cultural capital and cultural diversity
TRANSCRIPT
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Journal of Australian Studies 32:4 (December 2008); 509-20
Cultural capital and cultural diversity: some problems in
Ghassan Hages account of cosmopolitan multiculturalism
Scott Brook
Abstract
Ghassan Hages account of Australian cosmopolitan multiculturalism provided
an exemplary class critique of multiculturalism policy under the labor Hawke-
Keating governments (1983-1996), one which highlighted the fault lines along
which a popular backlash against multiculturalism later developed. However,
upon closer inspection the theoretical and ethnographic work behind the cosmo-
multiculturalist thesis appears seriously flawed. This article revisits Hages mid-
1990s ethnography on Vietnamese restaurants in Cabramatta, a suburb in
Sydneys south-west that has a significant number of Indo-Chinese residents and
businesses and is promoted by local government as Australias most
multicultural suburb. It argues Hages ethnography not only distorts the causality
of local tourism, but is unable to appreciate the mixed governmental rationales
that underpin local planning and the active participation of migrant associations in
this process. Furthermore, it is argued Hages notion of cosmopolitan capital is
insufficiently Bourdieusian as it assumes the domination effects of cultural capital
are due to the commodity relations it enables, rather than being a consequence
of its unequal distribution and (therefore) its capacity to realise class-specific
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social advantages. A brief review of one recent attempt to operationalise Hages
critique in Australian broadcasting policy further supports the conclusion that the
cosmo-multiculturalist thesis as it currently stands has limited value as an
explanatory tool and point of policy intervention.
Australian Multiculturalism after Labor
In Ghassan Hages various critiques of Australian multiculturalism the term
multiculturalism slides across levels of analysis, reflecting not only the different
domains of government policy in which questions of an ethnically diverse polity
are at stake, but also the different methodologies Hage has employed. Moving
between ethnographies based on participant observation and interviews, to
textual analysis of the rhetoric of media commentators, academics, politicians
and policy documents, Hages work is a strong example of cultural criticism; a
genre whose mix of ethical and political engagement, diverse intellectual
resources and popular pedagogy often sustains the role of public intellectual.1
Despite this eclecticism a central and arguably defining feature of Hages
methodology has been that questions of cultural diversity, whether at the level of
policy or everyday practice, are approached in relation to questions of class.
Hage regularly achieves this by constructing two sites of multicultural practice
one working class, the other middle classthat are taken as exemplary of two
1Ghassan Hage is currently listed at number eighteen on the Australian Public Intellectuals (API) Network
Top Forty list. Available on-line at http://www.api-network.com/main/index.php?apply=&webpage=
default&cID=16&PHPSESSID=&menuID=50 [Accessed 1/6/2008]
http://www.api-network.com/main/index.php?apply=&webpage=default&cID=16&PHPSESSIDhttp://www.api-network.com/main/index.php?apply=&webpage=default&cID=16&PHPSESSID -
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competing policy priorities. For instance, in the book chapter The class
aesthetics of global multiculturalism Hage contrasts an aestheticised global
multiculturalism of the mobile professional and managerial classes, against the
localised, nation-State orientated multiculturalism of working class migrants.2
Expressed as a conflict of competing ethical imperatives, we might say the
multiculturalism of cultural desire is here pitted against the multiculturalism of
cultural survival. For a book with the subtitle searching for hope in a shrinking
society, and a rhetorical style that strongly testifies to this ambition, the prospect
in this chapter is rather gloomy. As an aestheticised global multiculturalism of
cosmopolitan consumption replaces the multiculturalism of migrants rights vis -a-
vis the nation state, Hage argues, the value of a culturally diverse polity from the
point of view of government is reduced to place-marketing. Vocalising the
agenda of global multiculturalism thus, Hage writes;
[E]very government around the world can be heard begging,
Please come here Mr Transcendental Capital, please invest here in my
very multicultural zoo-like city, where all kinds of safe and
domesticated otherness is available for consumption. []
I can provide your multicultural workers with the [] grooviest coffee
shops you can imagine, equipped with the latest Italian coffee-
machines, the best baristas and the best macchiatos. I will
offer them the most culturally diverse culinary scene possible[.]3
2Ghassan Hage,Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for hope in a shrinking society, Pluto Press,
Annandale, NSW, 2003, 108-19.
