what is cultural ties essay

Cultural Identity Essay

27 August, 2020

12 minutes read

Author:  Elizabeth Brown

No matter where you study, composing essays of any type and complexity is a critical component in any studying program. Most likely, you have already been assigned the task to write a cultural identity essay, which is an essay that has to do a lot with your personality and cultural background. In essence, writing a cultural identity essay is fundamental for providing the reader with an understanding of who you are and which outlook you have. This may include the topics of religion, traditions, ethnicity, race, and so on. So, what shall you do to compose a winning cultural identity essay?

Cultural Identity Paper: Definitions, Goals & Topics 

Before starting off with a cultural identity essay, it is fundamental to uncover what is particular about this type of paper. First and foremost, it will be rather logical to begin with giving a general and straightforward definition of a cultural identity essay. In essence, cultural identity essay implies outlining the role of the culture in defining your outlook, shaping your personality, points of view regarding a multitude of matters, and forming your qualities and beliefs. Given a simpler definition, a cultural identity essay requires you to write about how culture has influenced your personality and yourself in general. So in this kind of essay you as a narrator need to give an understanding of who you are, which strengths you have, and what your solid life position is.

Yet, the goal of a cultural identity essay is not strictly limited to describing who you are and merely outlining your biography. Instead, this type of essay pursues specific objectives, achieving which is a perfect indicator of how high-quality your essay is. Initially, the primary goal implies outlining your cultural focus and why it makes you peculiar. For instance, if you are a french adolescent living in Canada, you may describe what is so special about it: traditions of the community, beliefs, opinions, approaches. Basically, you may talk about the principles of the society as well as its beliefs that made you become the person you are today.

So far, cultural identity is a rather broad topic, so you will likely have a multitude of fascinating ideas for your paper. For instance, some of the most attention-grabbing topics for a personal cultural identity essay are:

• Memorable traditions of your community
• A cultural event that has influenced your personality 
• Influential people in your community
• Locations and places that tell a lot about your culture and identity

Cultural Identity Essay Structure

As you might have already guessed, composing an essay on cultural identity might turn out to be fascinating but somewhat challenging. Even though the spectrum of topics is rather broad, the question of how to create the most appropriate and appealing structure remains open.

Like any other kind of an academic essay, a cultural identity essay must compose of three parts: introduction, body, and concluding remarks. Let’s take a more detailed look at each of the components:

Introduction 

Starting to write an essay is most likely one of the most time-consuming and mind-challenging procedures. Therefore, you can postpone writing your introduction and approach it right after you finish body paragraphs. Nevertheless, you should think of a suitable topic as well as come up with an explicit thesis. At the beginning of the introduction section, give some hints regarding the matter you are going to discuss. You have to mention your thesis statement after you have briefly guided the reader through the topic. You can also think of indicating some vital information about yourself, which is, of course, relevant to the topic you selected.

Your main body should reveal your ideas and arguments. Most likely, it will consist of 3-5 paragraphs that are more or less equal in size. What you have to keep in mind to compose a sound ‘my cultural identity essay’ is the argumentation. In particular, always remember to reveal an argument and back it up with evidence in each body paragraph. And, of course, try to stick to the topic and make sure that you answer the overall question that you stated in your topic. Besides, always keep your thesis statement in mind: make sure that none of its components is left without your attention and argumentation.

Conclusion 

Finally, after you are all finished with body paragraphs and introduction, briefly summarize all the points in your final remarks section. Paraphrase what you have already revealed in the main body, and make sure you logically lead the reader to the overall argument. Indicate your cultural identity once again and draw a bottom line regarding how your culture has influenced your personality.

Best Tips For Writing Cultural Identity Essay

Writing a ‘cultural identity essay about myself’ might be somewhat challenging at first. However, you will no longer struggle if you take a couple of plain tips into consideration. Following the tips below will give you some sound and reasonable cultural identity essay ideas as well as make the writing process much more pleasant:

• Start off by creating an outline. The reason why most students struggle with creating a cultural identity essay lies behind a weak structure. The best way to organize your ideas and let them flow logically is to come up with a helpful outline. Having a reference to build on is incredibly useful, and it allows your essay to look polished.
• Remember to write about yourself. The task of a cultural identity essay implies not focusing on your culture per se, but to talk about how it shaped your personality. So, switch your focus to describing who you are and what your attitudes and positions are. 
• Think of the most fundamental cultural aspects. Needless to say, you first need to come up with a couple of ideas to be based upon in your paper. So, brainstorm all the possible ideas and try to decide which of them deserve the most attention. In essence, try to determine which of the aspects affected your personality the most.
• Edit and proofread before submitting your paper. Of course, the content and the coherence of your essay’s structure play a crucial role. But the grammatical correctness matters a lot too. Even if you are a native speaker, you may still make accidental errors in the text. To avoid the situation when unintentional mistakes spoil the impression from your essay, always double check your cultural identity essay. 

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Article contents

Cultural diplomacy.

• David Clarke David Clarke School of Modern Languages, Cardiff University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.543
• Published online: 19 November 2020

Cultural diplomacy designates a policy field, in which states seek to mobilize their cultural resources to achieve foreign policy goals. The nature of those goals, and of the cultural resources mobilized to achieve them, has been subject to historical change, and a range of terminology has been used to designate this kind of policymaking in different national and historical contexts. Nevertheless, the term cultural diplomacy is a viable one for designating this particular area of foreign policy, which is often understood as one component of a state’s broader public diplomacy or, following Joseph Nye’s terminology, its “soft power.”

Cultural display and exchange have arguably always played a role in the relations between peoples. With the emergence of the modern state system in the early modern period, such display and exchange became an expression of formal diplomatic relations between courts, yet it is only in the 19th century that we see the emergence of cultural diplomacy in the sense it is understood today: It is no longer a matter of communication between rulers, but rather an expression of national identity directed at an international public. Throughout the 19th century, cultural diplomacy was closely associated with the rivalry of the Great Powers, particularly in the colonial context. However, following the end of the First World War, cultural diplomacy increasingly came to be understood as a means to pursue ideological competition, a trend that became central to the cultural diplomacy of the Cold War. Nevertheless, scholarship’s focus on the cultural dimensions of the confrontation between the two Cold War superpowers has drawn attention away from other varieties of cultural diplomacy in the “Third World” or “Global South,” which sought to establish forms of solidarity between postcolonial nations.

The post–Cold War world has been characterized by a shift in the rhetoric surrounding cultural diplomacy, which now frequently contains an economic dimension, as states compete for markets, investments, and attention in the context of neoliberal globalization. Nevertheless, we also see a pluralization of strategies of cultural diplomacy, in which a range of actors tailor their approach to cultural foreign policy according to their own perceived position in a multipolar world. Nevertheless, despite the continued popularity of cultural diplomacy in policymaking circles and the significant attention it has received from researchers in the 21st century, the assessment of the impact of cultural diplomacy remains a challenge.

• cultural diplomacy
• public diplomacy
• cultural policy

Introduction: Defining Cultural Diplomacy

In their important 2015 article, Ien Ang, Yudhishthir Raj Isar, and Phillip Mar identify a number of key issues relating to the study and analysis of cultural diplomacy. As the authors point out, one of the chief challenges in addressing this topic is one of definition. While cultural diplomacy has enjoyed a resurgence in academic and policymaker interest in the 2000s, “there is often a distinct lack of clarity in the way the notion is used, on exactly what its practice involves, on why it is important, or on how it works” (Ang, Isar, & Mar, 2015 , p. 365). One widely cited definition of the term betrays some of this uncertainty:

The concept of “cultural diplomacy,” refers to the exchange of ideas, information, art, and other aspects of culture among nations and their peoples in order to foster mutual understanding. But “cultural diplomacy” can also be more of a one-way street than a two-way exchange, as when one nation concentrates its efforts on promoting the national language, explaining its policies and point of view, or “telling its story” to the rest of the world. (Cummings, 2009 , p. 1)

This characterization of cultural diplomacy combines notions of an open-ended intercultural dialogue with an apparently more interest-driven communication of national policy to others. Patricia Goff’s definition of cultural diplomacy, in contrast, implies a greater distance from state policy, framing cultural diplomacy as a means to mitigate negative perceptions created by higher-level politics. For Goff ( 2013 , p. 3), “[c]ultural diplomacy is first and foremost about bridging differences and facilitating mutual understanding”: It is able to “tell another story about a country” that “may be a story that differs from what official policy would imply.” As Simon Mark ( 2010 , p. 64) points out, however, cultural diplomacy has also been associated with more instrumental approaches, in which the deployment of cultural means (however defined) is subordinated to the pursuit of other policy goals.

This absence of clarity about the scope and purpose of cultural diplomacy is further complicated by the lack of consensus in the literature and among practitioners about the constitutive “cultural” elements of such policy: Apart from the arts in the narrow sense, the “cultural” in cultural diplomacy has been understood to include radio and television, exchange programs, and language education. Perhaps for this reason, some researchers feel on safer terrain subdividing the unwieldy sphere of culture into more specific areas of policy, such as “arts diplomacy” (Grincheva, 2010 ), “language diplomacy” (Chaubet, 2004 ), or “exchange diplomacy” (Bettie, 2019 ), for example. A very wide definition of the cultural element in cultural diplomacy also blurs the boundary between this kind of activity and public diplomacy, a term used to describe all those means by which a state can seek to address and influence foreign populations. Here, Nicolas Cull’s assertion that cultural diplomacy is simply one facet of the broader field of public diplomacy, alongside elements such as exchange diplomacy and broadcasting, has been influential (Cull, 2008a , 2008b , pp. 487–493).

Without a hard-and-fast definition of cultural diplomacy, some boosters of the term and its associated practices are led to dismiss the necessity for clarity, while also insisting on cultural diplomacy’s long pedigree. So, for example, former U.S. ambassador Cynthia P. Schneider ( 2006 ) has described cultural diplomacy as “hard to define, but you’d know it if you saw it” while pointing to Thomas Jefferson’s enthusiasm for the value of arts to diplomacy. Published the following year, a report by UK think tank Demos acknowledged that the term is “not easily defined,” yet cited historical precedents as early as “the reciprocal gifts of arts and manufactures between the Doge of Venice and Kublai Khan” (Bound, Briggs, Holden, & Jones, 2007 , pp. 15–16). In a similar vein, Michael Krenn ( 2017 , p. 2) has argued that attempts to “patrol the intellectual border crossing between what is and what is not cultural diplomacy” get in the way of the investigation of a rich field which, in the case of the United States, he sees as reaching back to the late 18th century .

There are two complicating factors that appear to make a generally accepted definition of cultural diplomacy difficult. Firstly, despite the claims by some writers for the transhistorical and transcultural applicability of the term, it is far from universally used. In the Western world, the expression “cultural diplomacy” was established in U.S. policy by the late 1950s (e.g., International Educational Exchange Service, 1959 ), albeit with reference exclusively to exchange programs and educational programs. However, even in the American context some still preferred alternative forms of words, such as “cultural policy abroad” (Frankel, 1965 ). Elsewhere, Japan has used the term, although with shifting meanings, since the 1930s (Huttunen, 2017 ). By the 1970s, cultural diplomacy was a label that had gained sufficient recognition in international organizations to be the subject of an extensive report published by the Council for Cultural Cooperation within the Council of Europe (Haigh, 1974 ).

Nevertheless, it is also clear that many states have continued to use different language to describe activities that, in other national contexts, would be placed under the umbrella of cultural diplomacy: The term “exterior cultural action” (Raymond, 2000 ) remains in use in France, which has historically also adopted the notion of “rayonnement culturelle” (cultural projection); Germany, by contrast, still prefers the expression “auswärtige Kulturpolitik” (cultural foreign policy). Equally, the expression “international cultural relations” is widely used elsewhere (Wyszomirski, Burgess, & Peila, 2003 , p. 9), despite the fact that some commentators prefer to make a distinction between cultural diplomacy as a matter of state policy, on the one hand, and international cultural relations as the more organic development of culture interactions between nations, on the other (Arndt, 2005 , p. xviii; Mitchell, 1986 ). In short, as Mariano Martín Zamorano observes, “the definition of cultural diplomacy is almost as varied as the number of countries that claim to use it” (Zamorano, 2016 , p. 169).

The second difficulty of definition arises from the nature of the portmanteau term “cultural diplomacy” itself. Culture is already a highly complex notion, which has come to encompass a wide range of phenomena, from the high arts to the everyday habits and values of particular groups in human society (Eagleton, 2000 ). Yet there is neither consensus about the nature and purpose of diplomacy, nor about its legitimate actors (Murray, 2008 , p. 24), even assuming that cultural diplomacy can be understood as a direct contribution to the diplomatic enterprise and that the term “diplomacy” is not being used in some more metaphorical sense.

On closer examination, we can also see that understandings of both culture and diplomacy have been subject to significant change over time, which has reflected the conditions of the societies in which these concepts have been used. Just as culture in contemporary society is no longer likely to be understood in relation to a narrow definition of high art, so diplomacy is no longer an exclusive dialogue between a “club” of elite actors (Cooper, Heine, & Thakur, 2013 , p. 23). In this sense, to attempt to define the term cultural diplomacy is to seek to understand the relationship between two moving targets.

Despite these challenges, it is nevertheless possible to observe empirically that many contemporary states have developed a raft of policy instruments and institutions that, while not always identical in every aspect, do share a family resemblance, to use Wittgenstein’s term ( 1998 , sec. 65). Educational exchanges, dissemination and promotion of cultural products abroad, exhibitions, language education, book translation, and a range of other mechanisms deemed by their originators to be broadly cultural are administered by recognizable (although, again, by no means identical) configurations of departments within foreign ministries, embassy personnel such as cultural attachés, cultural and language-teaching institutes, state-funded cultural institutions, and nongovernmental cultural organizations in receipt of state funding. States refer to these activities either as “cultural diplomacy” or by some recognizably cognate term (Wyszomirski et al., 2003 ). This activity is directed primarily at foreign as opposed to domestic national audiences.

While the policy priorities that motivate such behavior may vary in detail, these commonalities point to the existence of a field of policymaking and practice that we can usefully identify as that of cultural diplomacy. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, Geir Vestheim ( 2012 ) has sought to understand the field of cultural policy as a space in which a range of actors enter into a negotiation over the definition of key values. In the case of the field of cultural policy in its domestic context, the subject of negotiation is both the definition of what constitutes arts and culture, and also the value of arts and culture to policy as they play a role in national society. If we apply this model to the field of cultural diplomacy, however, we see that what is at stake is again the definition of culture and its value to policy, but in this case in the context of international relations rather than domestic politics.

From this point of view, the lack of a clear definition of cultural diplomacy that is identified by Ang, Isar, and Mar is in fact symptomatic of the ongoing negotiation of the policy field, to which the practitioners, policymakers, diplomats, think tanks, and academics cited above all contribute. Equally, we can observe historical continuity in the existence of this policy field over time, even if the terminology of cultural diplomacy has not been used in every historical context. The struggle to define a national culture suitable for serving foreign policy goals gives coherence to the field, even if the understanding of what that national culture consists of and how it might produce effects in terms of international relations has changed.

Such an understanding of cultural diplomacy as a policy field is compatible with a discursive approach to public policy in general and to cultural policy in particular. Here discourse is understood as shaping how actors think about and name a problem (Considine, 2005 , p. 82). In other words, where actors of various kinds intervene in the field of cultural diplomacy, their discourse both constructs problems of culture in international relations in particular ways and frames solutions to these problems according to their own interests and ideological commitments. In this respect, the field of cultural diplomacy has similar characteristics to the field of domestic cultural policy. As Nicolás Barbieri suggests ( 2012 , p. 16), “[p]olicy discourses on culture are the representations of those involved in formulating policies in terms of what they understand, adopt and promote as ‘culture.’” These discourses, he argues, “are used as guides to action by defining the concepts and norms to be applied, identifying the problems to be solved, developing the policy instruments to be used and framing the national policy discussion within a given policy arena.” As Barbieri suggests here, while different actors may frame problems and solutions differently within the field, they nevertheless operate with certain shared assumptions about the overall purpose and scope of the policy area. For example, Jens Adam ( 2018 , p. 47) makes the case that actors in the field of cultural foreign policy are bound together by their framing of culture as an identity-giving national asset that can be mobilized to specific ends in an international context populated by other national cultural entities; this has remained the case even as new conceptualizations of the nature of the cultural have emerged.

Nevertheless, we can also observe that the discourse around the purpose and likely success of cultural policy in the international context is far from static and is even subject to trends sparked by the dissemination of novel paradigms, such as the recent popularity of the notion of “soft power,” as long as there are actors in the field whose interests are served by the adoption of such discourse. Furthermore, as the policy field in one national context struggles to articulate a viable response to changing global conditions, policy mimesis, in which apparently successful models are adopted from other states, is likely (Ahearne, 2018 , p. 706).

