Cultural Pluralism, Identity, and Globalization

Download or read book Cultural Pluralism, Identity, and Globalization written by Cândido Mendes and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To be part of a culture that provides us with an identity, making us different, giving us specific values, and at the same time to be actively integrated into an increasingly globalized social context, proposing democratic projects with a universalistic scope, facing the paradoxical risks of ethnocentrism: this is one of the most serious challenges that the last decades of the century have held in store for us. That endeavour, of course, is linked with a full exploration of the democratic idea, and a continuous search for the challenge--and the surprise--of humanism as our ever unfinished quest. Such a concern is in the core of the crisis of modernity, aware of the pittfalls of enlighted rationalism and its authoritarian arrogance. And this challenge is made all the more complex when we see the process of globalization as a muldimensional rather than a merely economic phenomenon, and acknowledge that its effects are, on the sociocultural level, not necessarily homogenizing, but often differentiating. The texts assembled in this book discuss this challenge, in its full complexity, with all the dilemmas, questions, paradoxes, and mediations it involves--back cover.