3Hage,Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for hope in a shrinking society, 110-11
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Although clearly polemical, Hages argument is anticipated by empirical research
from the mid-1990s on Australian state-sponsored policies of multiculturalism
under the Hawke and Keating governments (1983-1996). Refusing to accept
Labors policies and programs of multiculturalism at face valueie. in terms of a
narrative of developmental progress in which enlightened values of inclusive
diversity finally triumph over policies of assimilation and racially selective
migrationHage sought to highlight the less benign motives behind the pick-up
of the term by a government committed to wide scale economic reform. Taking
his cue from the use of the term cosmopolitanism interchangeably with
multiculturalism in the 1988 federal government report, Immigration: a
Commitment to Australia, otherwise known as the Fitzgerald Inquiry4, and
drawing on his earlier critique of the settler-colonial inheritances of multicultural
policy as a continuing governmental discourse for managing non-Anglo-Celtic
communities, or zoology5, Hage coined the neologism cosmo-multiculturalism
to describe a policy moment in which Australians where inculcated within a
celebratory and consumer relation to signifiers of ethnic authenticity. Unlike the
earlier welfare policy moment of the 1970s,6 cosmo-multiculturalism under the
late Hawke and Keating Labor governments had little to do with the needs of an
ethnically diverse polity, and even less with the symbolic work of home building
4Ghassan Hage, Anglo-Celtics Today: Cosmo-multiculturalism and the phase of the fading phallus,
Communal/Plural, no. 4, 1996, 41-77, 63. Ghassan Hage, At home in the entrails of the west in Helen
Grace, Ghassan Hage, Leslie Johnson, Julie Langsworth and Michael SymondsHome/world: Space,
community and marginality in Sydneys west, Pluto Press, Annandale, NSW, 99-153, 150-51n33.
5Ghassan Hage, Republicanism, Multiculturalism, Zoology, Communal/Plural, no. 2, 1994, 113-37.
6Hage,Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for hope in a shrinking society, 58-60.
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in migrant communities, but rather centralised a middle-class tourist subject for
whom public displays of taste for ethnic difference evidence a form of
cosmopolitan capital, a subset of cultural capital.7 Drawing on the critique of
cultural taste developed by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu,8 Hage suggested that
the function of a cultivated taste for ethnic diversity resided in the cosmo-
multiculturalists public display of social distance, or distinction, from those who
lack such good taste, and that such class practices could be redeemed as
representing the national interest. Although his ethnographic work in various
suburbs of Sydney focused on the consumption of ethnic cuisine, this thesis was
not limited to food. It could include fashion, travel, music, filmin fact any activity
in which a consumer seeks an experience of authentic ethnic difference.
Considered loosely as a policy moment, cosmo-multiculturalism
represented a more radical embrace of cultural difference than the earlier welfare
policy moment, yet it put this embrace in the service of a new national self-image
and a new national economy. Hages account therefore dovetailed well with the
policy contexts of both the 1989 Garnaut Report, Australia and the Northeast
Asian Ascendancy,9 as well as the touting of international and domestic tourism
during the 1980s as a solution to what Australians were being taught was their
7Hage, Anglo-Celtics Today: Cosmo-multiculturalism and the phase of the fading phallus, 64.
8 Pierre Bourdieu,Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, translated by Richard Nice,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge & Massachusetts, 1984.
9Ross Garnaut,Australia and the Northeast Asian Ascendancy: Report to the Prime Minister and the
Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Commonwealth Government of Australia, Canberra, 1989.
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vulnerable national economy; a moment Graham Turner has described as the
improbable enclosure of tourism within a national commercial project.10
In retrospect it is clear Hages account provided a strong account of what
went wrong with the image of multiculturalism. If the yoking together of
multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism enabled relations between Anglo-Celtic
and non-Anglo-Celtic Australians that were seriously patronising, Hage
demonstrated how this move simultaneously provided the terms on which
multiculturalism might be popularly perceived as elitist. Of course, Hage wasnt
alone in drawing attention to this. Sociologist Nancy Viviani would write in 1996
that [t]he stress on cultural diversity at the expense of the concern with equality
[] helped fuel the backlash against multiculturalism.11 Hages account,
however, provided a history and theory of the public spaces in which such elitism
was performed. During the 1980s and 1990s there was no shortage of articulate
liberal critics of popular anti-multiculturalism in the Australian media who were
willing to testify how cultural diversity was good for the nation, and how culturally
backward opponents of multiculturalism were: yet few of these critics paused to
consider how their rhetoric merged multiculturalism with globalisation, the forms
of class power their own position signaled in the media, or how their own morally
exemplary performances helped fuel popular resentments against multicultural
10 Graeme Turner,Making it National: Nationalism and Popular Australian Culture, Allen & Unwin,
Sydney, 1994, 111.
11Nancy Viviani, The Indochinese in Australia 1975-1995: From Burnt Boats to Barbecues, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1996, 148.