A further advantage of this approach is that it resolves another of the definitional conundrums highlighted by commentators on cultural diplomacy, namely the question of whether the diplomacy element of cultural diplomacy is defined by the involvement of the state, or whether it can be carried out without reference to state policy, for example by civil society organizations or independent cultural institutions. According to Jessica Gienow-Hecht and Mark Donfried ( 2010 , p. 14), for instance, the involvement of such actors raises the question of whether “cultural diplomacy [is] really diplomacy at all.”

In diplomatic studies it is increasingly recognized that, in the contemporary context, nonstate actors tend to “complicate and diversify” diplomacy, even as the state remains the “key actor” (Murray, Sharp, Wiseman, Criekemans, & Melissen, 2011 , p. 712). Equally, if we see cultural diplomacy through the lens of cultural policy, following Vestheim’s model of the field, we can see that, although the state has a central role in terms of its power to make policy and its ability to deploy resources, other actors seek to influence the definition of culture and its value to the nation state within the policy field. Over time, such actors may be co-opted to provide services to the state in the delivery of policy or become beneficiaries of state funding for some of their activities.

In light of the above, one of the key tasks of the study of cultural diplomacy is to understand how and why this policy field has developed over time, in terms of the discourse that frames and makes sense of its practices, and in terms of the actors involved in the field and their interrelationship. Rather than attempt to see cultural diplomacy as a stable phenomenon that reaches into the mists of historical time, it should be a central concern of the study of cultural diplomacy to show how the discursive construction of the policy field has been subject to shifts in understanding, both of the nature of culture and its value to policy, and of how such shifts have been negotiated by a range of actors. This kind of work requires detailed historical investigation of specific national contexts and (increasingly) international contexts in which, for example, organizations like the European Union (EU) seek to carve out a cultural diplomacy policy (Carta & Higgott, 2020 ). While such analysis is beyond the scope of this contribution, the following historical overview draws on existing research to point to broad trends in cultural diplomacy that have developed since the late 19th century , when we can identify the emergence of this policy field. Research carried out thus far, particularly by historians of international relations and cultural policy specialists, shows how changes in dominant conceptions of culture and developing understandings of the nature of the international system have shaped discourses about the role of culture in international relations.

The Emergence of Cultural Diplomacy as a Policy Field

Although the emergence of cultural diplomacy as a policy field can be located in the later part of the 19th century , it is worth considering earlier intersections between diplomacy and culture in order to more clearly distinguish the novelty of cultural diplomacy as a practice and a policy field. Commentators on cultural diplomacy are surely right to point out that the exchange of cultural artifacts as gifts between sovereigns or the display of cultural achievements in order to demonstrate power, wealth, and sophistication have a much longer history (e.g. Arndt, 2005 , pp. 1–24). However, if we turn to the emergence of the modern state system in the early modern period, which saw the development of formalized and permanent diplomatic representation between states, we can observe a number of ways in which culture played a role in the management of international relations.

In terms of the direct contact between ambassadors and foreign rulers, for example, Ellen Welch ( 2017 , pp. 12–13) has shown how spectacular theatrical performances at European courts, in which diplomats were audience members and sometimes participants, both served the function of displaying the wealth and power of the host and gave allegorical expression to understandings of international relations. On a more practical level, ambassadors and other envoys played a significant role as cultural intermediaries sourcing cultural artifacts such as books and paintings to be sent back home (Levin, 2018 , pp. 183–199; Um & Clark, 2016 , p. 8). Gaining access to the work of foreign artists had significant power implications, given that, by the beginning of the 17th century , the authority of European princes relied in part on their achieving the status of “promoters of cultural progress” able to demonstrate connoisseurship (Auwers, 2013 , p. 426). By the age of the Enlightenment, however, it was ambassadors themselves who could enhance their prestige as “learned and cultured gentlemen of leisure” by acting as patrons to the learning and the arts (Mori, 2013 , p. 183). While the professionalization of the diplomatic services in the 19th century saw a decline in such behavior, it also put an end to the appointment of “men of letters” acting as diplomats on the grounds of their familiarity with the shared intellectual culture of European courts (Lane, 2014 , p. 9).

What distinguishes these cultural dimensions to state diplomacy from the modern field of cultural diplomacy as it emerges in the 19th century , however, is their restriction to the interactions between political elites, and in particular between the courts of sovereigns. Culture was a means to represent and shape relationships, as well as serving to display a ruler’s prestige and claim authority, but the audience for such display was made up of other sovereigns and their courts. Welch ( 2017 , p. 331) notes, however, that by the time of the Congress of Vienna in 1815 , cultural representation of international relations had begun to shift into the emerging public sphere, for example into the public theaters and into publications aimed at a general readership.

This shift in culture’s role from being a mediator of elite relations to more public forms of reflection on international affairs had been amplified by the late 19th century by what Tobias Werron ( 2014 , p. 63) has identified as a “long-term trend toward public forms of competition” in international society, in which national communities and their political elites became increasingly conscious of an imagined global audience, in whose eyes prestige was judged against that of competitors. As Werron ( 2014 , p. 67) argues, advancing communications technology created “a global media system . . . that dramatically increased the possibilities of mutual observation between states and other agents,” so that nations became more acutely aware of how they appeared (or how they imagined they appeared) in the eyes of others. Culture in this context was no longer merely a means by which princes and their emissaries could represent their relationships and enhance their prestige in the context of courtly diplomacy, but was rather a mirror in which the national community perceived its status relative to others.

It should be noted that deliberate reference is made here to the national community, rather than more narrowly to the state, as this development coincided with the emergence of modern forms of popular nationalism in which citizens were encouraged to concern themselves with and be sensitive to the power and prestige of the nation. By the last two decades of the 19th century , as the European Great Powers entered a second phase of intensified colonialism, this public preoccupation could be seen in the formation of learned associations, public societies, and philanthropic endeavors aimed at promoting overseas expansion and exploiting new territories and markets in the national interest (Stovall, 2015 , pp. 209–210). Among such activists, and among governing elites, a view of international relations as characterized by a struggle for power prevailed (P. Kennedy, 1988 , p. 252). However, this perception expressed itself not simply in the desire for access to markets and territory in purely economic terms, but primarily in the need for international prestige (Speitkamp, 2014 , p. 35). It was in this context, too, that civil society organizations emerged, intent on developing the cultural influence of nation abroad. However, as Gregory Paschalidis ( 2009 , p. 279) has put it, we should not see nascent cultural diplomacy’s coincidence “with the age of neo-imperialism” as evidence that it was merely a tool of such imperialism, but rather acknowledge that, like the desire for overseas expansion, it was “more related to the great European powers’ nationalist aspirations and geopolitical rivalries.”

These new private organizations shared a range of interlocking motives. For example, the Alliance Française (founded in 1883 ), concerned itself initially with French language education as a means to more fully integrate France’s colonial possessions in North Africa and to spread France’s influence in the Middle East (Horne, 2017 ), yet these more straightforwardly imperial goals were accompanied from the beginning by the ambition to also conquer markets (Chaubet, 2004 , p. 769). Similarly, the various “overseas associations” ( Auslandsgesellschaften ) that emerged in Germany from the first decade of the 20 th century saw their function as the projection of German culture beyond the formal limits of Germany’s relatively small overseas empire in order to gain political and economic influence (Kloosterhuis, 1994 ). A further concern, shared by both German organizations such as the Allgemeiner Deutscher Schulverein zur Erhaltung des Deutschtums im Auslande (General German School Association for the Conservation of Germanness Abroad, founded 1881 ; Varga, 2013 , p. 443) and by the Italian Dante Alighieri Society ( 1889 ; van Kessel, 2016 , p. 39) was to maintain the cultural and linguistic identity of former citizens who had gone to live abroad as settler colonists. These motives overlapped in some cases with a concern for internal culture cohesion. For example, the founders of the Deutsche Akademie ( 1923 ), the forerunner of today’s Goethe Institute, were at least initially as concerned within the promotion of a shared national culture at home as its projection overseas (Michels, 2005 , p. 19). A further point of commonality between all of these organizations was the prominence given to defending and propagating the national language, which was symptomatic of a Romantic conception of national languages, along with their promotion of canonized national literatures as characteristic of the national “soul” (van Kessel, 2016 , p. 37).

While many such organizations remained private, there was nevertheless a trend toward the institutionalization of cultural diplomacy within foreign ministries, the earliest example being the French creation of a government agency with responsibility for coordinating French cultural and educational activities overseas in 1910 (Lane, 2014 , pp. 12–13). During the First World War, the concerns of the belligerent states turned toward propaganda of a more aggressive kind, and the emergence of fascist governments in the 1920s and 1930s, which aimed to use cultural institutions to spread propaganda abroad, led to a shift in the nature of cultural diplomacy: no longer only a vehicle for the projection of prestige in the context of an international system dominated by power rivalries, cultural diplomacy increasingly came to be regarded as a matter of ideological competition. The founding of the United Kingdom’s British Council by the British Foreign Office in 1934 has been interpreted, for example, as a response to the rise of fascist influence in Europe (Paschalidis, 2009 , p. 281), although concerns about the economic consequences of these rivals’ cultural diplomacy seem to have played just as a significant a role (Michels, 2005 , p. 127). Furthermore, it was the influence of cultural propaganda from Nazi Germany, and to a lesser extent from Italy and Japan, that motivated the United States to take cultural diplomacy seriously as a matter for the state, with the development of its Good Neighbor Policy in Latin America from 1933 (Krenn, 2017 , pp. 56–60).

In the late 19th century , the colonizing Great Powers of Europe had all laid claim to be the primary representatives of civilization and progress in their dealings with the non-European world. However, they had implicitly understood other powers as their rivals for that preeminence, not as being outside of the bounds of a shared civilization. The advent of the First World War, however, saw the propagandistic framing of conflict in terms of an existential threat to one’s own cultural identity: German intellectuals, for example, contrasted their nation’s Kultur to the degraded Zivilisation of its enemies (Trommler, 2014 , pp. 195–202), whereas Germans’ alleged love of killing and conquest was linked by British commentators to elements of German culture, such as the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (Martin, 2003 ). An understanding of the enemy as a cultural threat, albeit in the broad sense of culture as a way of life, was also a feature of the Second World War (Iriye, 1997 , p. 132). In the Cold War, however, the struggle for “spiritual superiority” between the superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union took center stage, with both sides making an exclusive claim to the humanistic tradition and its values (Caute, 2003 , pp. 3–4) and promising “a definitive break with the human tragedies of the past and exclusive access to universal happiness, social harmony, equality and freedom in the future” (Scott-Smith & Segal, 2012 , p. 1).

In this context of “ideological bipolarity” (Gould-Davies, 2003 , p. 195), the cultures of the rival superpowers were also experienced as threats to the very identity of Western or Soviet society respectively, so that attempts at external cultural projection were often accompanied by worries about the influence of the enemy in the domestic sphere. Such concerns were not unjustified: although the superpowers still used cultural means “to improve their relative power and position in areas not yet committed to either camp” (Gould-Davies, 2003 , p. 196), for example in developing countries, and focused considerable effort on maintaining their influence in countries already within their own blocs, their cultural diplomacy efforts also sought to weaken each other’s population’s commitment to their respective ideologies.

Cultural Diplomacy in the Cold War

The literature on the cultural Cold War is significant and ever-expanding, particularly in terms of its coverage of US policy, which has been extensively debated by scholars of international cultural history. Individual cultural forms, such as dance (Croft, 2015 ; Peterson MacDaniel, 2015 ; Prevots, 1994 ), music (Davenport, 2009 ; Fossler-Lussier, 2005 ), and visual art (Krenn, 2005 ), have all been the subject of major studies, and the institutional and political context of the policy relating to these and other aspects have been thoroughly documented, whether with specific reference to cultural diplomacy or within the broader frame of public diplomacy. Rather than give a blow-by-blow historical narrative of the development of cultural diplomacy in the Cold War context, the following account will highlight key issues that emerge from these historical studies, many of which still have relevance for cultural diplomacy today.

The two superpowers were by no means newcomers to cultural diplomacy at the end of the Second World War. The prewar USSR in particular understood culture as central to its revolutionary project, not only internally as a form of ideological persuasion and education cementing Bolshevik rule, but also in terms of the Soviet state’s externally focused claim to be the heir and new representative of the European cultural tradition. As Katerina Clark ( 2011 , pp. 1–30) has argued, by staking a claim to become the new leader of what was perceived as a “world culture,” the Soviet Union also insisted on its claim to global dominance, with cultural power framed as a necessary adjunct to emerging military and economic might.

Early Soviet cultural diplomacy focused particularly on cultural elites from the West, whose representatives were invited to visit the USSR, in the hope that it would be possible to win their admiration as externally verified proof of the superiority of Soviet culture and civilization (Barghoorn, 1960 , Chapter 2; David-Fox, 2011 , p. 25). Such cultural relations were managed by the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties (VOKS), founded in 1925 , and its successor organization, the Union of Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Contacts (SSOD), from 1958 . Within and beyond the cultural sphere, the USSR relied until the mid-1950s on front organizations either within the Soviet Union or internationally, including sympathetic fellow-traveler groups in capitalist countries, to extoll the virtues of the socialist system to foreign audiences. This led to a messaging that was both unilaterally propagandistic and lacking in a clear understanding of the expectations of the potential audience, particularly in the United States (Magnúsdóttir, 2010 , pp. 51–53).

The decade following the Second World War was marked by an intense distrust of cultural exchange between the two superpowers. While the United States had hoped to use cultural relations as a means of strengthening the Grand Alliance with the Soviet Union in the war years, Stalin was motivated to immunize his own citizens as far as possible from contact with the West. On the US side, the growing McCarthyism of the early 1950s led to an outright rejection of Soviet culture as inherently subversive of American values (Gould-Davies, 2003 , pp. 197–198; Magnúsdóttir, 2019 , p. 59).

The United States government was in comparison a late entrant into the field of cultural diplomacy: until the Good Neighbor Policy of the 1930s, it had allowed cultural relations to remain the preserve of civil society groups and charitable foundations (Krenn, 2017 , pp. 54–56; Rietzler, 2011 ). In the context of efforts to roll back Soviet influence around the world in the postwar period, however, the United States took steps to institutionalize its cultural diplomacy efforts, within the broader public diplomacy framework established by the founding of the United States Information Agency (USIA) in 1953 (for a comprehensive history of the USIA, see Cull, 2008b ). The Voice of America broadcasting network, which also had its origins in the Second World War, became an important vehicle for the dissemination of American culture, and especially its popular music, beyond the Iron Curtain. Whereas the USSR continued to assert its superiority by focusing on aspects of high European culture, such as classical music performance (Tomoff, 2015 ), in which it could make a claim to outperform the United States in terms of quality, the United States had a distinct advantage in terms of its status as the home of an increasingly globally dominant popular culture and an emergent youth culture. While the United States initially focused on high culture in its own cultural diplomacy, by the latter stages of the Cold War, popular culture disseminated by the market played the most significant role in cementing US influence, as other nations engaged in a process of “self-Americanization” (Stephan, 2006a , p. 78).

Despite the state’s activism, the role of charitable foundations and independent private cultural organizations such as the Museum of Modern Art (Krenn, 2005 , p. 19) or the Martha Graham Dance Company (Croft, 2015 , Chapter 3; Prevots, 1994 , pp. 45–52) continued to be highly significant for US cultural diplomacy, in contrast to the state control evident on the Soviet side. That said, there was a high degree of coordination between the US state and these nonstate actors, including in some cases covert funding to anti-communist cultural organizations in capitalist countries, which was funneled through charitable foundations until embarrassing revelations in the early 1960s (Stonner Saunders, 2000 ). Researchers focusing on European responses to these initiatives have pointed to complex processes of cooperation, assimilation, and resistance, with European intellectuals and ordinary consumers of culture responding to US cultural diplomacy, and US cultural imports more generally, in a variety of ways (Berghahn, 2001 ; Stephan, 2006b ).

A key challenge facing both superpowers, however, was the question of how to gain access for their cultural output to each other’s home territory. Following the death of Stalin, the Khrushchev era represented an opportunity for mutual exchange, with both sides willing to run the risk of allowing the other access to their own public sphere in exchange for the opportunity to exert influence. The “Agreement Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on Exchanges in the Cultural, Technical, and Educational Fields” of January 1958 , commonly known as the Lacy–Zarubin Agreement, covered (as its official title suggests) a wide range of exchange activity. Despite a later chilling of cultural relations during the 1970s under Brezhnev, various iterations of this agreement continued to provide the basis for artistic and educational exchange, which allowed Soviet citizens and US citizens the opportunity to visit exhibitions, performances, and other cultural events showcasing the achievements of the other superpower, as well as to gain improved access to books and films (for a detailed overview, see Richmond, 2004 ).

