from the political principle of differentiated citizenship have generated forms of social cohesion characterized by constant tensions and, at times, open conflict, but also by social practices of respect towards cultural diversity.

The Social Organization of an Urban Diaspora: Corporate Groups, Factions and Networks amongst Penang’s Malaysian-Chinese:

The social organization of the Chinese diaspora in Malaysia has emerged as a very diversified phenomenon so that it is hard to speak of a coherent social and cultural community. Starting from the c...

Europe: Sociocultural Overview

Most concepts of Europe as a unitary imagined community are characterized by a bipolar scheme in which Europe is opposed to ‘anti-Europe.’ However, it is misleading to think of Europe as a united civilization or as a sum of cultural areas. Europe is considered as a system of structurally and culturally diverse historical regions. The article also deals with the relevance of European nation-states in the past and in the framework of the present globalization processes. It shows how Europe experiences a difficult, tense, and contradictory transition from a Europe of the national communities to a postnational Europe.

Childhood and citizenship: a political anthropologist's candid observations on children's exclusion and protection

The political anthropologist’s point of view will certainly emerge in this endnote. It thus may not be able to capture the significant and complex theoretic and empirical richness of the articles included in this important multidisciplinary collection in which principally historians and anthropologists present the results of their thought-provoking and groundbreaking research on specific themes associated with childhood. As far as anthropology is concerned, the theme of childhood as a social category, hence not merely a demographic one, has been somewhat neglected, whereas the theme of adolescence, thanks also to the studies of the school of culture and personality, has been and still is very popular. We need only mention Margaret Mead’s classic study on adolescence in Polynesia. Why has it been neglected? The reason could be that children are regarded as individuals who are fully fledged members neither of the polis, nor of the civitas and therefore are also excluded to some extent from the cité of the modern nation-state. Consequently, they are currently denied a full social role and are granted a particular status within society. Therefore, I would like to make some general observations on the present relationship between childhood and citizenship from the point of view of political anthropology. It is common knowledge that in Greco-Roman and medieval societies (especially in towns not under feudal regimes, such as northern Italy’s comuni and the German freie Reichsstädte) citizenship was a known concept. This vision of citizenship was, however, rather different from that of modern national societies. Juridically and philosophically speaking, present-day citizenship implies a specific relationship, defined by reciprocal rights and duties, between the national State and its members. As such, modern citizenship is significantly different from the feudal and absolutist subjection, which instead is grounded in personalised hierarchic relations between an overlord and the individual members of the populations directly under his rule. Modern citizenship is based on the equality of rights, namely civil, political and social rights that were gradually introduced in Europe after the French Revolution and the Declaration of Human Rights. Perhaps we also ought to mention cultural rights, but for the time being this idea has hardly been brought into the mainstream, probably because such rights transcend the specific individual aspect of human rights and imply the existence of collective rights, i.e. community rights. Though nowadays citizenship is perceived as a universal heritage of mankind, it is a product of Western civilisation. In other words, the concept is indeed familiar to societies with different traditions, but