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elites that culminated in a spectacular backlash, as Meaghan Morris has
suggested.12
If Hages thesis on cosmopolitan multiculturalism has become an efficient
means of accounting for the demise of bipartisan support for multiculturalism
during this period, then I want to suggest its utility for policy is less
straightforward. However, before considering the way in which Hages account
has been negotiated in an example of recent cultural policy, I want to focus in
detail on Hages ethnography on cosmopolitan visitors to the suburb of
Cabramatta.
13
This fieldwork was a key exhibit in the development of the cosmo-
multiculturalism thesis, one that sought to show how government policy was
thoroughly aligned with middle-class practices of social distinction. Although
Hages account of these visitors as seekers of cosmopolitan distinction is entirely
plausible, I suggest it is under-developed is so far as Hages research does not
demonstrate how such practices accumulate social advantages that are
unavailable to those who lack cosmopolitan capital, but focuses instead on the
point of exchange between cosmopolitan tourists and their hosts. This relation is
presented as being between consumers and feeders of cultural difference, a
situation in which the value of ethnic culture shifts from being a source of home-
building for migrant communities, to that of a commodity for non -migrant
Australians.14 Hages fieldwork is further problematic in so far as it does not
consider the well documented fact that local government in Cabramatta has
12Meaghan Morris, `Please explain? ignorance, poverty and the past,Inter-Asia Cultural Studies,1:2,
2000, 219-32.
13Hage, At home in the entrails of the west.
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drawn upon Indochinese cultural identity as a resource in numerous tourism-
orientated projects in cultural and urban planning, projects that have involved a
range of stakeholders in pursuit of an equally diverse number of goals. I suggest
Hages complete exclusion ofany reference to this history of policy development
implies not only a moral resistance to the notion that culture might form such a
resource, but an inability to appreciate the more mundane and routine objectives
of those government programs for which questions of an ethnically diverse polity
are at stake. In the face of this, Hages research on the pursuit of cosmopolitan
capital in Cabramatta appears not so much orientated by the goal of
demonstrating its role in the reproduction of social advantages by and for a
specific social class; rather, it appears to be orientated by the goal of
demonstrating a commodity relation in which culture is alienated from its morally
superior function of home-building. To this end, I argue, Hages, applied theory
of cosmopolitan capital is distinctly different to Bourdieus theory of cultural
capital.15
In search of the cosmo-multiculturalists
Cabramatta is a suburb with high levels of ethnic and linguistic diversity in the
Local Government Area of Fairfield in Sydneys south west. Cabramatta also has
a significant concentration of Indochinese Australian residents, community
organisations and businesses whose presence has been rendered publicly
14Hage, At home in the entrails of the west, 140.
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visible due to both regular moral panics in the media during the 1980s and 1990s
associated with drugs and Asian gangs, as well as vigorous urban tourism
initiatives since the 1980s which continue today with the promotional tag:
Discover Cabramatta: A Taste of Asia. Fairfield City Council invests a great deal
of effort in promoting the cultural diversity of the area, and boasts Cabramatta on
its website as the most multicultural suburb in Australia.16
In Hages discussion of his fieldwork Cabramatta functions as a mediating
point between the middle-class, consumerist and predominantly Anglo-Celtic
multiculturalism of inner city Sydney, and the multiculturalism of everyday
migrant home-making in Sydneys western and south-western suburbs.17 Playing
these two lived relations to cultural diversity off against each otherone
cosmopolitan, the other migrant; one centred on cultural consumption, the other
on cultural maintenanceHage used his research on Cabramattas Vietnamese
restaurants to show how inner-city cosmo-multiculturalists dont simply denigrate
the south-western suburbs as less multicultural (read: cosmopolitan) than they
are, despite the fact that more migrant Australians live there, but also, and even
more perversely, travel to the south-western suburbs to enjoy authentic ethnic
cuisine. In the case of Cabramatta, the interviews were with local restaurant
patrons, patrons who traveled to Cabramatta from Sydneys inner suburbs for its
15I should point out my comments are restricted to a reading of the notion of cosmopolitan capital and do
not attempt to cover Hages much broader concept of national capital as developed in White Nation:
Fantasies of White supremacy in a multicultural society, Pluto Press, Annandale NSW, 1998.
16Fairfield City Council,http://wwwfairfield.nsw.gov.au[Accessed 1/6/2008].
17Hage, At home in the entrails of the west.
http://wwwfairfield.nsw.gov.au/http://wwwfairfield.nsw.gov.au/http://wwwfairfield.nsw.gov.au/http://wwwfairfield.nsw.gov.au/ -
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perceived authentic Vietnamese cuisine, as well as the staff and owners of the
Vietnamese restaurants studied.