Existing research on cultural diplomacy during the Cold War, and particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, demonstrates the extent to which a neat division between external and domestic cultural policy needs to be questioned. In contrast to the Soviet Union, the appropriate form of American culture to be mobilized in the service of cultural diplomacy was at times the subject of considerable internal debate. As the nature and value of American culture continued to be contested in domestic politics, cultural diplomacy could become a prism through which the struggle for the dominance of a particular understanding of that culture was refracted. The most famous and well-documented of these struggles related to the government-sponsored exhibition “Advancing American Art” of 1946 (Krenn, 2005 , pp. 52–66), which was designed to tour throughout Europe, including some of the states then coming under Soviet domination. This selection of modernist works was accused by conservative US congressmen of presenting a distorted and degraded view of America’s culture and way of life, whereas its supporters argued that it was the challenging nature of some of the paintings that powerfully demonstrated the United States’ status as the home of freedom of expression. Overall, the latter argument eventually carried the day in US policy, although “Advancing American Art” did fall victim to the initial backlash. In the case of fine art, abstract impressionism and other avant-garde work that did not in fact represent the mainstream of American taste came to play an important role in the United States’ cultural diplomacy, precisely because it provided a contrast with the repressive orthodoxies of the Soviet Union.

The difficulty of balancing domestic priorities with the effectiveness of cultural diplomacy was also evident in the role of cultural practitioners in US policy, an area that has attracted considerable attention from scholars. Well-known creative individuals, such as internationally known writers and musicians, had the potential to act as effective cultural ambassadors, but were also people with their own political standpoints, which were not always in harmony with the official position of the US government or mainstream political opinion. This could lead to such paradoxical situations as, for example, when the playwright Arthur Miller became (involuntarily) a significant cultural asset for the United States abroad at the same time as facing political ostracism at home as a potential communist (Abrams, 2012 ). The case of Leonard Bernstein, as analyzed by Jessica Gienow-Hecht, provides another example of the tension the United States experienced between harnessing the star power of critical artists and concerns about keeping such ambassadors on message (Gienow-Hecht, 2012 , pp. 23–26). In the final analysis, the mobilization of critical figures did reinforce the United States’ status as the home of cultural freedom, and, as Andrew J. Falk ( 2011 , p. 211) observes of a range of less well-known progressive cultural figures who contributed to US cultural diplomacy efforts, the state ironically came to see them as a significant pool of creative talent that could be co-opted to the anti-communist struggle.

This does not imply, however, that the benefit was only on the side of government. Apart from the possibilities of employment, travel, and exposure to new audiences, artists and intellectuals co-opted to work in US cultural diplomacy programs brought with them their own understandings of culture and its purpose in the international context. Gienow-Hecht’s ( 1999 ) study of German émigré writers who returned to Germany in the postwar period to work on US-sponsored publications, for example, shows how these writers brought their own understandings of German culture to the enterprise and used their platform to promote the need for a dialogue between that culture and the United States, rather than merely acting as a mouthpiece for American reeducation of the German populace.

A good deal of attention has also been paid by scholars to the tensions between the roles of African American musicians (paradigmatically, Louis Armstrong) as both ambassadors for American culture and reminders of its poor record on racial equality (Davenport, 2009 ; Fossler-Lussier, 2005 , Chapter 3; von Eschen, 2006 ). Even though black musicians like Armstrong largely refrained from publicly raising this issue when undertaking state-sponsored tours abroad, international audiences were only too aware of the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. As Gary Rawnsley ( 2018 ) has argued, this points to a key issue with all varieties of public diplomacy, cultural diplomacy included: namely, that the state’s actions at home and abroad speak much more loudly than its efforts at self-presentation via cultural means. Indeed, where that self-presentation is perceived as being in contradiction with unpopular aspects of state policy, this may lead to accusations of hypocrisy.

The USSR was shorter on such internationally renowned stars, and there were also prominent cases of cultural figures defecting from the USSR and from the Soviet bloc more generally, most famously in the case of the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev in 1961 (Caute, 2003 , pp. 483–489), which called into question the Soviet system’s claims to superiority. At the same time, at least during the years of the post-Stalin thaw, the act of opening up to the West and encouraging more visitors to the Soviet Union pushed the state, as Gleb Tsipurksy ( 2017 ) argues, to develop its own new expressions of popular and youth culture at home, in the hope that the USSR could compete with the West for excitement and appeal without the supposedly damaging ideological baggage of these originally Western forms. However, it was ultimately for its excellence in longer established artistic forms, such as ballet, classical music, and literary fiction that the USSR was best known to audiences in the West. Particularly among literary authors, it was a reputational problem for the Soviet Union and the communist world more widely that those authors that were celebrated in the West were precisely those who achieved dissident status, most famously in the case of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was deprived of his Soviet citizenship in 1974 .

The overwhelming bulk of research in the field of cultural diplomacy has concentrated on the two Cold War superpowers, with a particular emphasis on the United States. Other countries within the two ideological blocs of the conflict, however, developed unique positions according to their perceived foreign policy priorities. A case in point is the United Kingdom, which, while an ally of the United States, was rapidly being eclipsed by it as a world power. In the early Cold War, when the United Kingdom was seeking to contain potential unrest in its colonies, its cultural diplomacy efforts chimed in with the overall anti-communist frame, while seeking to preserve its own global influence. For example, J. M. Lee ( 1998 , p. 116) has argued that the British identified communism primarily as a potential source of subversion among subject (or formerly subject) peoples. James Vaughan’s research demonstrates that cultural diplomacy was seen as a means to counter the rise of Arab nationalism in the Middle East and draw Arab peoples toward the United Kingdom as a major Western power (Vaughan, 2005 ). Alice Byrne ( 2016 ) has shown how in India, which moved inevitably toward independence after the Second World War, British efforts at cultural diplomacy followed a comparable logic. While concerned at the potential impact of communist propaganda on the newly independent state, the United Kingdom hoped to maintain cultural ties in the face of the United States’ better-funded efforts and remain India’s key partner in the West.

France provides another example of a postwar power seeking to manage the process of decolonization in such a way as to maintain influence as a Western partner to postcolonial nations, as for example Jennifer M. Dueck (Dueck, 2010 ) shows in her study of the last decade of the French mandate in Syria and Lebanon. What distinguished the French position from the British, however, was a determination to preserve the predominance of the French language in France’s former colonies, with Francophonie replacing the empire as a cultural space for French influence (Maack, 2001 , pp. 81–82; Stovall, 2015 , p. 402).

What all of this demonstrates is that states within the capitalist world who were aligned with the United States had to negotiate a distinct identity for themselves in their cultural diplomacy, which they believed would allow them to maintain advantageous cultural and, ultimately, economic relationships with others, even as they contributed to the overall anti-communist effort. We can see a very different form of self-distinction in the case of a neutral state like Sweden, on the other hand: it sought to create a cultural diplomacy niche for itself in the 1950s and 1960s by emphasizing the role of its Swedish Institute as a voice of “honesty and reason” that sought to overcome chauvinism and promote progress in international relations (Glover, 2011 , pp. 59–60).

Apart from the emphasis in the existing scholarship on the US experience, researchers’ interest in the communist world has tended to focus on the Soviet Union, leaving aside the question of whether the USSR’s satellite states could develop a cultural diplomacy identity for themselves in pursuit of distinct national interests. Dean Vuletic ( 2012 , p. 131) suggests that researchers need to pay more attention to cases where “small states . . . could . . . act as a cultural force in their own right,” although his analysis of Yugoslavian popular music as a cultural export is situated in the context of a state that had attained the status of a renegade in the communist bloc. Analyzing the case of Hungary, by comparison, Anikó Macher ( 2010 , p. 76) has argued that it remains an open question

to what extent . . . the people’s democracies [were] exploited by the USSR and used as extensions to, or even substitutes for, Soviet diplomacy; or, conversely, to what extent were they developing hidden policies designed to promote their own national interests [.]

The answer to this question will undoubtedly be dependent on the nature of the state to be analyzed, especially in terms of its prewar cultural ties and the development of its relationship to Moscow over the length of the Cold War. For example, the case of the German Democratic Republic, discussed by Christian Saehrendt ( 2017 ), shows how its cultural diplomacy efforts in Africa and the Middle East in the 1960s both served the Soviet Union’s broader interest in gaining influence in these regions, and allowed East Germany to pursue its own foreign policy priorities in terms of gaining international recognition, which had been hampered by the Hallstein Doctrine promulgated by its West German rival. Furthermore, as Macher ( 2010 , p. 95) notes, rivalries between Soviet bloc countries were a further factor, with individual socialist states at times competing with each other for the prestige of extensive Western cultural exchanges. By the 1970s, Zsolt Nagy ( 2017 , p. 302) has proposed, cultural relations as an aspect of foreign policy had gained a “relative autonomy” from Moscow, yet there is certainly room for more research into the specific uses that individual socialist states were able to make of this opportunity.

The focus evident in existing scholarship on the US–Soviet cultural rivalry in the Cold War has also had the disadvantage of drawing attention away from other experiences of cultural diplomacy in what has variously been termed the “Third World” or the “Global South.” Broadly speaking, those states that had experienced European colonialism, albeit in different periods, and which were not integrated into the two postwar blocs are more often studied as recipients of cultural foreign policy than as originators of it. However, through processes such as the emergence of the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1950s or the development of Pan-Arabism in the Middle East, culture became a vehicle for exchange and solidarity between states who sought an identity for themselves beyond the bipolar confrontation of the two superpowers. While the scholarship on the cultural dimensions of these relationships remains relatively limited, it does already point to alternative histories of dialogue and self-positioning by cultural means that complicate the narrative of the two-bloc cultural competition of the Cold War.

For example, in the context of the development of the Non-Aligned Movement ( 1961 ), whose beginnings are often associated with the Bandung Conference of 1955 (C. J. Lee, 2010 ), researchers have demonstrated the importance of Indonesia as a case study of a postcolonial nation that accepted the cultural overtures from the Soviet and the US sides as a means to “develo[p] flexible mutual relationships with both blocs” (Isabella, 2018 , p. 95), while also pursuing its own programs of culture exports to other postcolonial nations. In doing so, postindependence Indonesia asserted its status as an equal partner in “a new, young and moving world” (Lindsay, 2012 , p. 207). This was of particular importance, as Matthew Cohen ( 2019 , p. 256) proposes, for a country “burdened with Orientalist images” from the colonial era.

Among the other nonaligned countries, India was equally a state that invested significantly in cultural diplomacy, developing its own brand of cultural foreign policy that stressed internationalism and mutual exchange, rather than foregrounding the need for influence in the national self-interest. This “internationalist idealism” (Isar, 2017 , p. 706) was particularly marked by the influence of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister and foreign minister, for whom the principle of free cultural exchange was closely tied to ideals of anti-imperialism and peaceful cooperation with other Asian nations (Mark, 2008 , pp. 182–183).

In the Arab world, Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt sought to take advantage of its “pronounced cultural and intellectual preeminence in the region” (Dawisha, 2016 , p. 143) in order to promote pan-Arab solidarity, as well as encouraging anticolonial sentiment across Africa (Brennan, 2010 ). While Nasser envisioned the achievement of Arab cultural unity through the pursuit of Egypt’s own “cultural supremacy” (Dawisha, 2016 , p. 150), other Arab nations sought in the further course of the Cold War to contribute to such unity in a variety of different fields (Mermier, 2016 ).

The case of China in the early Cold War world also warrants further attention from the point of view of cultural diplomacy. Contemporary scholarship on Chinese cultural diplomacy has focused largely on China’s activities in this sphere in the 21st century (e.g. Barr, 2011 ), with researchers showing particular interest in the Confucius Institutes’ program (Hartig, 2016 ; Liu, 2019 ). However, relatively little attention has been paid to the People’s Republic before the Cultural Revolution. Early Maoist China has often been perceived as culturally isolationist, as Emily Wilcox ( 2017 , p. 519) notes. However, her own study ( 2017 , pp. 219–220) demonstrates how China sought to engage with the Bandung movement and develop relationships of mutual cultural exchange with other Asian countries in a spirit of “anti-colonialist internationalism.” Earlier analysis by William E. Ratliff ( 1969 ) also shows how China promoted cultural exchange with Latin American countries at the time of the “Great Leap Forward,” offering itself as a model of modernization and encouraging anti-US sentiment in defiance of the USSR’s turn toward coexistence.

The cases outlined above add further layers of complexity to the function of cultural diplomacy in a Cold War world that cannot be reduced to the competition of two ideological blocs. Publications on the role of visual arts in exchanges among countries of the Non-Aligned Movement (Margarit, 2019 ; Moderna galerija Lubljana, 2019 ) and of biennials as forums for dialogue between nations of the “Global South” (Gardner & Green, 2013 ) offer further intriguing insights into Cold War cultural diplomacy beyond bipolarity, which would be worthy of further investigation.

Cultural Diplomacy Since the End of the Cold War

The end of the Cold War saw not only the disappearance of one of its superpowers in the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but also the abandonment of cultural diplomacy by the United States, which disbanded the United States Information Agency (USIA) in 1999 . There had always been American politicians who had been suspicious of state intervention in the cultural sphere, as the historical accounts by Cull ( 2008b ), Arndt ( 2005 ), and Krenn ( 2017 ) testify; and with the disappearance of the United States’ Cold War rival, the most significant justification for the mobilization of culture in the context of foreign policy had evaporated. This turn away from public and cultural diplomacy in the US case was also of a piece with the more general mood of ideological triumphalism often associated with Francis Fukuyama’s ( 1992 ) thesis on the “end of history,” which assumed that liberal capitalist democracy had proven itself to be the most successful model of social organization, toward which others would inevitably progress. Nevertheless, other voices warned that, as globalization gathered pace, driven by the opening up of markets and the spread of new communications technology, cultural difference in the broad sense would become a key factor in new conflicts, superseding the previously dominant role of ideology (Huntington, 1996 ).

The 9/11 attacks on the United States appeared to give credence to this latter notion, forcing a reconsideration of the role of culture in communicating US positions to the wider world. For many Americans, a key question after 9/11 was to understand, as George W. Bush ( 2001 ) himself put it, why others appeared to “hate” the United States. Alongside Bush’s “war on terror,” attempts were made to counter these negative perceptions, including a touring exhibition of Joel Meyerowitz’s Ground Zero photographs, which sought to develop sympathy for the United States, particularly in Muslim countries (L. Kennedy, 2003 ). The danger here was of appearing openly propagandistic.

Responding to the ongoing decline of the United States’ image abroad in the wake of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 , Congress authorized the creation of a new Advisory Committee on Cultural Diplomacy to advise the Secretary of State. Its report subsequently declared cultural diplomacy to be the “linchpin of public diplomacy” (US Department of State, 2005 ). Rather than returning to Cold War paradigms of showcasing the cultural freedom of the United States, this document emphasized that cultural exchange between peoples could have the function of sustaining dialogue and relationships, even where disagreements over policy in other areas might exist. If the United States was to exercise its power in the world, there would always be those who would resent this, but such resentment could be mitigated by cultural contacts that would allow others to feel positively about America even if they disapproved of particular foreign policy decisions. Importantly, however, the report argued that cultural diplomacy must be a dialogue, not a one-way communication:

Listening is central to this effort. To practice effective cultural diplomacy, we must first listen to our counterparts in other lands, seeking common ground with curators and writers, filmmakers and theater directors, choreographers and educators—that is, with those who are engaged in exploring the universal values of truth and freedom. The quest for meaning is shared by everyone, and every culture has its own way of seeking to understand our walk in the sun. We must not imagine that our attempts to describe reality hold for everyone. (US Department of State, 2005 , p. 5)

Rather than a model of cultural diplomacy that seeks to generate admiration and perhaps imitation, the authors of this report therefore sought to reframe cultural diplomacy as a means to build mutual understanding and trust, based on the acknowledgment of cultural difference, in which culture in the sense of the arts and education is taken to express a unique worldview. Published in the same year, Jan Melissen’s influential account of the “new” public diplomacy adopted a similar position, emphasizing dialogue, mutuality, and the building of trust rather than transparently self-interested messaging (Melissen, 2005 , p. 21)

This approach implicitly acknowledges a shift in the discourse around the definition of culture in the field of cultural policy that had begun to take hold, as Frank Trommler ( 2014 , p. 690) has pointed out, in the 1960s and 1970s in international organizations such as UNESCO and the European Council (on UNESCO, see Grinell, 2018 ). This view combined a broad understanding of culture as encompassing a much wider range of expression than the high culture that dominated established cultural policy, an emphasis on the parity between cultures, and a conception of cultural exchange in the broadest sense as a means for dialogue and relationship-building. For example, in his report for the European Council in 1974 , already cited above, Anthony Haigh ( 1974 , p. 246) argued for an evolution of cultural diplomacy away from a “primitive” phase of cultural propaganda toward the ultimate goal of “collective cultural cooperation” as a means to strengthen international relationships.

The discourse of cultural diplomacy as dialogue was not the only policy trend of the 2000s, however. As states came to terms with the increasing pace of globalization, the reframing of domestic cultural policy in terms of “cultural industries” or “creative industries” policy sought to offer solutions to a number of issues that particularly impacted Western countries. Whereas postwar traditions of domestic cultural policy had tended to focus on issues of quality and intrinsic value outside of market considerations, with a bias toward high culture (Bell & Oakley, 2015 , p. 21), the interrelated phenomena of culture and creativity were now deemed relevant to wider sectors of the economy, from arts and leisure to commercial design and computer software (Flew, 2012 ; Hesmondhalgh, 2007 ). The United Kingdom is often cited as a pioneer of this kind of policy discourse (Bell & Oakley, 2015 , pp. 27–31; Flew, 2012 , pp. 9–32), which has nevertheless attained a global reach (see, for example, Wuwei, 2011 ).