Hages account however is problematic for two reasons. The first is
empirical. The Cabramatta fieldwork was limited to interviews concerning the
behaviour and interactions of restaurant customers and their hosts and therefore
didnt consider the history of urban planning and municipal promotion in Fairfield,
nor the distinct local rationales for these projects. This leads to a serious error in
Hages account of the history of local tourism and the agency of local businesses
and community organisations in this process. Although Hage acknowledges the
tactics of Vietnamese restaurant owners in attracting their cosmopolitan patrons,
the development of Cabramatta as a tourist destination is represented as an
effect of the desireof tourist-consumers, rather than the managed result of town
planning. Hage argues Cabramatta is not cosmo-multicultural by design
Cabramatta, like any good Third World tourist spot outside of the touristic circuit,
was discovered by the adventurers of the centre playing the colonial explorer
game.18 However, apart from the claims made by the Cabramatta culinary
tourists he interviews, Hage puts forward no evidence of this. Furthermore, his
conclusion is in stark contrast to the history of Cabramatta tourism presented by
cultural geographer Kevin Dunn.19 Dunn notes that from the late 1980s domestic
18Hage, At home in the entrails of the west, 143.
19Kevin M. Dunn, The Vietnamese concentration in Cabramatta: site of avoidance and deprivation, or
island of adjustment and participation?,Australian Geographical Studies 31:2, 1993; 228-45. Kevin M.
Dunn, Rethinking ethnic concentration: the case of Cabramatta, Sydney, Urban Studies, 35:3, March
1998, 503-25. Kevin M. Dunn, Using cultural geography to engage contested constructions of ethnicity
and citizenship in Sydney, Social & Cultural Geography, 4:2, 2003, 153-65.
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tourism has been touted by a range of local agents as a way of combining a
positive image campaign with local economic development, as well as a form of
place-making that has significance for local migrant communities.20 Such place-
making projects have been founded on the hope that negative press associating
the area with crime and drugs21which Cabramatta locals, reportedly, regarded
as a significant contributor to the local drug trade through attracting heroin
users22will be replaced by tourists and shoppers.
In the mid-1980s local businesses and cultural associations formed the
Cabramatta Pai Lau Beautification Association which from 1986 onwards was
responsible for organising annual Lunar New Year festivities. This group
organised the construction of the Pai Lau gatewaythe centerpiece of Freedom
Plaza in Cabramattas central business districtas well as numerous stone
sculptures of animals from the Chinese zodiac. Freedom Plaza in the heart of
Cabramattas CBD incorporates multiple functions, including street-beautification,
community-based heritage, tourist attraction, and most recently, CCT
surveillance. Completed in 1989 and funded by numerous business and
community groups both locally and throughout New South Wales, including
Chinese, Vietnamese, Lao and Khmer community associations, and the
government of Taiwan, the heritage listed Pai Lau gateway was builtaccording
to Fairfields heritage audio touras a symbol of harmony and multiculturalism,
20Dunn, Rethinking ethnic concentration: the case of Cabramatta, Sydney.
21Peter Teo, Racism in the news: a critical discourse analysis of news reporting in two Australian news
papers,Discourse and Society, 11:1, 2000, 7-49.
22Christopher Kremmer, Generation V, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 April 2005.
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and, above all, as a monument to democracy and freedom.23 Bold letters spell
out the words liberty and democracy in Chinese, Vietnamese, Khmer, Lao and
English. The regional political significance of these words is deliberate. The tour
notes the gate was also designed to challenge popular perceptions that Chinese
and Indochinese refugees had come to Australia as economic refugees. In the
early 1990s Dunn interviewed many of the office bearers of the Pai Lau
association and notes they
revealed an awareness of the strategic nature of these icons.
The secretary of the Association commented that they were overt
attempts to compete with Chinatown in inner Sydney, and that these
were public relations and tourism-orientated initiatives.24
Such urban developments accompanied the Cabramatta Tourist Associations
promotion of Cabramatta during the late 1980s with pamphlets and bumper
stickers with titles such as Visit the new face of Cabramatta, and slogans such
as Cabramatta: where East meets West. 1990s tourism initiatives pursued or
supported by Fairfield City Council have included commissioned documentaries,
virtual tours on compact disc, and food tours. Dunn notes that [l]ike the
beautification works, these public relations initiatives have a ring of Orientalism
23'Tune in to Fairfield: a multicultural driving tour, produced by Fairfield City Council in partnership with
the Migration Heritage Centre and Premiers Department NSW. Audio tour notes available at
http://www.fairfieldcity.nsw.gov.au/default.asp?iDocID=6771&iNavCatID=213&iSubCatID=2258
[Accessed 5/10/2007]
24Dunn, Using cultural geography to engage contested constructions of ethnicity and citizenship in
Sydney, 160.