The attraction of the notion of creativity to postindustrial societies like the United Kingdom was threefold. Firstly, it promised a reinvigoration of economies whose productive capacity was increasingly outsourced into global supply chains, with negative consequences for domestic employment. In this context, engagement with culture (in the sense of the arts) was understood as a means of developing the kinds of creativity necessary to develop the new ideas and creative goods that would drive economic growth. Secondly, for citizens struggling to cope with the challenges of a rapidly changing globalized economy, artists and other “creatives” were proposed as a model for innovation and adaptability; to the extent that, as Olly Mould ( 2018 ) has argued, no individual was exempt from providing “creative” solutions to the economic challenges they faced. Indeed, engagement with the arts came to be seen as a pathway to social inclusion, which would develop the creative attitudes necessary to thrive in the new economy (Hewison, 2014 , pp. 32–62). Thirdly, by projecting creative vibrancy abroad, a positive context would be created for market expansion, inward investment, tourism and, therefore, economic prosperity.

Clearly, these three aspects were interlinked: only a creative workforce would be able to generate the national profile that would, in turn, make the nation and its products more attractive to others. In this way, cultural diplomacy was increasingly perceived by policymakers as a contribution to the development of a national “brand” (Hurn, 2016 ; Iwabuchi, 2015 ; Varga, 2013 ; Zamorano, 2016 , p. 173). The notion of the nation as brand was itself a response to the dynamics of neoliberal globalization, in which “competition states” (Cerny, 2010 ) began to perceive one of their key responsibilities as the development and maintenance of the international profile deemed necessary for economic “attention” (van Ham, 2010 , p. 140).

In this same period, the notion of “soft power” became an increasingly popular term for those trying to explain the purpose of cultural diplomacy. Coined by US international relations scholar Joseph S. Nye, who also advised the Obama administration, the term soft power relies on notions of attraction and influence to allow states to be able to set agendas in the international arena and shape others’ preferences (Nye, 2004 , 2011 ). Although the means to achieve this are not only cultural in Nye’s account, since he regards the foreign policy of states and their political values as equally important elements of a nation’s image, soft power is frequently cited as a framework for understanding the logic of cultural diplomacy, both by academics and in policymaking circles.

The discourse around the field of cultural diplomacy has shifted considerably over time, from a preoccupation with national prestige in an international environment characterized by power rivalries, to a focus on ideological struggle, to a growing emphasis on culture as a means of dialogue and relationship-building among equals, to an economically instrumental approach. It would be tempting to see this as an evolution in which earlier paradigms are progressively superseded, but it is rather the case that today such discourses have become sedimented in the policy field and can be drawn on by its various actors as a means to frame specific approaches to managing cultural relations with others. In many cases, as exemplified by a report for the British Council in 2013 , policymakers, think tanks, and cultural institutions are able to acknowledge that cultural diplomacy may serve a variety of purposes simultaneously, from peacebuilding and the fostering of international understanding, to the promotion of tourism and the expansion of trade (Holden, 2013 , p. 33). The task then becomes that of keeping these various goals in balance.

At the same time, it must be acknowledged that the present moment is bearing witness to a pluralization of approaches to cultural diplomacy, depending on the particular priorities and contexts of individual states. So, for example, Germany has sought to balance the promotion of the national brand with the fostering of intercultural dialogue as a means to promote postnational values such as human rights and democracy in the world (Weigel, 2019 , p. 21), whereas China has attempted to integrate cultural policy into its infrastructural investments, which seek to expand its economic and political power, both regionally and globally (Winter, 2019 ). In contrast, Qatar, a small but wealthy state, has invested in contemporary art at home and educational programs abroad in order pursue a range of policy goals, combining its desire for international prestige with domestic concerns over the definition of Qatari identity (Eggeling, 2017 ). While the ideological divisions of the Cold War by no means led to uniformity in the cultural diplomacy of states in the capitalist and communist blocs, as shown above, they nevertheless provided a broad frame within which specific national interests could be expressed. The multipolar world of the 21st century , however, sees considerable divergence in the priorities, approaches, and discursive framing of cultural diplomacy, depending on the perceived needs of the states in question. This variety emerges in the context of the broader trends outlined above.

Assessing the Outcomes of Cultural Diplomacy

A major issue for research in cultural diplomacy lies in the assessment of its outcomes. In other words, to what extent can we talk about successful cultural diplomacy? Much of the evidence provided in the existing literature tends toward the anecdotal, pointing to individual examples of cultural diplomacy’s apparent effectiveness in specific circumstances. So, for example, Yale Richmond ( 2004 , p. 127) reports on the experience of a Russian cellist in the Cold War who was led to question Soviet ideology on the decadence of capitalism when he saw the quality of Western orchestras visiting the Soviet Union. Goff, by way of contrast, underlines the potential of culture to create shared understanding when she cites the example of a Chilean ambassador, who, when he found himself

faced with South African interlocutors with little knowledge of Chile, […] built an event around the Chilean writer, Ariel Dorfman. Many South Africans were familiar with Dorfman, but unaware of his Chilean roots. A bridge was created, accentuating what Chileans and South Africans shared in common. (Goff, 2013 , pp. 142–143)

Such individual experiences are not insignificant, but are also not obviously generalizable in such a way that it would be possible to establish a causal relationship between the claims made by actors in the field of cultural diplomacy and broader policy outcomes. Specifically, they do not allow us to understand what changes in behavior, attitudes, or beliefs were brought about for the individuals in question in the long-term: moments of connection, inspiration, and cooperation can be observed; however, as Mark ( 2010 , p. 63) points out, effects beyond the momentary are difficult to trace with any certainty.

Some commentators have dismissed the need for hard evidence of the efficacy of cultural diplomacy. For example, an early treatment of the issue in the 1960s by Charles Frankel, at that time Assistant Secretary of State in charge of education and culture in the US State Department, admitted that the link between any particular cultural activity abroad and policy outcomes remained “dim,” yet nevertheless persuasive based on his own experience (Frankel, 1965 , pp. 87–88). This tends to make the assessment of cultural diplomacy outcomes more a matter of personal belief. Robert Albro ( 2015 ) has also pointed to what he calls “folk theories” developed by cultural diplomats, that is to say justificatory structures of reasoning that apparently obviate the need to evidence the efficacy of policy. In light of such difficulties in assessing the outcomes of cultural diplomacy, Isar has written of cultural diplomacy as “an overplayed hand” (Isar, 2009 ).

An additional difficulty in terms of judging the effectiveness of cultural diplomacy is evident when greater attention is paid to the work of creative individuals who become the agents of such policy. Historically, the ideological and professional motivations of US cultural figures who became involved in American cultural diplomacy did not align precisely with those of the state. In today’s cultural diplomacy, in which many states rely increasingly on an arm’s-length approach to cultural policy abroad, the institutions and individual creative personnel who benefit from the funding provided by government may understand their engagement in this activity in quite different terms. As Melissa Nisbett’s work has shown (Nisbett, 2011 , 2013 ), individual artists and employees of cultural institutions such as museums may value the artistic, professional, or institutional goals that work in cultural diplomacy may allow them to achieve, while at the same time strategically adopting the policy discourse of the state. When assessing the outcomes of cultural diplomacy, it is therefore problematic to judge success only from the point of view of policymakers. Rather, we need to acknowledge that other agendas will be in play (Clarke, 2016 ).

A further difficulty to be addressed in the contemporary context concerns the limitations placed on the influence of policy, when set against the backdrop of cultural globalization, driven by digital technologies. For instance, whereas the national cultural institutes of the 20th century might have given interested audiences access to cultural products that were sometimes difficult or costly to access, for example by providing libraries of books or organizing showings of films, worldwide digital distribution of such material at relatively little cost potentially undermines the function of such intermediaries. Commercial media markets will, in fact, always outweigh the output curated by institutions of cultural diplomacy, especially in the case of the United States. This has led not only to optimistic accounts that suggest that commercial culture can do the work of cultural diplomacy (Fraser, 2003 ), but also to concerns about the negative images of the nation that are sometimes portrayed in media products destined for a global market (Bayles, 2014 ).

The digital age also brings challenges in terms of the shift from one-to-many communication to many-to-many communication (Castells, 2013 , p. 55). Briefly, whereas the age of analogue media saw the power to produce and distribute cultural products remain in the hands of a relatively small number of gatekeepers, whether those were media corporations or state-funded cultural institutions, Web 2.0 technology allows anyone with an internet connection to access potentially large audiences. So, for example, anti-US feeling was stoked throughout the Arab world in 2012 when a Los Angeles-based filmmaker produced an inflammatory 12-minute video called “Innocence of Muslims,” attacking Islam, and posted it to YouTube (Bradshaw, 2012 ). While the US government was in no way responsible for the film, it was the American embassy in Cairo that was attacked as a consequence of the backlash.

Despite these questions about the measurability of the outcomes of cultural diplomacy and doubts about the state’s ability to “wield” (van Ham, 2010 , p. 54) culture in the context of contemporary globalization, nations show no signs of withdrawing from this policy field. One explanation for this, which has not yet been sufficiently explored by researchers, is that the process of self-definition and self-projection that is implicit in cultural diplomacy may serve other ends than simply the instrumental ones of influencing foreign publics, advantageous relations with others, or even selling the national brand. In this regard, it is notable that existing research on cultural diplomacy has produced few contributions that seek to engage with international relations theory (an exception here is Rivas, 2007 , 2018 ). Over the last three decades, constructivist approaches to international relations have become interested in the extent to which states seek recognition of their identities as particular kinds of (positively connoted) actors in the international system (e.g. Ringmar, 2002 ; Wendt, 1999 , pp. 236–237), which has clear relevance to the question of cultural diplomacy.

Here we can potentially draw on the work of critics of Nye’s conceptualization of soft power working within the discipline of international relations, who have argued that an actor’s attempt to communicate a particular image of itself to others will bear the traces of its own socially constructed identity (Bukh, 2014 ; Mattern, 2005 , p. 600). This would seem to provide a useful starting point for the consideration of the phenomenon of cultural diplomacy in more than simply instrumental terms: the argument would be that policy tells us about the kind of identity an actor seeks recognition for, even if outcomes are hard to assess (cf. Clarke, Cento Bull, & Deganutti, 2017 ). It is also potentially compatible with the broadly discursive approach to cultural diplomacy as a policy field outlined above, in that it should be possible to consider how the mobilization of particular policy discourses expresses the identity of states whose approaches to cultural diplomacy are becoming ever more differentiated in the contemporary world.

The study of cultural diplomacy remains a rich area of enquiry, covering a wide range of phenomena in a variety of historical and contemporary contexts. Ultimately, what allows us to regard these phenomena as belonging to a coherent policy field are the shifting discourses by which policymakers, practitioners, and analysts of cultural diplomacy have sought to understand the benefits of defining and mobilizing culture, often defined in national terms, in the international arena. However, in the policymaking community and among practitioners, there is at times a tendency to promote cultural diplomacy’s efficacy on the basis of relatively scant and often anecdotal evidence. Historical scholarship, by contrast, provides a wealth of detailed case studies, but does not always look beyond those case studies to make broader theoretical claims. In my own work (Clarke, 2016 ), I have noted the absence of engagement with the traditions of Culture Studies theory in the literature on cultural diplomacy. As such theory offers insights into the mediation and expression of identities through cultural consumption, it may be particularly useful for addressing audience responses to cultural diplomacy, but may also prove applicable to other actors in the field. Constructivist approaches to international relations are also promising in terms of their focus on states’ quests for recognition of their identities in their dealings with others. The challenge for the study of cultural diplomacy, an inherently interdisciplinary endeavor, will be to develop more coherent theoretical models that can be applied to the historical data available and that will allow us to draw more robust conclusions about the multiple functions and effects of policy in this field.

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Democratic societies are often characterized by extensive pluralism of religions, cultures, ethnicities, and worldviews, on the basis of which citizens make claims against their state. Democratic states are additionally characterized by a commitment to treat all citizens equally, and so they require fair and just ways to wade through and respond to these claims. This entry considers cultural claims in particular.

Cultural claims are ubiquitous in political and legal spaces. Not only do individuals and groups both make cultural claims against the state, often for legal or political accommodations, but the state often explains its choices in terms of protecting particular aspects of its culture. This entry will first examine the ways in which “culture” is defined by political and moral philosophers: culture-as-encompassing group, culture-as-social-formation, culture-as-narrative/dialogue, and culture-as-identity. Over the course of this discussion, the “essentialist” challenge will be introduced: an essentialist account of culture is one that treats certain key characteristics of that culture as defining it and correspondingly all of its members must share certain key traits in order to be treated as members (for more, see Phillips 2010). In particular, the entry goes on to note that early conceptions of culture-as-encompassing groups are criticized for being essentialist, and later conceptions are attempts to reformulate culture in ways that avoid the essentialist challenge.

Following an articulation of these main ways of understanding culture, the entry turns to an assessment of distinct (though occasionally overlapping) types of cultural claims that are pressed against the state by minority groups: exemption claims, assistance claims, self-determination claims, recognition claims, preservation claims (and claims against coerced cultural loss), defensive claims in legal settings, and exclusive use claims (claims against cultural appropriation). There are both justifications for, and objections to, these claims, and they often hinge on how “culture” is understood. In many cases, the disputes about the justifiability of these claims hinge on competing understandings of what culture is, and especially, how valuable it is to those who are members, as will be shown below. Finally, the entry will close with an assessment of cases where a majority community makes cultural claims to justify actions, mainly in the context of controlling immigration and, in some cases, refusing entry to potential migrants all together, as well as the cultural demands it makes of those who are admitted, and the range of justifications and objections offered in these cases. This section considers the content of the majority culture, to which newcomers are asked to adhere, as well as how forcibly they can be “asked” to do so.

1.1 Culture-as-encompassing-group

1.2 culture-as-social-formation, 1.3 culture-as-dialogue, 1.4 culture-as-identity (or identity rather than culture), 2.1 exemption rights, 2.2 assistance rights, 2.3 self-determination rights, 2.4 recognition rights, 2.5 cultural preservation rights, 2.6 rights against cultural loss, 2.7 cultural defense rights, 2.8 exclusive cultural use rights (or rights against cultural appropriation), 3.1 cultural continuity and exclusion rights, 3.2 cultural continuity and integration enforcement rights, 4. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries, 1. defining culture.

Defining the term “culture” is very challenging: it has been described as both a “notoriously overbroad concept” (Song 2009: 177) and a “notoriously ambiguous concept” (Eisenberg 2009: 7). It is deployed in multiple ways: as the entry will go on to consider in more length, the term “culture” can refer to the set of norms, practices and values that characterize minority and majority groups, for example by noting that the Hasidic Jewish communities in New York practice a unique “culture”, or by describing Italian or Senegalese culture. But it is also used in other ways, for example, to refer to “bro” culture or “hipster” culture, or the culture of British football fans. Moreover, any one person can be a member of multiple cultures—someone (like this writer!) can be a member of the Canadian culture, the Ottawan culture, the Jewish culture, and the academic culture at the same time. Contextual considerations will explain why the norms, practices, and values that define each of these cultures become relevant at a particular moment. Moreover, only some of these cultures have political and legal relevance; only those that do are the focus of this entry.

In the political and legal spheres, there is widespread disagreement about what culture is , and the next section is focused on elaborating these distinct views of culture. There is however considerable agreement that whatever it is, it matters to people and the meaning and value it provides to the lives of individuals are among the most important reasons, if not the most important ones, to defend and protect it in legal and political spaces. This value is why it is important to attempt to discover what culture is and correspondingly why, and which aspects of it in particular, should or should not be protected in the public sphere. Notice that the observation that cultures are valuable to people, and indeed that they bring value to the lives of individuals, is not the same as saying that individual cultural practices are all good. Any defensible account of culture must take seriously the importance of culture in general without defending all of its instantiations. There are four main ways in which culture has been interpreted: as an encompassing group, as social formation, in dialogic terms, and in identity terms.

One way to think about culture is as a kind of all-encompassing whole, which shapes all or most dimensions of our lives. It is perhaps Will Kymlicka’s formulation of a “societal culture” that is most responsible for generating serious reflection on the nature of culture understood in this way. A societal culture

provides its members with meaningful ways of life across the full range of human activities, including social, educational, religious, recreational and economic life, encompassing both public and private spheres. (Kymlicka 1996: 76)

Kymlicka explains that a vibrant societal culture provides a “context for choice”, i.e., it provides the resources that individuals rely on to make sense of their world and the choices it offers. On this account, nation-states are well-described as having a societal culture, as are Indigenous groups and sub-state national minority groups (for example, the Catalans or the Tibetans); immigrant groups which sustain a range of cultural practices and norms even as they integrate into a larger “societal culture” are not.

Kymlicka is not alone in offering an encompassing account of culture. Michael Walzer too offers such an account, proposing that we understand political communities as “communities of character”, in which members are bound by a “world of common meanings” (Walzer 1983: 28). Avishai Margalit and Joseph Raz also describe so-called “encompassing” groups, in which their members

find in them a culture which shapes to a large degree their tastes and opportunities, and which provides an anchor for their self-identification and the safety of effortless secure belonging. (Margalit & Raz 1990: 448)

Avishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal say of an encompassing group that its culture “covers various important aspects of life”, and in so saying, they offer as an example the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish culture:

it defines people’s activities (such as Torah study in Ultra-Orthodox culture), determines occupation (such as circumciser), and defines important relationships (such as marriage). It affects everything people do: cooking, architectural style, common language, literary and artistic traditions, music, customs, dress, festivals, ceremonies…the culture influences its members’ taste, the types of options they have and the meaning of these options, and the characteristics they consider significant in their evaluation of themselves and others. (Margalit & Halbertal 1994: 498)

Whereas Kymlicka emphasizes the freedom that is offered by a robust societal culture, Margalit and Halbertal speak of its role in securing members’ “personality identity” (Margalit & Halbertal 1994: 502) and Walzer of its importance in shaping a “collective consciousness”. Although these scholars justify the protection of a robust culture for many reasons, they agree that what culture does, fundamentally, is offer a background value system that helps members select among options and interpret their value, including for example with respect to certain forms of employment, or education, or family structure and child-rearing. Walzer captures the way in which culture informs how even the most basic of things are understood:

a single necessary good, and one that is always necessary—food, for example—carries different meanings in different places. Bread is the staff of life, the body of Christ, the symbol of the Sabbath, the means of hospitality, and so on. (Walzer 1983: 8)

Much is illuminated by these accounts of culture, including especially why depleted societal cultures may be less able to provide the context for choice that Kymlicka emphasizes, or why one’s “personality identity” may thereby be threatened: if a cultural group’s educational, political, or economic systems are weakened, their capacity to support members to make sense of the world, and choose among options, is likewise weakened. Moreover, this account illustrates the wrong of undermining the cultures of others: if a culture is undermined, the choices available to its members are thereby reduced. We can see this with respect to Indigenous culture in many states: where states have actively attempted to erase Indigenous culture, the result has been severe social dislocation and alienation among Indigenous peoples whose context for choice has been substantially weakened.

However, multiple objections have been launched at this way of understanding culture, most of which are variants on what is termed the “essentialist” objection; notice, though, that the views described above are not believed by their holders to be essentialist. The essentialist objection targets what it sees as an assumption that members of a culture will hold the same set of practices, norms, and values to be important, and in the same measure. But, say critics, this assumption does not hold: in any actual culture, members will be differently committed to its defining practices and norms, and indeed, there will necessarily be disagreement around which of its practices and norms are defining in the first place. The essentialist objection says, roughly, that treating culture as encompassing wrongly does one of the following things: 1) it proclaims that certain features of a culture are at its core and therefore immutable, on pain of dissolving the culture (Eisenberg 2009: 120), and correspondingly that cultures are necessarily bounded and determinate rather than contested and fluid (Moore 2019; Patten 2014: 38); 2) having identified these features as at a culture’s core, it excludes those who believe themselves to be members but do not  conform to, display, or respect these features (Parvin 2008: 318–19); and, 3) it ignores the reality that most people in a liberal society “draw their identity from a multiplicity of roles and communities and memberships at any one time” (Parvin 2008: 321), which can variously have social salience, depending on the context, both independently of, and sometimes in conjunction with, cultural identities (Moore 2019). In summary, a too-encompassing account of what culture is for its members runs the risk of treating the boundaries of a culture as if they are determinate, unshifting, and as though its members display no variance (and perhaps cannot display variance) in their commitment to the culture as a whole and its defining practices.

The alternative accounts of culture that are considered below are all, at least in part, intended to respond to the essentialist challenge; their objective is, in other words, to generate a plausible account of what culture is , and correspondingly what it means to be a member of a particular cultural group, that can be deployed to make sense of legal and political controversies, and ideally adjudicate among them, without succumbing to the essentialist challenge. A caveat: the views of culture treated below should be understood as “ideal types”, characterized so as to understand its key features, how it is differentiated from other views, and why it does not fall victim (in its own estimation) to the essentialist challenge.

One attempt to reconceive culture in a way that responds to the essentialist challenge, but which retains a view of culture as largely encompassing, proposes that cultures are defined by their members’ shared experience of social formation (Patten 2014: 39). On this “social lineage” account of culture, what makes a culture is that its members are subject to a “set of formative conditions that are distinct from the formative conditions that are imposed on others” (Patten 2014: 51). The experience of being subjected to common institutions, understood broadly to include shared educational spaces, languages, media, as well as shared historical traditions and stories, overlapping familial structures, and so on, shapes a sense among cultural group members that they share a distinct way of seeing the world, and that certain assumptions that they possess are shared by, or at least understood by, others. This view emphasizes a culture’s historical trajectory, but does not require that its defining norms, values and practices are unchanging over time. On the contrary,

internal variation is possible because subjection to a common set of formative influences does not imply that people will end up with a homogeneous set of beliefs or values. (Patten 2014: 52)

As a result, cultures are sites in which members can contest and deliberate their meaning with enough shared assumptions about the way the world works that they can recognize each other as engaged in the same project.

Patten writes of the institutions to which cultural group members are subject that they are at least to some degree “isolated from the institutions and practices that work to socialize outsiders” (Patten 2014: 52), and thus serve to distinguish one culture from another. On this view, significant emphasis is placed on who is controlling the levers of the institutions that shape members’ formation: that is, it matters that members are in control of the institutions to which they, themselves, are subject, so that they can plausibly shape their own social experience, and the experience of younger members, in fundamental ways. Where the control over this social formation is denied, a culture’s members are thereby harmed; when it is coercively denied, there is very likely an injustice demanding remedy.

By focusing on the shared experience of subjection to common cultural institutions, this account avoids the accusation that what defines a culture is the stability of its basic norms and values over time: culture is not, on this view, a static entity. Instead, what matters is that cultural group members believe themselves to be members of a cultural group, and that this belief’s foundation is in the experience of common cultural institutions, rather than in the specific practices that are central to the group. These central practices can change fundamentally, without the cultural group itself dissolving. However, this view is subject to criticism by scholars who worry that those who control the levers of formation do not represent the views of all members (Phillips 2018), that instead they are using their relative positions of power to create and enforce cultural norms and practices that do not command (or would not command, without coercion) widespread agreement.

The latter objection—that a so-called culture is the product of some but not all of its members leads some scholars to rearticulate culture in terms of the ways in which it is constructed via dialogue among members and their engagement with each other. The purpose of emphasizing that a culture’s members are the source of its main practices, values and norms, is to emphasize that a culture is not “given” to its members from above, as a fixed and unalterable entity. Rather, members of a culture are, in a fundamental way, its authors. Here is James Tully explaining this: cultures are

continuously contested, imagined and reimagined, transformed and negotiated, both by their members and through their interactions with others. (Tully 1995: 11)

Seyla Benhabib similarly emphasizes the narrative aspect of cultures, noting that insiders

experience their traditions, stories, rituals and symbols, tools, and material living conditions through shared, albeit contested and contestable, narrative accounts. (Benhabib 2002: 5)

That there is contestation among members, and that its main elements are under constant negotiation, does not render a culture any less meaningful for its members. What may seem confusing is the idea that a contestable and constantly shifting culture warrants protection; perhaps protection means artificially halting the natural changes that a culture would undergo, by protecting elements of it at a moment in time. But defenders of this view demand protection in the form of ensuring that the forums in which culture is negotiated, shared and transmitted, are sustained in robust and inclusive ways, and without unwanted interference by forces external to the culture. As with the culture-as-formation account, the emphasis is on the capacity of group members to shape the norms and practices that are central, rather than with the norms and practices themselves.

How does this view respond to the worry about asymmetrical power distribution within a cultural group? Focusing on the ways in which a culture’s central characteristics are determined via negotiation among members is an attempt to be attentive to the power structures that shape whose voice is heard during these negotiations, in minority and majority cultures (Dhamoon 2006). In many, and indeed perhaps in most, cultures, historically the dominant voices have been male, and one impact of that has generally been a gendered view of the how best to organize cultural life, that has reduced the rights of women (and other minorities) in myriad ways, often to their disadvantage as well as against their will. For some, the oppression of less powerful members by those who hold the levers of power generates at least partial skepticism about the value of protecting or accommodating culture in liberal, democratic states, especially in cases where it may seem that “multiculturalism is bad for women” (Okin 1999). On this view, cultural practices that undermine the rights of women (and other minorities) should not be tolerated in liberal democratic states.

The recognition that many cultural practices are disadvantageous to women (and other minorities) does not propel all political theorists to adopt a skeptical attitude towards them in all cases. For some, it is an opportunity to see that cultures can be valued even by those who are putatively oppressed, even as they work from the inside to influence the direction of their culture, towards less oppressive norms and practices. For example, although often sidelined from their centres of power, many women value their cultures in ways that press them not to exit, but rather to engage in processes of reforming inegalitarian practices and norms, from within (Deveaux 2007). This way of thinking about culture and its contents celebrates, and encourages, moves to “democratize” the mechanisms by which a cultural group’s main norms, values and practices are adopted, and defends public cultures that are genuinely open to multiple voices (Lenard 2012).

This narrative or dialogic account of culture thus responds well to the essentialist challenge, by denying that the defining features of a culture must be static and equally valuable to all members of a cultural group. But, it must respond to another challenge, namely, the individuation challenge (Moore 2019). If an account of culture is going to be robust enough to define the entities that should be entitled to additional political and legal consideration in various ways, including with respect to additional rights protections or exemptions from certain legal and political requirements, it must also be able to identify with some specificity the boundaries of a particular, discrete, culture and who legitimately counts as a member for the purposes of respecting the political and legal claims made as a result. But this can be a challenge to accomplish.

To see why, consider Benhabib’s account of the ways in which cultures are observed from the outside, and the way they are experienced from the inside. The observer is largely responsible, she says, for imposing “unity and coherence on cultures”, whereas from the inside, its participants

One effect of understanding the culture in this way is that while many of its members will hold deeply to the central values and take deep satisfaction in participating in the central cultural traditions, many others will dip in and out of its central practices, and pick and choose among its central values and norms. So, just who counts as a member is blurry, and this blurriness may appear to be a problem when membership is said to confer rights and privileges that are not available to non-members. There is an inevitable tension between the need to individuate cultures for political reasons and the boundaries of cultures which are inevitably poorly demarcated. Only context will enable us to resolve the political questions that will thereby emerge.

To answer the challenge of how to identify a culture, and its members, one proposal focuses on the subjective component associated with belonging to a cultural group. Take this example, described by Margaret Moore: although there is deep division in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants, the differences are neither religious (the conflict is not about distinctive interpretations of a religious text, and religious figures are not targeted for violence), nor cultural, since surveys of cultural values of both communities reveal considerable overlap among the values that competing communities hold (Moore 1999: 35). She says, rather, a focus on shared identities among rival groups makes more sense of the conflict.  A largely or partly identity-focused view highlights that one key dimension of culture is the way in which it shapes the identity of cultural group members. As well, such a view highlights that culture is a thing to which many people will have important connections, but which will be defining for them in multiple and distinct ways. An identity-focused view has clear merits: for example, it can explain why individuals remain nominally attached to a culture, even though its centrally defining features shift historically over time, and even if they do not engage with some of its more traditional aspects.

Additionally, an identity-focused view can accommodate identities that are not obviously culturally based, for example, including LGBTQ+ identities (Eisenberg 2009: 20; for a discussion of cultural/identity claims in an LGBTQ+ context, see Ghosh 2018: chapter 4). Indeed, an identity-focused view aims to circumvent the difficulty of identifying what specific material is legitimately cultural material. As noted above, scholars of minority cultures frequently note that there is a wide variety of claims made by a wide variety of groups, and these groups are defined by an assortment of distinct characteristics, including race, ethnicity, religion and sexuality. Say its defenders, a focus on identity rather than culture may be preferable because

the term identity covers more ground in the sense that it can refer to religious, linguistic, gendered, Indigenous and other dimensions of self-understanding. (Eisenberg 2009: 2)

2. Minority Cultural Rights Claims

The four views of culture described above inform the cultural claims that both individuals and groups make against the state. The specific threats that individuals and groups face, and which demand a kind of protection, are distinct, as are the responses that states may have in response to the claims made by individuals and groups (Eisenberg 2009: 20–21). In some cases, claims are made for accommodations for all members of a group qua group; in others, claims are made with respect to particular individuals; and there may well be connection among these. For example, a group may demand language protection policies, or an individual may claim a right to speak her mother tongue in legal proceedings. These rights are related to each other, and may be in some cases derived from one another: one reason an individual has a right to speak her mother tongue in legal proceedings may be because the state has recognized her language as an official language either of the state, or of a sub-state jurisdiction, for example. As a matter of accommodation , it will be important in what follows to notice when claims are made for accommodations that apply to individuals and when they are accommodations that apply to groups; although some philosophers are keen to assess whether cultural rights are best understood as individual or group rights (Casals 2006), the analysis below proceeds by assuming that they can be both (following Levy 2000: 125).

Notice as well that the term “accommodation” is a kind of catch-all to include the wide range of claims an individual or group can make against a state on the basis of culture. Political philosophers have attempted to distinguish among these claims in myriad ways, in order to make sense of them. Many such rights are claimed by immigrant groups (typically) to a state, who require certain accommodations from the state in order to better integrate into that state. In the larger debate around the value of multiculturalism, there is considerable discussion about which sorts of accommodations encourage the integration of, especially, culturally distinct newcomers, and which sorts permit or even encourage their separation from the larger society (e.g., Sniderman & Hagendoorn 2007). Some scholars worry, as well, that a focus on how best to accommodate cultural minority groups travels with ignoring (perhaps wilfully) more important questions of redistribution to those who are less well off (Barry 2001; Fraser 1995). In general, however, multicultural theorists agree that accommodation rights are most defensible when they support the integration of minorities in general, and newcomers in particular, as well as when they are aimed at remedying persistent inequalities between majority and minority groups.

It is worth noting that not everyone readily agrees that “culture” should be treated as a source of distinct legal and political claims, however. For example, Sarah Song points out that so-called “multicultural” claims are often in fact claims to accommodate a wide range of groups, including racial, religious and ethnic groups. Many political theorists of cultural rights appear to believe that there are distinct and recognizable cultural groups, making distinctive cultural claims, whereas in their example-giving they rely on a “wide range of examples involving religion, language, ethnicity, nationality, and race” (Song 2009: 177). Rarely is “culture” alone the basis for a claim against a state. Rather, says Song, so-called cultural claims are in fact often demands for other well-understood and defensible democratic goods. Most such demands are for religious accommodations, well-defended by standard liberal defenses of freedom of conscience; others are demands for reparations for past and ongoing wrong, in the form of affirmative action; others yet are demands for democratic inclusion, often rooted in a morally problematic history of deliberate exclusion. Once the reasons for these “cultural” demands are revealed clearly, we will often find democratically defensible reasons to respect and accommodate them, without needing to resort to relying on culture as a distinct entity, giving rise to a distinct set of rights-claims. The result is that the controversy associated with properly defining cultures and identifying their members can be avoided in many instances. However, this analysis can make it difficult to treat cases where something called “culture” interacts with, or supplements, religious, ethnic, and racial claims.

Take the case of the choice, made by referendum, to ban minarets on mosques in Switzerland. The defensibility of the ban has been the subject of deliberation among political philosophers, and one key point of contention has been whether and to what extent minarets are religiously required by Islam. Many interpreters propose that, since minarets are not obligatory according to Islamic religious requirements, the choice to ban them is regrettable (because of what it says about the public place of Islam in Switzerland), but it does not violate the religious freedom of practising Muslims in Switzerland, and as a result is permissible (Miller 2016). In making this claim, however, what is ignored is the cultural significance of minarets. Without a recognition of the distinct place of culture in certain claims, a full understanding of the minaret case cannot be reached. The same challenge can be seen in deliberations around whether Muslim women should be permitted to wear face coverings in public spaces. Some commentators suggest that, because (according to some interpretations) Islamic texts do not appear to require face coverings, women can be denied the right to engage in this practice, without violating their religious freedom. In making this argument, its defenders notice that the choice to cover faces is in effect a (mere) cultural interpretation of Islamic requirements, as evidenced by the fact that only some communities of practising Muslims engage in the practice. For some scholars, it is essential to separate religious from cultural claims—liberal democratic states take religious claims very seriously as matters of conscience, and have a long history of zealously protecting religious freedom. So, having determined that a claim is not one of religious freedom, such scholars believe they can comfortably deny the request for permission to cover faces in public spaces. However, ignoring the cultural dimensions of the claim—or treating them as though they are obviously of less significance than the underlying religious claim—fails to treat the case properly. In particular, it fails to take seriously that religious obligations necessarily have cultural interpretations, that a full recognition of religious freedom entails recognizing their cultural interpretations, and that specifically cultural legal and political accommodation (of a religious commitment) will thereby be called for.