http://www.fairfieldcity.nsw.gov.au/default.asp?i%20DocID=6771&iNavCatID=213&iSubCatID=2258http://www.fairfieldcity.nsw.gov.au/default.asp?i%20DocID=6771&iNavCatID=213&iSubCatID=2258http://www.fairfieldcity.nsw.gov.au/default.asp?i%20DocID=6771&iNavCatID=213&iSubCatID=2258 -
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about them, constructing the suburb as the Exotic East.25 He also suggests that
however much economically motivated, these positive stereotypes were
strategic political devices in the representational battles faced by these
communities.26 Dunn also notes, however, that there were many agents and
agendas involved, and that the Asia-themed promotions of Cabramatta were
often pursued by Fairfield City Council beyond the initiatives of community
groups and associations.27
I do not draw attention to this history in order to claim such urban and
cultural planning projects have been successful in terms of their objectives, or
that the effects of such orientalist strategies are benign. However, I do suggest
they too constitute the field in which cosmopolitan practices are played-out, and
that their local policy rationales cannot be read-off from the broader cosmo-
multiculturalist thesis. In ignoring the role of tourism in urban planning, Hage
overlooks the specific context in which local tourism was touted as a solution to a
range of problems, and, therefore, the extra-economic uses to which culture
was being put. While these are not the immediate topic of Hages ethnography,
their complete exclusion from Hages account does suggest a substantial
resistance to the notion migrant culture might be linked to the commodity
relations of tourism. For his part, Dunns research sought to develop a case
against governmental migrant resettlement policies that pathologised ethnic
25Dunn, Using cultural geography to engage contested constructions of ethnicity and citizenship in
Sydney, 160.
26Dunn, Using cultural geography to engage contested constructions of ethnicity and citizenship in
Sydney, 160.
27Dunn, Rethinking ethnic concentration: the case of Cabramatta, Sydney, 13.
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concentrations, policies which Dunn shows had during the 1980s developed
migrant dispersion programs in order to assuage popular majority fears of
unassimilated ethnic ghettos. Dunns work sought to produce empirical evidence
that sites of ethnic concentration, such as Cabramatta, were beneficial to migrant
resettlement and by no means prevented migrant communities from broader
social participation, including, crucially, economic participation.28
That Hage cannot consider tourism affirmatively relates to a second and
far more serious problem, which concerns his use of the concept of cultural
capital. For unlike Pierre Bourdieus account, Hage does not leave room for
thinking cosmopolitan cultural capital affirmatively. For Hage, cosmopolitan
capital (which he also glosses as touristic capital29) is problematic in and of itself
as it sustains a market for ethnic culture. According to Bourdieus most
programmatic statement, embodied cultural capital at a basic level is an index of
a persons capacities that have been built-up by various forms of implicit and
explicit training, beginning with the family, extending through education and into
the domain of everyday consumption.30 Such capacities might reflect highly
institutionalised practicessuch as the ability to play a musical instrumentor
more subtle forms of sensibility, such as knowing what to talk about across a
wide range of social contexts. Cultural capital brings advantages to its holders as
it is the basis of further acquisition of cultural capital (for instance, through the
28Dunn, The Vietnamese concentration in Cabramatta: site of avoidance and deprivation, or island of
adjustment and participation?.
29Hage, At home in the entrails of the west, 101.
30 Pierre Bourdieu, The Forms of Capital, in John G.Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research
for the Sociology of Education, New York, Greenwood Press, 1986, 241-258.
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education system) and can also be converted into symbolic capital (recognition),
social capital (social contacts and networks) and economic capital (financial
capital). And it is because cultural capital is unequally distributed that it can cater
for games of distinction that assist in the reproduction of social class. To follow
Bourdieu, however, would be to maintain the possibility that cultural capital can
be, and in the words of Tony Bennett, withdrawn from the game of distinction,
through an intervention in its distribution.31 For Bourdieu this was best achieved
through state education. To give an example: that some Australians might use
their capacity to appreciate high cultural forms to produce social distance from
people from other social classes who do not have this capacity was not to be
countered by overturning the scales of cultural legitimacy upon which they were
erected (so that, for instance, arts funding bodies might regard Heavy Metal
music as equally worthy of funding as chamber music). Rather, for Bourdieu, this
situation was to be addressed by expanding public education so that everyone
might possess the means of appropriating those cultural fields, such as classical
music, that had achieved aesthetic autonomy and thereby could support the
cultivated practice of disinterested taste. Of course, Bourdieus solution raises its
own problems, not least concerning its assumptions concerning the universal
value of European aesthetic culture.32In any case, Hages use of cultural capital
31Tony Bennett, Cultural Capital and Inequality: Refining the Policy Calculus, Cultural Trends, 15:2/3,
2006, 239-44, 240.