In what follows, distinct types of cultural claims, made against a state’s major institutions, will be examined. These claims are, as will be seen, sometimes made by individuals and sometimes by groups. Where relevant, the analysis will highlight whether the concept of culture that is being deployed is culture-as-encompassing group, culture-as-social-formation, culture-as-narrative, or culture-as-identity. The analysis will not always be neat. In some cases, there will be multiple defenses of a cultural right, which rely on distinct understandings of culture.

Perhaps the most familiar type of cultural claim made against the state is in the form of request for exemptions from rules and regulations that typically apply to all citizens. Exemption rights respond to the fact that, in liberal democracies, laws and practices are meant—genuinely—to treat all citizens equally, but that there are some which inadvertently impose disadvantage on certain minorities. The worry to be resolved is that minority citizens are unintentionally or accidentally burdened by the normal application of certain laws (Levy 2000: 130), in ways that treat them unfairly, which can be resolved by exemptions from certain laws and normal practices (Quong 2006; Gutmann 2003). The extension of exemption rights then is understood as a

a recognition of that difference, as an attempt not to unduly burden the minority culture or religion en route to the laws’ legitimate goals. (Levy 2000: 130)

For example, some Sikhs request exemption from laws that require wearing motorcycle or construction-site helmets. Although Sikhism is a religion, Sikhs describe the requirement that they wear a turban not quite as a religious requirement, but rather as a symbol of their faith and commitment to Sikh values, as well as an expression of their identity (Sikh Faith FAQs in Other Internet Resources ). Without exemption from these laws, Sikhs would be excluded from taking advantage of opportunities that are meant to be available to all citizens on an equal basis. The same is true of Indigenous communities, who have requested exemptions from generally applicable laws that limit hunting and fishing, explaining that such limits undermine their traditional way of life, or make it hard (or impossible) for them to sustain themselves (Levy 2000: 128). Before Sunday-closing laws were abandoned in Canada and the United States, religious minorities were occasionally granted exemptions from them. In these cases, as described above and without legally provided exemptions, people (usually minorities) must choose between participating in opportunities that should be available to all citizens on an equal basis or to respect their (cultural) understanding of what their religion requires of them.

The request for exemption can be lightly distinguished from the request for rule modification. As indicated, exemption requests are, as they sound, requests that individuals be exempted from certain requirements that are meant to apply to all citizens equally; modification requests ask for changes in existing, majority, practices to accommodate certain other, minority, practices. Sikhs sometimes request exemption from laws that would, otherwise, require them to remove their turban as above; in other cases, they request uniform modifications, so that turbans are treated as one among several available head coverings for those carrying out a specific role. The same is true of uniform modification requests made by Muslim women who cover their faces or heads, and Jewish men who wear yarmulkes, where uniforms have traditionally required an uncovered head or face, or where they have required particular head coverings (as in the Sikh case, they may also be presented as requests for exemptions). Similarly, when observant Muslims request short breaks in their work day to pray at specific times of day, or when Jewish and Muslim students ask for changes in the provision of foods (to accommodate kosher and halal obligations) in school cafeterias, the request is for modification rather than exemption.

In most cases, the early failure of a legitimate law to modify or exempt new practices is unintentional. That is, the laws or practices in place were not adopted intentionally with the purpose of excluding, but were rather adopted under the assumption that they treat the existing population fairly. But widespread immigration has diversified many populations in substantial ways. Immigrants often travel with practices and norms that are, when they arrive, unfamiliar to the states they are joining, and as a result states are asked to modify certain laws, and exempt newcomers from certain others. There may be cases where there are legitimate public reasons to persist in applying certain laws in spite of the disadvantage they generate for newcomers. As well, there are cases where states persist in demanding obedience to laws and practices that clearly disadvantage newcomers attempting to integrate, but where there are no good mitigating factors to justify persisting in the imposing of disadvantage (as when the Danish town of Randers passed a law requiring that pork be served “on an equal footing with other foods” in school cafeterias). In these latter cases, the exclusionary impact of the laws is no longer inadvertent, and they are generally condemnable for perpetuating unnecessary and unjustified exclusion from political, economic and social spaces.

It is not always the case that individuals or groups claiming cultural rights to exemption and modification are immigrants, but that is often the case. Indigenous communities ask for exemptions, as do certain orthodox religious communities. These cases will be discussed below in the section focused on cultural preservation.

Demands for assistance call on the state to preserve the conditions under which various elements of a culture can persist and even thrive, especially minority languages, or to promote and protect cultural associations in various ways, including by offering financial support to artists from within these cultural groups, or by providing resources to permit the production and distribution of ethnic-language media. The justification for assistance rights is the same as for exemption and modification requests: it is to prevent persistent unfairness in access to rights or goods that are meant to be available for all citizens on an equal basis. In the case of assistance rights, cultural minority groups argue that the majority group has access to these goods already, for example to a robust language or media space, and so they request state resources to secure these goods for cultural minorities as well. Here, whereas the justification overlaps with the one offered to defend exemption and modification rights—to generate fairness—the understanding of culture that underpins the demand for these rights is distinct. Typically, exemption and modification claims treat culture-as-identity or dialogue, whereas in the case of assistance claims, the background understanding of culture is often culture-as-social-formation or culture-as-encompassing group; the culture is treated as a whole that requires assistance to protect each of its central parts, in order to do the job of shaping members well.

Self-determination rights are those that confer substantial control to sub-state jurisdictions over a particular territory and in particular the right to run the major institutions on that territory. A self-determining community is one that, because of control over major institutions in a territory, is capable of making and enforcing decisions, without interference by outsiders, in multiple policy spaces (I. M. Young 2004). The justification for self-determination rights is sometimes based on reparation or corrective justice, for example where past state actions have undermined the capacity for a particular cultural group to be self-determining in the first place (Song 2009: 184). In other cases, the demand for self-determination is justified with respect to the importance of protecting the autonomy of a culturally distinct sub-state jurisdiction, that is, its capacity to run its own affairs in ways that are consonant with its particular cultural preferences. The right to self-determination typically relies on an understanding of culture-as-encompassing group, or culture-as-social-formation, suggesting that without significant control over the major institutions that govern the lives of citizens, the relevant group will not be able to be self-determining.

The right to self-determination is typically attributed to states, so its meaning in the context of minority communities operating at the sub-state level is not always clear. Among sub-state jurisdictions, the right is often claimed by Indigenous groups as well as sub-state national groups, like the Basques and the Scottish, whose “societal culture” is manifestly distinct from the majority’s societal culture. The demand for self-determination is a demand to make choices about how children are educated, what language is spoken by the relevant political authorities, and how the public space should be organized. The right claimed has at least three manifestations: 1) the right, at a minimum, to “maintain a comprehensive way of life within the larger society without interference”; 2) the right to recognition by the majority for its way of life, and 3) the right to active backing by the majority to affirmatively support the relevant way of life so that “the culture can flourish” (Margalit & Halbertal 1994: 498). These three interpretations make distinct demands on the state, running from simple non-interference to active participation in sustaining the conditions for self-determination. As a result, the larger state is sometimes tasked with assessing the extent to which it wants to direct its resources to supporting a particular request for self-determination, focused on whether associated claims to cultural preservation are warranted. These will be considered below.

The demand for formal recognition in legal and political documents often travels with the demand for self-determination, and is grounded in a desire to have the majority mark its commitment to the full and equal respect of a cultural minority group (Mcbride 2009). In the Canadian case, the Québécois have long fought for recognition as a nation, with a “distinct society”. Attempts to recognize Québec’s status in the Canadian constitution have repeatedly failed, though a motion that read “That this House recognize that the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada” was approved (with considerable controversy, however) by the House of Commons in 2006. The demand for recognition in this case is a demand for respect as an equal, national, founding partner of the Canadian state.

In the case of Indigenous communities as well, the right to self-determination often includes not only the demand to exercise authority over specific jurisdictions, but also for recognition. They seek recognition, for example, as original inhabitants of a particular state, or as nations in their own right, or as having been the victims of various crimes at the hands of colonizers, including the violation of early treaties between them, as well as demands for state support in sustaining and, in many cases, rebuilding communities that were actively devastated by colonizing/settler governments. In Canada, and other colonizing states, for example, it has become common to read land acknowledgement statements in advance of events (including as part of the “announcements” read at the beginning of a school day), recognizing that events and proceedings are taking place on unceded Indigenous land. Similarly, Australian Indigenous communities have long argued for official recognition in the Australian constitution. From the perspective of Australian Indigenous communities, the hope, and indeed the expectation, is that official recognition will give rise to additional rights and benefits, for example to greater voice and political access to members of the minority. The hope for additional rights and benefits is present in some, but not all, cases of recognition claims (for example, it largely was not present in the case of Québec).

Recognition comes in other forms beyond acknowledgement in legal and political documents, that are intended to confirm respect for minority groups. In some states, the languages of minority groups can be officially recognized as national languages. For example, the Romansh language in Switzerland is officially recognized as a national language, even though its speakers make up less than 1% of the country’s total population. By contrast, Turkish laws that banned the speaking of Kurdish in public spaces were an attempt to deny recognition to a national minority (lifted finally in 1991). As with demands for official recognition in binding constitutional documents, these sorts of recognition demonstrate respect for minority communities as well as a commitment to treating them as full and equal members of the larger state.

Cultural preservation rights are those that groups claim as key to sustaining a cultural group as a cultural group. This right is sometimes described as a right to the “survival of a culturally-specific people” (Gutmann 2003: 75). In some cases, the justification is based on the claim that certain forms of exposure to and engagement with the wider community will result in the erosion of a culture that is valued by its members. In others, the justification is historical, as in where orthodox religious groups, fleeing religious persecution in Europe, agreed to settle new land in Canada and the United States in exchange for religious freedom. In others, the central justification is that cultural diversity is valuable and worth preserving, in and of itself (Parekh 2000). (In some cases, cultural preservation rights are claimed as recompense for past wrong; this claim is considered separately, below.) Demands for cultural preservation are most controversial where they are made by illiberal groups, as will be detailed shortly.

It is worth dwelling here for a moment to notice that there are two ways to interpret cultural preservation: it could mean the preservation of a group as a distinct cultural entity or it could mean the preservation of certain practices and values that are believed, at a moment in time, to be central to the culture. Rights to cultural preservation come in multiple formats, including demands for exemption, parental autonomy, respect for internal conflict resolution mechanisms (in family law, mainly), and control over membership. These rights are justified with respect to preserving culture, and typically rely on an understanding of culture-as-encompassing groups or culture-as-social-formation, just as does the more general right to self-determination with which they often travel.

Many minority illiberal groups ask only for rights of forbearance against the state in which they live (Spinner-Halev 2000). In response, a state may permit an illiberal cultural group to be “left alone”, on the idea that so long as it can persist without state support of any kind, it may do so. A state may be asked to do more, however, to preserve the culture.

For example, a state may be asked to exempt community members from certain requirements that are typically demanded of all citizens, including mandatory schooling and child labour laws. Consider this example: many orthodox Amish communities live a life that is largely segregated from the wider community. They live a religiously structured way of life which dictates whom members marry, how they raise children, how they produce an economy that permits their way of life to continue. In most cases, they demand neither recognition nor additional financial support in order to protect their communities’ way of life. They had previously demanded only non-interference, for the most part. But, in the 1970s, some American Amish communities demanded, and were granted, the right to withdraw their children from mandatory education at the age of 14, arguing that where their children were required to remain in school until the age of 16, they were more likely to exit the community. This high rate of exit would, they argued, result in the failure of the Amish way of life to persist over time (Burtt 1994). The right of exemption the Amish claimed was, in this case, derivative of the larger demand for cultural self-preservation; without the exemption, they said, the culture itself might fade away.

A state may also be asked to respect certain domains of legal authority, perhaps most frequently in the domain of family law. Minority communities often regulate the conditions of marriage, and custody of children, as well as divorce, and request the legal authority to do so. Respecting the legal authority of minority communities to exercise jurisdiction in family law is the kind of request that often troubles critics of cultural minority rights, since it may entrench disadvantages to women, for example in divorce settlements or custody agreements (Shachar 2001; Bakht 2007). In general, then, states that acknowledge the legal authority of minority communities in the space of family law also demand that those who are participating in these adjudication proceedings do so willingly; majority states therefore often retain permission for themselves to interefere in these proceedings, in support of those who may be inadequately protected. The state must attempt a balance here, between offering its support to the most vulnerable members of a minority group (for example to ensure that their constitutional rights are protected) and interference of a kind that is inattentive to the rightful claims of minority groups to persist over time, in part by exercising its authority in key spaces.

Another common form of cultural preservation rights are exclusion rights, that is, the right of a cultural group to refuse to admit others to territory or membership, because of a worry that more generous terms of admission threatens to undermine it by, in effect, diluting it. Just as states have the putative right to control their borders (discussed below in section 3), and who can claim membership rights even after admission, so do some sub-state jurisdictions claim this double right of exclusion, citing the importance of cultural preservation. Indigenous communities have sometimes claimed the right to exclude non-Indigenous individuals from settling on their territories or the right to exclude others (for example non-Indigenous spouses of Indigenous persons) from certain membership benefits, including the right to vote (or otherwise have a say) for those who will govern. State courts have been asked to adjudicate the rightful authority of Indigenous communities to make these determinations (see Song 2005).

The cultural preservation rights described above pose a difficult challenge, connected to the critiques of treating culture as an encompassing group: any claim for cultural preservation, say some critics, translates in effect into problematic claims of control over members, which, moreover, are typically most restrictive for women and LGBTQ+ members of a cultural group. This is a challenge posed most forcefully where rights of cultural preservation are demanded by so-called illiberal groups like the Amish, and where they are (in the eyes of critics) imposed on children against their will. Illiberal groups are those which deny certain key liberal values, like autonomy and equality; in many cases, these communities are supported by educational systems that discourage autonomous choice-making, by avoiding the teaching of skills and capacities that typically enable it, and by enforcing hierarchical rules that elevate some members over others in ways that egalitarians find uncomfortable. The worry is that the community wants not only to preserve itself as a distinct cultural group, but also that it wants to protect a kind of cultural homogeneity that leaves no room for contestation or dissent over its central values and practices. These latter hierarchical rules often render women vulnerable to more powerful men, who may demand various forms of sexual subservience to them, who relegate them to the home to care for children, and who impose rigid codes of behaviour on them, for which harsh penalties are meted out in cases of violation. These kinds of so-called “cultural practices” are, for some critics, such that they render any form of state support in protecting minority cultural groups largely indefensible (Okin 1999). 

A worry that runs through objections to these many cultural preservation rights is that women may not be willing participants in these cultures, and therefore that respecting cultural preservation rights consigns women to lives they would not choose, do not want, and cannot escape. But for many it is a mistake to assume that women members are such only under duress, since many will deeply value the community itself and respect the norms and values that it seeks to protect, even if they reject certain among them. In these cases, and where political theorists consider them, there is an attempt to move from treating culture in encompassing terms towards treating it in dialogic and narrative terms. Cultures, even oppressive (to liberals) minority cultures, are subject to change, and perhaps the best source of change is deeply committed members who willingly endorse key values but reject others, including those that do not respect the equal rights of women. Monique Deveaux’s account of female adult participants in customary marriages in South Africa, who accept some elements of their culture, but who aim to gain a voice at the table to shift others, treats culture in dialogic terms (Deveaux 2007). Here, the key motivating thought is that cultures can and do shift over time, in response to how its members engage in it, and what matters is not the change itself, but who or what is its source. On this view, the objective of cultural preservation rights is not to preserve culture per se , a challenge that would prove impossible in any case, but rather the right to protect the ability of group members to shape their culture and to protect it against unwelcome sources of change.

Others argue that so long as women, and any others subject to rigid cultural demands, possess a right (or the capacity) to exit the community, their choice to remain should be treated as such (Kukathas 1992). For those who hold this view, efforts to render the right to exit genuinely exercisable are tremendously important (Kukathas 2012; Holzleithner 2012). In so doing, a state must make a choice about the resources it provides to those members who may desire to exit, but who do not have the means to establish themselves in the larger society. In some orthodox religious communities, property is owned in common and individual members do not have any personal property or resources; as a result, exiters have nothing on which to rely while they establish their new lives. In others, members are poorly educated, and unfamiliar with life outside of their own communities, and so exit without the capacity to sustain themselves in the larger society.  So, receiving states can offer support to exiters in various ways, for example by providing shelters to exiting women (and men), in which education is provided so that they may eventually attain self-sufficiency as a member of mainstream society. The choice to support exiters may seem to undermine a culture’s capacity for self-preservation. But supporting exiters is not well-understood as denying cultural preservation rights; rather, the choice to do so stems from a state’s commitment to protecting the rights of all of its members, including the most vulnerable, as best as it can do.