32 My reading of Bourdieu here has been greatly assisted by Tony Bennetts recent essay that dispels the
myth that Bourdieu was a cultural relativist. See Tony Bennett, The historical universal: the role of
cultural value in the historical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, The British Journal of Sociology 56:1, 2005,
141-64.
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here is clearly different from Bourdieus. It does not attempt to clear a space in
which to consider how the class-specific practices of cosmopolitans are an index
of unequally distributed capacities that could be inculcated in the general
population, as a form of multicultural citizenship education in schools, for
example. Rather, Hage stakes out opposition to the idea that multicultural policy
might work with the kinds of market exchanges that permit the cosmopolitans
tourist itinerary in the first place. Furthermore, it is not that economic exchanges
are insufficient as a means of mediating the process by which the general
population experiences itself as a culturally diverse polity (which is a plausible
critique of those forms of neo-liberal ideology that aspire to delete any role for
government beyond economic management). Rather, Hage takes up the far less
negotiable position that economic exchanges fundamentally compromise cultural
diversity policy through sustaining relations between consumers and feeders of
cultural difference.33
Let me summarise the argument so far. I am not here contesting Hages
research that shows cosmopolitan visitors to Cabramatta make claims to social
distinction, nor that their imagined experience of discovering Cabramatta is
central to these claims. These research findings can both be upheld. I am
suggesting Hages research on cosmopolitan capital is insufficiently Bourdieusian
as it (1) does not demonstrate the domination effects of these claims to
distinction, which would require research on the forms of social advantage that
accrue to holders of cosmopolitan capital on the basis of these claims, and (2)
33Hage, At home in the entrails of the west, 140.
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cannot consider cosmopolitan capital neutrally as a capacitythat only becomes a
source of distinction due to its unequal distribution. For Hage, cosmopolitan
capital is not problematic because it delivers social advantages to its holders that
are unavailable to others due to its restricted circulation (which Hages research
does not seek to demonstrate); rather, cosmopolitan capital is problematic
because it reproduces a market relation between cosmopolitan consumers and
ethnic feeders (which Hages research does demonstrate), a relation in which
culture becomes a commodity at the expense of its more morally acceptable
function of home-building.
34
Considered as a form of tourism critique,Hages account hence becomes
an easy target for a classic study in tourism studies, namely Dean MacCannells
The Tourist: a new theory of the leisure class.35 For MacCannell, the modern
tourist is a deeply ambivalent figure. While their attempt to experience authentic
34I must thank an anonymous reader of an earlier version of this paper for both an extended critical
response to my discussion of Cabramatta tourism and a spirited defence of Hages research there. These
have encouraged me to clarify the limits of my argument and more fully acknowledge those findings of
Hages research that are outside its scope. However, this reader emphasised a central objection that I cannot
accept; namely, that I rely on secondary sources and report no ethnographic findings of my own. Of course,
it is beyond dispute that fieldwork is crucial to the advance of research on cultural diversity and cultural
capital. However, as a criterion by which to assess the worthiness of contributions to debates in this area,
this criticism would imply methodological discussions have no validity of their own and/or can only be
broached when the speaker has cultivated the authority that comes with fieldwork. This not only diminishes
the possibility research might be accumulative and divided between specialised functions, but appears to
attribute a special status to ethnography as of higher cognitive value than those more bureau-based (dare I
say bureaucratic) modes of intellectual work, such as paying close attention to the details of published
reports and applied methodology, as well as raising questions of how research findings are coordinated
with the action of government agencies.
35Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: a new theory of the Leisure Class, Schocken Books, New York, 1989,
[1976].
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difference places them at the vanguard of many of the negative effects of
Modernity, the motivation for this quest is not an appetite for social distinction,
but rather the quintessentially Modern need to recuperate the disorientating and
alienating experience of limitless social differentiation for a sense of the world as
fundamentally explicable. In this the tourists search for knowledge both
prefigures the social sciences, including anthropology, as well as holds out the
potential that the practices of tourism can be redeployed as community
planning. It is for this reason MacCannell claims [t]he modern critique of tourists
[ie. anti-tourism] is not an analytic reflection on the problem of tourismit is part
of the problem.36 Indeed, the only way of interrupting the touristic desire for
authenticity is to stop regarding tourism as an inauthentic relation that needs to
be transcended. MacCannells argument here would focus on how Hages
technique of contrasting the tourists experience of commoditised cultural
difference with the domestic scene of migrant homemaking is itself anticipated by
the very same desire for authenticity, and the very same desire to escape the
scene of social planning, that motivates the cosmopolitans he studies.