The right to cultural preservation described above should be distinguished from the slightly different right against coerced cultural loss, which focuses on preservation in cases where the potential loss is the result of coercion by outside forces against which a cultural group is relatively powerless. Of course, cultural change  is inevitable in some form, as highlighted above, and especially if one holds a culture-as-dialogue view, cultures are in fact never static. Rather, practices, norms, and values that are defining of a culture at one time may cease to be centrally defining of that culture, for a whole range of reasons including economic, environmental, and political. So, in fact, some amount of cultural loss is inevitable, and moreover, it is not always to be regretted. Sometimes, it is a normal response to external factors that are beyond a culture’s control, and sometimes it is welcome because the changes result in the better protection of human rights or more inclusive cultural traditions and practices. A cultural group may choose to shift their central modes of production in response to changing environmental factors, for example. So, as Samuel Scheffler has argued, the strong preservationist view of culture—that cultures should be insulated from all forms of change—must be rejected (Scheffler 2007).

Yet, especially minority cultures may sometimes have a reasonable claim that they are not able to protect themselves against unwanted cultural change, or that they are not able to control the pace of change. They may thereby be entitled to forms of state support, to help them create the conditions under which they can resist unwanted cultural change.  When linguistic minorities request state support to persist in educating children in a minority language, for example, sometimes the justification is in the name of protecting against the erosion of the language in the face of pressure to adopt or become fluent in the majority language.

In other cases, majorities are actively focused on undermining minority cultures, often over years and even decades. Colonial states have pursued genocidal policies against Indigenous communities for example, with the expressed purpose of undermining their capacity to survive as distinct peoples. In assessing cases of cultural loss, then, a key factor is whether the shift is forced upon minority groups, not necessarily by changing environmental or economic conditions, but by agents who intend to undermine the culture, by actively disvaluing it and thereby acting so as to undermine the conditions for its robust continuity. External, malicious, factors that engender cultural change that would not otherwise be expected, make the change not only regrettable, but generate a case for reparations, for example with respect to Indigenous communities, where there is “evidence of a history of dispossession, discrimination, or subordination” (Phillips 2018: 97).

In legal environments, wrong-doers sometimes deploy a cultural defense, explaining that minority cultural norms and values, which are in tension with those of the majority, are causally relevant in explaining why they committed a wrong. A cultural defense has, thereby, sometimes been treated as a relevant mitigating factor in assigning punishment. The right to offer a cultural defense is typically justified with respect to the importance of recognizing that minorities do not always operate according to the same values and norms that are represented in the majority’s legal system, and that these differences are entitled to some consideration in legal spaces. Earlier court decisions accepted explanations that, for example, men who murdered their unfaithful partners were moved to do so by a combination of shame and rage associated with cultural norms. For example, men who claimed that “gang rape” (known culturally as marriage by capture) was mandated by Hmong culture as a way to secure a wife, in which women were not only complicit but in fact willing partners, are no longer understood to have a defense in legal suits accusing them of rape (Song 2005). However, the power of “cultural” explanations in mainstream legal spaces has decreased over time, as states have come to see how many of these defenses are in fact cover for patriarchal, misogynist attitudes that persist, both in some minority communities and in the wider community.

“Cultural” defenses of crime often amount to treating culture as though it were a homogeneous whole, and as though perpetrators of crime rather than its victims have a lock on its interpretation. But “respect for culture cannot mean deference to whatever the established authorities of culture deem right” (Gutmann 2003: 46). Additionally, a generic imperative to “respect culture” in legal spaces can ignore the differences among types of cultural expectations, which can range from permissible acts, to encouraged acts and required acts, only some of which may justifiably be treated as legally relevant (Vitikainen 2015: 162). As well, it can permit and encourage the representation of minority (especially non-western) cultures as stereotypes, and “mobilizes culture in ways that encourage absurdly large generalizations about people from particular cultural groups” (Phillips 2007: 81 & 99). The danger represented by an uncritical acceptance of the cultural defense is in a treatment of culture as so encompassing that it treats its members as incapable of autonomous decision-making. But, say critics of the cultural defense, this is a mistake—along with many other factors, culture can be part of an explanation for engaging in wrong-doing, but should “never be mistaken for the whole truth” (Phillips 2007: 98).

A final cultural right that is claimed by some is the right to control cultural artifacts or expressions, or the use of cultural content in general (Matthes 2016). This is the right that is at issue in recent controversies focused on cultural appropriation, defined as the use, by a non-member, of “something of cultural value, usually a symbol or a practice, to others” (Lenard & Balint 2020). Familiar examples of actions that have been accused of engaging in cultural appropriation include the wearing of dreadlocks by whites; the donning of Indigenous clothing as Halloween costumes; the use of turbans in high fashion; the teaching of yoga by instructors who do not have South Asian backgrounds. In all of these cases, a non-member is accused of “appropriating” a particular cultural practice or symbol that is not their own. On this view, cultures have exclusive rights to use their cultural “products” as they see fit, often because that practice is understood to be central to their identity. This perspective is controversial, and often mocked, by those who observe that history just is the mingling and sharing of cultural practices and symbols, including in the spaces of cuisine, the arts, dress and spiritual practices; their mocking treats the rights claim as relying on an understanding of culture that is unchanging and immutable over time, which is historically inaccurate and, furthermore, undesirable. Correspondingly, key cultural artifacts are best understood as belonging to “humanity”: “it isn’t peoples who experience and value art: it’s men and women” (Appiah 2009).

The right claimed—to full or exclusive use of defining cultural practices or symbols—is perhaps not best enforced by the state, though states can and do engage in practices that are attentive to the harms allegedly caused by cultural appropriation. For example, centralized support for the arts, in the form of grants to produce artistic endeavours, can be sensitive to who is asking for support to produce what , and can direct funding towards artists from a particular tradition who aim to produce culturally specific products, and correspondingly refuse (unless very good reason is offered) to support endeavours by cultural outsiders to produce “insider” art (Rowell 1995; J. O. Young 2008). The right claimed is relatively stronger where a particular cultural community is the victim of a power imbalance, where the cultural community has expressly requested that a particular practice or symbol be “left alone” by a majority community, and where members of the majority community are  profiting on the basis of its use of the particular symbol or practice (Lenard & Balint 2020). As in other cases, the right claimed by a cultural group is strongest where there are persistent inequalities between the minority claimant and the majority group.

3. Majority Cultural Rights Claims

Section 2 considered the cultural rights claims that are, usually, made by minority groups. Majority groups make cultural claims as well, in particular with respect to excluding others from their territory as well as with respect to what can be demanded of those who are admitted.

One domain in which majority communities claim a cultural right is in the space of immigration. For some, the right of states to shape their culture can legitimately serve as a reason to exclude others, in general and sometimes specific others. This view is often attributed to Michael Walzer, who argues that the right of a state to control its borders is intimately connected to its capacity to

defend the liberty and welfare, the politics and culture of a group of people committed to one another and to their common life. (Walzer 1983: 39, emphasis added)

The right of a state to control its culture is therefore an essential one to protect its “collective consciousness”, as noted in Section 1.

This claim has encountered pushback from many scholars, for multiple reasons. One reason is that the claim that a state may exclude would-be migrants for cultural reasons has too often been, in fact, an attempt to enact discriminatory legislation aimed at excluding migrants whose beliefs and practices are said to be incompatible with, or even undermining of, the values and norms that define the majority’s culture. Exclusion based on so-called cultural reasons has often been a claim that a state prefers to remain culturally, religiously, ethnically, and racially homogeneous. Historically, states engaged explicitly in such discriminatory practices, which have now been repudiated, including for example variants of Asian Exclusion Acts which were in operation in North America in the early 1900s.

The same accusation is also merited in several recent cases, such as the implementation of the so-called Muslim Ban in the United States, or with respect to proposals during the height of the crisis in Syria (2015) in some countries to prioritize Christian over Muslim refugees (Song 2018). Among political theorists of immigration, there is however widespread repudiation of discriminatory immigration policies, both explicitly and implicitly, even among those who defend the general right of states to exclude would-be migrants and refugees, for many reasons including to preserve culture (Miller 2005).

A second source of pushback stems from a more general skepticism that a majority’s culture, even if genuinely valuable to its members, should be treated as sufficiently so to warrant excluding migrants, especially necessitous ones (the language of necessity is borrowed from Song 2018). Even if it is conceded that culture is valuable to a majority, many scholars believe that its protection cannot warrant excluding those in severe need of safety or subsistence.

Yet, say those who defend the view that culture can, at least in some cases, serve to exclude migrants, there is a case to be made for treating the state as possessing the right to cultural continuity (Miller 2005). This claimed right looks very much like the right to cultural preservation (or against cultural loss) described above, and it highlights not so much the sentimental dimensions of a majority’s attachment to its culture, but rather its pragmatic interpretation. On this view, any particular state is defined by a “shared public culture” which, because shared, underpins the trust that democratic states rely on to pursue political and social objectives in common. No particular value that makes up a shared public culture is valuable in and of itself. Rather, it is the combination of a set of values, norms, and practices, that produces “our” culture that is valuable, and in its presence, trust is higher; as a result, so is the willingness to cooperate to support policies that require some sacrifice, including for example, commitment to redistributive social policies that are especially to the benefit of those who are least well-off (e.g., see the essays in Gustavsson & Miller 2019). So, according to those who defend these views, a state that seeks to exert control over admission citing “cultural” reasons is neither racist nor discriminatory, but rather is seeking controlled admission (rather than closed borders) so that newcomers can, over a sufficient time period, come to adopt enough of the set of defining values, norms, and practices, to be able to warrant and extend the trust that underpins the policies that instantiate these objectively valued goods.

States that defend the right of cultural continuity at the level of admission to a state typically also deploy the right to adopt and enforce “integration” policies that encourage newcomers to adopt majority norms and values, arguing that the faster such adoption happens, the more rapid admission itself can be. Integration policies ask newcomers to adopt the norms and practices of the majority community, whereas accommodation policies ask the majority to accommodate practices that are distinct from those that define the majority’s culture. On this conventional multicultural view, the process by which migrants are admitted to the territory, and then to membership, is a “two-way” street, requiring that both newcomers and the host state adapt in response to each other (Kymlicka 1998).

Is the demand that newcomers integrate culturally reasonable? Is it reasonable, that is, to ask immigrants to adopt the norms, values, and practices that are central to the culture they have joined (l will leave aside the question of economic and political integration, here)? Notice that in the political and sociological literature in immigration incorporation, integration (culturally) is typically distinguished from assimilation, where the former focuses on welcoming newcomers with the distinct sets of norms and values that travel with them (and so accommodating them where possible), and the latter demands that immigrants adopt as fully as possible the set of norms and values that are central to the host society (Brubaker 2001; see also Modood 2007). In the political theory literature on multiculturalism, however, it is widely accepted that a demand for full assimilation is normatively problematic (it requires too much of immigrants, to abandon their histories and identities, as part of joining a new community), but that some form of encouragement to integrate is permissible.

Whether the integration demands are permissible depends on at least two connected things, however: first, on the content of the shared public culture and, second, on the accessibility of the venues in which the content of this public culture is deliberated. The space in which a culture is deliberated is amorphous as well as expansive. The source of key norms, practices, and values is multi-fold: some are historical, some are deliberately adopted through political processes, some are accidentally adopted in response to contingent circumstances. The demand that newcomers integrate, in the sense of adopt the norms and practices of the majority culture to at least a reasonable extent is more defensible in cases where access to spaces in which they are deliberated is public and therefore open to many voices. The precise meaning of “accessibility” to spaces that are not clearly defined, and entry to which is not monitored or policed in any formal way, is challenging to pin down. But the key point is that to the extent that cultures welcome and take seriously new voices—in public media, in political spaces, and so on—they can be described as publicly accessible. So, there is a connection between the legitimacy of demanding adherence to majority culture norms and practices, as part of the process of integration, and the genuine access that newcomers have to the spaces in which they are deliberated.

In considering the second question, with respect to the content of a majority’s shared public culture, I borrow from the literature in the political theory of nationalism (though I do not believe that the language of nationalism itself is essential to appreciate its relevance to the discussion here). A culture can be defined by features that are more or less inclusive. Where cultures are defined by characteristics that are typically used to describe ethnic nations, including shared history, religion, ethnicity/race, newcomers are less easily able to join them and be recognized as full members. Where cultures are defined by characteristics that are typically used, on the other hand, to describe civic nations, including shared commitment to political institutions and, usually, a commitment to liberal democratic principles, then they are more welcoming for newcomers. In the language adopted earlier in this entry, cultures that are defined by exclusive features are more likely to treat culture as encompassing, whereas cultures that adopt inclusive features, and emphasize accessibility to the forums in which its content is deliberated, treat culture in dialogic or identity terms. This need not be the case, though, since those who treat culture in dialogic terms may nevertheless believe that key elements of history or religion are central to it (though they are open to deliberation about the appropriateness of these elements as central) and similarly identities can be formulated on the basis of exclusionary features.

Another way to define inclusivity focuses attention on the extent to which a culture’s main norms, practices, and values can be adopted by newcomers without their giving up something they value (Lenard 2019). Key here is to define the permissible contours of an inclusive culture that, at the same time, can serve to distinguish it from others in ways that resolve what philosophers have called the “particularity” problem. If cultures are defined only by commitment to liberal democratic principles and the institutions that instantiate them, then a person will necessarily be committed to any state that is so defined. But this conclusion does not make sense of the reality that many citizens are attached to their state’s interpretation of these values—fundamental, abstract, liberal democratic principles are adopted, respected, and instantiated, in other words, in a culturally specific way. It is important, then, to delineate the boundary of permissible cultural content, which can include recognition of key historical moments, or political conversations, or cultural icons. No state can demand of newcomers that their emotional commitment be to their new state; but it can reasonably impart information about learnable key cultural markers, encourage newcomers to adopt the associated practices and norms, and hope that over time their emotional identification shifts to the host state, at least partially (Carens 2005). Under the condition that the public cultural content of a host state is reasonably accessible, and that the forums in which it is deliberated are likewise reasonably accessible, then the host state can permissibly encourage the integration of newcomers. This right is perhaps best understood as derivative of the right to cultural continuity that states claim in relation to immigration, which can permissibly be claimed if and only if the accessibility conditions described above are met.

Not all scholars agree on this point, of course, and some reject entirely the suggestion that newcomers can be asked to make accommodations to the culture of the state that they have joined. Those who adopt variants on this view treat the majority’s culture as nearly always homogeneous and oppressive in ways that are disrespectful of newcomers, and treat the demand for integration along at least some dimensions as “cleaned up” variations on the discriminatory and racist immigration policies of the past (Abizadeh 2002). This is a real worry. When the Netherlands demanded that potential migrants from majority Muslim countries watch a video and pass a test merely to gain entry to its territory—a video that showed gay men kissing and a topless woman—it was widely excoriated for its discriminatory intent, rather than (as was claimed) an attempt to ensure that migrants could adopt the liberal values that supposedly characterized the country’s culture. More generally, the mechanisms of encouraging the learning and adoption of the majority culture’s values, in addition to its actual content as delineated above, as well as the consequences for failure to do so, must be scrutinized for their reasonableness. This assessment is a tricky business, certainly, made trickier because in many (if not most) immigration situations, the potential newcomer is in a situation of vulnerability in relation to the host state: their interest in gaining entry is very strong and so in many cases, they will accept heavy-handed attempts to coerce their integration without complaint.

Both minority groups (many of which are immigrant groups) and majority groups claim that “culture” is important and deserving of accommodation in multiple ways. This entry began with an examination of the multiple ways in which culture has been understood, to unpack the ways in which it is deployed when specific cultural rights are claimed. It is important to notice that these cultural claims, on both sides, are often made in relation to each other: a minority group demands a particular cultural right and the majority responds by claiming a different cultural right. In many cases, the choice to respect or ignore claimed cultural rights is framed in terms of the impact that doing so will have on the culture of the majority, for example, by stating that a particular practice for which accommodation is requested is incompatible with the majority culture in general, or sometimes more specifically with a particular practice or norm that is believed to be particularly important. The latter claim was made, for example, in France, during “l’affaire du foulard”—the right to cover one’s head as a manifestation of Islamic (or Jewish) religious commitment was denied for the way in which it compromised the French’s commitment to laicity (Laborde 2008; Benhabib 2004).

This entry has attempted to offer the resources that are essential to adjudicating these conflicts, in ways that take seriously both those who demand cultural rights and those who resist respecting them. Hopefully, future political theory can make use of this taxonomy to identify satisfactory conclusions to these conflicts when they arise.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Matthias Hoesch, Margaret Moore, and Stéfanie Morris for comments on an earlier draft of this entry.