Accordingly, one can hear a nascent form of Hages critique in the statements of
one Cabramatta restaurant customer he quotes. A professional from inner
Sydney who was interviewed for the research on why he travelled to Cabramatta
for its restaurants, states;
I would like to see perhaps a lot less meat in traditionally non-meat
cultures such as Indian and Japanese, so that instead of presenting
36MacCannell, The Tourist: a new theory of the Leisure Class, 10.
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us with Australianised food they actually present the real food, and Id
like to see it divorced from the concept of multiculturalism a little more
and presented as a community activity by ethnic communities feeding
themselves rather than as something that Australians can cash in on.
Exploited labour as making food for us.37
Here we can see the cosmo-multiculturalist in all their glory; freely providing the
anthropologist with their wish-list of authentic ethnic cuisine. This statement is
clearly strong evidence in support of Hages account. Regarding the second half
of the quotation however, we also have to consider the possibility that this
interviewee would entirely agree with Hages thesis on cosmo-multiculturalism
and in fact shares the value Hage places on those forms of migrant home-
making that are not orientated towards the Other in a commercial exchange
(exploited labour) or associated with a government policy (multiculturalism).
Indeed, Im not sure its possible here to separate Hages moral critique from that
of the interviewed subject, except for the fact that the interviewee is speaking in
the context of being asked to reflect on their tastes in restaurant cuisine, and
Hage, the anthropologist-critic, is not.
Cosmopolitanism and cultural policy
Of course, there is nothing wrong about opposing the use of culture as an
economic resource on grounds of moral or political principle. However, the
practical limitation of this position is that it cannot appreciate the mixed agendas
37Hage, At home in the entrails of the west, 140. Emphasis added.
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and domains of local government, such as urban and cultural planning, which
routinely factor in the priorities of local economies and are fairly impervious to
reflex condemnations of this. Opposition to the idea culture might be viewed as
a resource not only prevents critics from attending to the details of governmental
reform or identifying points where engagement is possible, but also detracts
attention from the varied agendas of non-government agents who make use of
this terrain. Given this, it would appear to restrict discussion to a mode of political
critique whose main rhetorical effect would be moral denunciation.
A neat conclusion here would be to suggest, following Ian Hunter, that the
practical site of application for Hages critique would be the classroom, where the
idea and ideal of culture as a whole way of life works as a pedagogic tool
through which students might problematise their relations to cultural diversity as
a form of ethical training.38 Considered thus, the instrumental value of Hages
critique of cosmo-multiculturalism would be pedagogic rather than cognitive in so
far as it enables the moral value of different uses of culture to be played-off
against one another.39 However a recent attempt to operationalise Hages
38Ian Hunter, Culture and Government: the emergence of literary education, Macmillan, London, 1988.
39It is hard to avoid being persuaded by Hunters historical account of the exemplary role of cultural
critique even if the sarcasm that often accompanied this argument detracted from Hunters claim to
appreciate those mundane and routine aspects of the teaching apparatus that are overlooked by overly
profound approaches. John Frow has noted the discrepancy between Hunters in principle assumption of
the validity of critique as a pedagogically orientated mode of ethical self-formation and his tendency to
speak of it as narcissistic, dilettantish and therefore trivial. See his Rationalization and the Public
Sphere,Meanjin, 51:3, 1992, 505-16, 513. The significance of multiculturalism for curriculum
development at all levels of the education system can hardly be overstated and constitutes a highly
dispersed field of policy development with its own distinctive and enduring rationales. The dissemination
of Hages work in this field is clearly outside the scope ofthis article.
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critique in a policy context makes such a conclusion unsustainable. In 2002
Australias Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) published Living Diversity:
Australias Multicultural Future40, the report of a questionnaire that surveyed a
national sample group, five non-English speaking background groups (Filipino,
Greek, Somalis, Vietnamese and Lebanese) and an Aboriginal sample group.41
SBSs charter requires the public broadcaster to reflect the cultural and linguistic
diversity of Australia and the research was commissioned by the SBS Board to
address several questions relating to general attitudes towards cultural diversity,
diversity in everyday life (such as interacting with people from diverse
backgrounds), and media consumption, with a focus on generational changes
amongst non-English speaking background migrant groups and long time
Australians. Long time Australians were a majority subgroup of the national
sample defined as fourth-generation (or more) Australians. This group were
predominantly Anglo-Celtic, but not exclusively so.
In his contribution to the report, People Mixing: Everyday Diversity in
Work and Play, Greg Noble introduces the term everyday cosmopolitanism to
signal a positive difference from both the elite cosmopolitanism Hage had
proposed on one side, and cultural insularity on the other. Everyday
cosmopolitanism, which is glossed as an openness to cultural diversity, a
40Ien Ang, Jeffrey E. Brand, Greg Noble and Derek Wilding,Living Diversity: Australias Multicultural
Future, Special Broadcasting Service Corporation (SBS), Artarmon, NSW, 2002.
41The National sample group (1437 respondents) included both long time Australians and 1
stgeneration
migrant Australians. The other sample group sizes were as follows; 406 Filipinos: 401 Greeks: 400
Lebanese: 401 Somalis: 400 Vietnamese: and 56 Aboriginal people. All respondents were above the age of
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practical relation to the plurality of cultures, a willingness to engage with others42
is to be encouraged: indeed, a key finding of the chapter is that Australians from
all backgrounds experience everyday cosmopolitanism and that this helps
explain the generally positive views towards Australias multiculturalism and
cultural diversity which this Report describes.43 However, the chapter does cite
Hages cosmopolitan multiculturalism, glossed (after Hage) as a multiculturalism
without migrants, as a plausible explanation for those long time Australians the
report identifies as enjoying culturally diverse food, yet having relatively little
direct intercultural contact.
44
Here, the fact that culinary cosmopolitanism is
very much a mainstream practice, (with 72% of the national sample saying they
enjoy eating food from other countries45) becomes a site of potential concern.
While long-time Australians are more likely to enjoy the cultural variety
of foods in Australia, this is evidence for the multiculturalism without
migrants Hage (1997) describes: that is, people who consume exotic
differences but have relatively little direct intercultural contact.46
However, there are three strong reasons why this conclusion is
contestable in relation to the data that is presented. First, the report notes it is
statistically logical for ethnic minorities to experience greater intercultural
16 at the time of the survey. For more information on the sample groups see Ang et al,Living Diversity:
Australias Multicultural Future, 67-74.
42Ang et al,Living Diversity: Australias Multicultural Future, 34.
43Ang et al,Living Diversity: Australias Multicultural Future, 6.
44 Ang et al,Living Diversity: Australias Multicultural Future, 37.
45Ang et al,Living Diversity: Australias Multicultural Future, 40.
46Ang et al,Living Diversity: Australias Multicultural Future, 37. The reference is to Hage, At home in
the entrails of the west.
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supermarkets, fast-food franchises and convenience stores no less than
restaurants) far exceeds, for long time Australians, the opportunity to socially
interact with people from different cultural backgrounds.
This situation is hardly evidence of the multiculturalism without migrants
Hage diagnoses, if by this we mean the pursuit of cosmopolitan distinction. This
is further supported by the fact that the more problematic sub-population of long
time Australians the report identifies consists of those who lackcosmopolitanism
and to whom SBS should target their services; namely older groups and those
with lower levels of education.
50
Although I think it is correct to be skeptical that Hages argument holds
any explanatory import here, as the report suggests, what it clearly does do is act
as a critical signpost for policy discussion. It flags a possible relation to
government subsidised culture that the agent behind the report (SBS) might
monitor in future. Given that a national survey undertaken in the mid-1990s
demonstrated that a taste for watching Australias two public television
broadcasters correlated positively with both higher incomes and occupations
requiring tertiary qualifications, it makes sense for this policy document to
signpost the nexus of class and cosmopolitanism as something to be concerned
about.51However, the signpost works because it is detached from Hages moral
49Ang et al,Living Diversity: Australias Multicultural Future 31. This measure is also referred to in the
text as enjoying food from other countries. (p. 30).
50 Ang et al,Living Diversity: Australias Multicultural Future, 38.
51Tony Bennett, Michael Emmison and John Frow, Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 234-35.
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position. As we might expect, the proposed policy solution to the disjunction
between enjoying foods from different cultures and low level of intercultural
contact in the long time Australian population is that SBS should consider
focusing its efforts on older and less well educated long time Australians. Just
as the report introduces the notion of everyday cosmopolitanism as a way to
reconceive the field of practices around cultural diversity as non-elitist, it then
identifies the group in which cosmopolitan capital needs to be built-up.
Whatever we might think about cosmopolitanism as a lived ethical relation,
acknowledging it may also be economically and politically productive for
particular migrant groups (as in the case of cultural tourism) or a resource
capable of building up nationally valued ethical capacities in citizens (as in the
case of public broadcasting policy) allows us to take it seriously as a means of
distributing hope, as Hage calls for. This isnt to eclipse a commitment to equity-
orientated government programs that address the needs of migrant communities,
nor to argue against a principled appeal for the maintenance of such programs.
And it certainly isnt to suggest that the pursuit of cosmopolitan capital by certain
groups who may thereby secure class-based advantages is not a cause for
potential concern and further research. It is simply to say a commitment to
multiculturalism (and its critique) is not well served by refusing to consider
culture as a resource that is managed for a range of purposes and effects.