Copyright © 2020 by Patti Tamara Lenard < Patti . Lenard @ uottawa . ca >

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106 Cultural Identity Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

Cultural identity is a concept that refers to the sense of belonging and identification individuals have with a particular culture or ethnic group. It plays a significant role in shaping one's values, beliefs, traditions, and behaviors. Writing an essay on cultural identity allows individuals to explore and understand their own cultural backgrounds, as well as those of others. To help you get started, here are 106 cultural identity essay topic ideas and examples:

• Exploring the concept of cultural identity.
• How does cultural identity impact an individual's perspective on the world?
• The role of language in cultural identity.
• The influence of cultural identity on personal relationships.
• The impact of globalization on cultural identity.
• The challenges faced by individuals with a multicultural background.
• How cultural identity shapes one's perception of beauty.
• The connection between cultural identity and self-esteem.
• The portrayal of cultural identity in literature and art.
• The impact of cultural identity on educational achievements.
• How cultural identity affects one's career choices.
• The role of cultural identity in shaping political opinions.
• The influence of cultural identity on religious beliefs and practices.
• The impact of cultural identity on gender roles and expectations.
• The challenges of maintaining cultural identity in a foreign country.
• The role of cultural identity in shaping fashion trends.
• The impact of cultural identity on food and cuisine.
• The connection between cultural identity and music preferences.
• The role of cultural identity in shaping sports and athleticism.
• The influence of cultural identity on parenting styles and values.
• How cultural identity affects attitudes towards health and wellness.
• The impact of cultural identity on social media usage.
• The role of cultural identity in shaping travel preferences.
• The connection between cultural identity and environmental attitudes.
• The influence of cultural identity on communication styles.
• How cultural identity affects attitudes towards technology.
• The impact of cultural identity on social justice and activism.
• The role of cultural identity in shaping concepts of time and punctuality.
• The connection between cultural identity and storytelling traditions.
• The influence of cultural identity on celebrations and holidays.
• How cultural identity affects attitudes towards marriage and family.
• The impact of cultural identity on body image and beauty standards.
• The role of cultural identity in shaping leadership styles.
• The connection between cultural identity and historical narratives.
• The influence of cultural identity on funeral and mourning practices.
• How cultural identity affects attitudes towards disability and inclusion.
• The impact of cultural identity on concepts of privacy and personal space.
• The role of cultural identity in shaping attitudes towards immigration.
• The connection between cultural identity and social class.
• The influence of cultural identity on leisure and recreational activities.
• How cultural identity affects attitudes towards mental health and therapy.
• The impact of cultural identity on perceptions of justice and fairness.
• The role of cultural identity in shaping concepts of beauty and attractiveness.
• The connection between cultural identity and social media activism.
• The influence of cultural identity on attitudes towards climate change.
• How cultural identity affects attitudes towards animal rights and conservation.
• The impact of cultural identity on perceptions of technology and innovation.
• The role of cultural identity in shaping attitudes towards entrepreneurship.
• The connection between cultural identity and political engagement.
• The influence of cultural identity on attitudes towards globalization.
• How cultural identity affects attitudes towards multiculturalism and diversity.
• The impact of cultural identity on perceptions of patriotism and national identity.
• The role of cultural identity in shaping attitudes towards immigration policy.
• The connection between cultural identity and attitudes towards cultural appropriation.
• The influence of cultural identity on attitudes towards cultural preservation.
• How cultural identity affects attitudes towards cultural assimilation.
• The impact of cultural identity on perceptions of cultural imperialism.
• The role of cultural identity in shaping attitudes towards cultural exchange.
• The connection between cultural identity and attitudes towards cultural relativism.
• The influence of cultural identity on attitudes towards cultural heritage.
• How cultural identity affects attitudes towards cultural diplomacy.
• The impact of cultural identity on perceptions of cultural authenticity.
• The role of cultural identity in shaping attitudes towards cultural tourism.
• The connection between cultural identity and attitudes towards cultural genocide.
• The influence of cultural identity on attitudes towards cultural nationalism.
• How cultural identity affects attitudes towards cultural diversity.
• The impact of cultural identity on perceptions of cultural appropriation in fashion.
• The role of cultural identity in shaping attitudes towards cultural preservation in architecture.
• The connection between cultural identity and attitudes towards cultural exchange in music.
• The influence of cultural identity on attitudes towards cultural assimilation in literature.
• How cultural identity affects attitudes towards cultural imperialism in media.
• The impact of cultural identity on perceptions of cultural authenticity in food.
• The role of cultural identity in shaping attitudes towards cultural heritage in museums.
• The connection between cultural identity and attitudes towards cultural relativism in philosophy.
• The influence of cultural identity on attitudes towards cultural diplomacy in politics.
• How cultural identity affects attitudes towards cultural diversity in education.
• The impact of cultural identity on perceptions of cultural appropriation in art.
• The role of cultural identity in shaping attitudes towards cultural preservation in language.
• The connection between cultural identity and attitudes towards cultural exchange in dance.
• The influence of cultural identity on attitudes towards cultural assimilation in film.
• How cultural identity affects attitudes towards cultural imperialism in literature.
• The impact of cultural identity on perceptions of cultural authenticity in fashion.
• The role of cultural identity in shaping attitudes towards cultural heritage in music.
• The connection between cultural identity and attitudes towards cultural relativism in history.
• The influence of cultural identity on attitudes towards cultural diplomacy in sports.
• How cultural identity affects attitudes towards cultural diversity in the workplace.
• The impact of cultural identity on perceptions of cultural appropriation in music.
• The role of cultural identity in shaping attitudes towards cultural preservation in theater.
• The connection between cultural identity and attitudes towards cultural exchange in visual arts.
• The influence of cultural identity on attitudes towards cultural assimilation in cuisine.
• How cultural identity affects attitudes towards cultural imperialism in architecture.
• The impact of cultural identity on perceptions of cultural authenticity in literature.
• The role of cultural identity in shaping attitudes towards cultural heritage in film.
• The connection between cultural identity and attitudes towards cultural relativism in music.
• The influence of cultural identity on attitudes towards cultural diplomacy in fashion.
• How cultural identity affects attitudes towards cultural diversity in media.
• The impact of cultural identity on perceptions of cultural appropriation in theater.
• The role of cultural identity in shaping attitudes towards cultural preservation in film.
• The connection between cultural identity and attitudes towards cultural exchange in literature.
• The influence of cultural identity on attitudes towards cultural assimilation in visual arts.
• How cultural identity affects attitudes towards cultural imperialism in music.
• The impact of cultural identity on perceptions of cultural authenticity in theater.
• The role of cultural identity in shaping attitudes towards cultural heritage in dance.
• The connection between cultural identity and attitudes towards cultural relativism in fashion.
• The influence of cultural identity on attitudes towards cultural diplomacy in literature.
• How cultural identity affects attitudes towards cultural diversity in politics.

These cultural identity essay topic ideas and examples offer a wide range of options for exploring the intricate aspects of cultural identity. Remember to choose a topic that resonates with your personal experiences, interests, and perspectives. Good luck with your essay!

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• Section 2. Building Relationships with People from Different Cultures

Chapter 27 Sections

• Section 1. Understanding Culture and Diversity in Building Communities
• Section 3. Healing from the Effects of Internalized Oppression
• Section 4. Strategies and Activities for Reducing Racial Prejudice and Racism
• Section 5. Learning to be an Ally for People from Diverse Groups and Backgrounds
• Section 6. Creating Opportunities for Members of Groups to Identify Their Similarities, Differences, and Assets
• Section 7. Building Culturally Competent Organizations
• Section 8. Multicultural Collaboration
• Section 9. Transforming Conflicts in Diverse Communities
• Section 10. Understanding Culture, Social Organization, and Leadership to Enhance Engagement
• Section 11. Building Inclusive Communities
• Main Section

Relationships are powerful. Our one-to-one connections with each other are the foundation for change. And building relationships with people from different cultures, often many different cultures , is key in building diverse communities that are powerful enough to achieve significant goals.

Whether you want to make sure your children get a good education, bring quality health care into your communities, or promote economic development, there is a good chance you will need to work with people from several different racial, language, ethnic, or economic groups. And in order to work with people from different cultural groups effectively, you will need to build sturdy and caring relationships based on trust, understanding, and shared goals.

Why? Because trusting relationships are the glue that hold people together as they work on a common problem. As people work on challenging problems, they will have to hang in there together when things get hard. They will have to support each other to stay with an effort, even when it feels discouraging. People will have to resist the efforts of those who use divide-and-conquer techniques--pitting one cultural group against another.

Regardless of your racial, ethnic, religious, or socioeconomic group, you will probably need to establish relationships with people whose group you may know very little about.

Each one of us is like a hub of a wheel. Each one of us can build relationships and friendships around ourselves that provide us with the necessary strength to achieve community goals. If each person builds a network of diverse and strong relationships, we can come together and solve problems that we have in common.

In this section, we are going to talk about:

• Becoming aware of your own culture as a first step in learning about other people's culture.
• Building relationships with people from many different cultures.

But first let's talk about what culture is . Culture is a complex concept, with many different definitions. But, simply put, "culture" refers to a group or community with which we share common experiences that shape the way we understand the world . It includes groups that we are born into, such as race, national origin, class, or religion. It can also include groups we join or become part of. For example, we can acquire a new culture by moving to a new region, by a change in our economic status, or by becoming disabled. When we think of culture this broadly we realize we all belong to many cultures at once. Do you agree? How might this apply to you?

How do you learn about people's cultures?

Start by becoming aware of your own culture..

It may seem odd that in order to learn about people in other cultures, we start by becoming more aware of our own culture. But we believe this is true. Why?

If you haven't had a chance to understand how your culture has affected you first hand, it's more difficult to understand how it could affect anyone else or why it might be important to them. If you are comfortable talking about your own culture, then you will become better at listening to others talk about theirs. Or, if you understand how discrimination has affected you, then you may be more aware of how it has affected others.

Here are some tips on how to becoming more aware of your own culture:

What is your culture?

Do you have a culture? Do you have more than one? What is your cultural background?

Even if you don't know who your ancestors are, you have a culture. Even if you are a mix of many cultures, you have one. Culture evolves and changes all the time. It came from your ancestors from many generations ago, and it comes from your family and community today.

In addition to the cultural groups we belong to, we also each have groups we identify with, such as being a parent, an athlete, an immigrant, a small business owner, or a wage worker. These kinds of groups, although not exactly the same as a culture, have similarities to cultural groups. For example, being a parent or and an immigrant may be an identity that influences how you view the world and how the world views you. Becoming aware of your different identities can help you understand what it might be like to belong to a cultural group.

Exercise: Try listing all the cultures and identities you have: (This is just a list of suggestions to get you started. Add as many as you think describe you.) What is your: Religion Nationality Race Sexual identity Ethnicity Occupation Marital status Age Geographic region Are you: A female A male Nonbinary or genderqueer Disabled From an urban area From a rural area A parent A student Have you ever been: In the military Poor In prison Wealthy In the middle class In the working class

Did this help you think about your identities and cultures? How have these different cultures and identities affected your life?

How do you build relationships with people from other cultures?

There are many ways that people can learn about other people's cultures and build relationships at the same time. Here are some steps you can take. They are first listed, and then elaborated upon one at a time.

• Make a conscious decision to establish friendships with people from other cultures.
• Put yourself in situations where you will meet people of other cultures.

Examine your biases about people from other cultures.

• Ask people questions about their cultures, customs, and views.
• Read about other people's culture's and histories

Listen to people tell their stories

• Notice differences in communication styles and values; don't assume that the majority's way is the right way

Risk making mistakes

• Learn to be an ally.

Make a conscious decision to establish friendships with people from other cultures

Making a decision is the first step. In order to build relationships with people different from yourself, you have to make a concerted effort to do so. There are societal forces that serve to separate us from each other. People from different economic groups, religions, ethnic groups, and races are often isolated from each other in schools, jobs, and neighborhoods. So, if we want things to be different, we need to take active steps to make them different.

You can join a sports team or club, become active in an organization, choose a job, or move to a neighborhood that puts you in contact with people of cultures different than your own. Also, you may want to take a few minutes to notice the diversity that is presently nearby. If you think about the people you see and interact with every day, you may become more aware of the cultural differences that are around you.

Once you have made the decision to make friends with people different from yourself, you can go ahead and make friends with them in much the same way as with anyone else. You may need to take more time, and you may need to be more persistent. You may need to reach out and take the initiative more than you are used to. People who have been mistreated by society may take more time to trust you than people who haven't. Don't let people discourage you. There are good reasons why people have built up defenses, but it is not impossible to overcome them and make a connection. The effort is totally worth it.

Put yourself in situations where you will meet people of other cultures; especially if you haven't had the experience of being a minority, take the risk.

One of the first and most important steps is to show up in places where you will meet people of cultures other than your own. Go to meetings and celebrations of groups whose members you want to get to know. Or hang out in restaurants and other gathering places that different cultural groups go. You may feel embarrassed or shy at first, but your efforts will pay off. People of a cultural group will notice if you take the risk of coming to one of their events. If it is difficult for you to be the only person like yourself attending, you can bring a buddy with you and support each other in making friends. At these events, it is important to participate, but make sure you do not become the center of the event in order to lift up the voices and actions of the people leading the event.

We all carry misinformation and stereotypes about people in different cultures. Especially, when we are young, we acquire this information in bits and pieces from TV, from listening to people talk, and from the culture at large. We are not bad people because we acquired this; no one requested to be misinformed. But in order to build relationships with people of different cultures, we have to become aware of the misinformation we acquired.

An excellent way to become aware of your own stereotypes is to pick groups that you generalize about and write down your opinions. Once you have, examine the thoughts that came to your mind and where you acquired them.

Another way to become aware of stereotypes is to talk about them with people who have similar cultures to your own. In such settings you can talk about the misinformation you acquired without being offensive to people from a particular group. You can get together with a friend or two and talk about how you acquired stereotypes or fears of other different people. You can answer these kinds of questions:

• How did your parents feel about different ethnic, racial, or religious groups?
• What did your parents communicate to you with their actions and words?
• Were your parents friends with people from many different groups?
• What did you learn in school about a particular group?
• Was there a lack of information about some people?
• Are there some people you shy away from? Why?

Ask people questions about their cultures, customs, and views

People, for the most part, want to be asked questions about their lives and their cultures. Many of us were told that asking questions was nosy; but if we are thoughtful, asking questions can help you learn about people of different cultures and help build relationships. People are usually pleasantly surprised when others show interest in their cultures. If you are sincere and you can listen, people will tell you a lot.

Read about other people's cultures and histories

It helps to read about and learn about people's cultures and histories. If you know something about the reality of someone's life and history, it shows that you care enough to take the time to find out about it. It also gives you background information that will make it easier to ask questions that make sense.

However, you don't have to be an expert on someone's culture to get to know them or to ask questions. People who are, themselves, from a culture are usually the best experts, anyway.

Don't forget to care and show caring

It is easy to forget that the basis of any relationship is caring. Everyone wants to care and be cared about. Caring about people is what makes a relationship real. Don't let your awkwardness around cultural differences get in the way of caring about people.

If you get an opportunity to hear someone tell you her life story first hand, you can learn a lot--and build a strong relationship at the same time. Every person has an important story to tell. Each person's story tells something about their culture.

Listening to people's stories, we can get a fuller picture of what people's lives are like--their feelings, their nuances, and the richness of their lives. Listening to people also helps us get through our numbness-- there is a real person before us, not someone who is reduced to stereotypes in the media.

Additionally, listening to members of groups that have been discriminated against can give us a better understanding of what that experience is like. Listening gives us a picture of discrimination that is more real than what we can get from reading an article or listening to the radio.

Exercise: You can informally ask people in your neighborhood or organization to tell you a part of their life stories as a member of a particular group. You can also incorporate this activity into a workshop or retreat for your group or organization. Have people each take five or ten minutes to talk about one piece of their life stories. If the group is large, you will probably have to divide into small groups, so everyone gets a chance to speak.

Notice differences in communication styles and values; don't assume that the majority's way is the right way.

We all have a tendency to assume that the way that most people do things is the acceptable, normal, or right way. As community workers, we need to learn about cultural differences in values and communication styles, and not assume that the majority way is the right way to think or behave.

Example: You are in a group discussion. Some group members don't speak up, while others dominate, filling all the silences. The more vocal members of the group become exasperated that others don't talk. It also seems that the more vocal people are those that are members of the more mainstream culture, while those who are less vocal are from minority cultures. How do we understand this? How can this be resolved? In some cultures, people feel uncomfortable with silence, so they speak to fill the silences. In other cultures, it is customary to wait for a period of silence before speaking. If there aren't any silences, people from those cultures may not ever speak. Also, members of some groups (women, people of low income, some racial and ethnic minorities, and others) don't speak up because they have received messages from society at large that their contribution is not as important as others; they have gotten into the habit of deferring their thinking to the thinking of others. When some people don't share their thinking, we all lose out. We all need the opinions and voices of those people who have traditionally been discouraged from contributing. In situations like the one described above, becoming impatient with people for not speaking is usually counter-productive. However, you can structure a meeting to encourage the quieter people to speak. For example, you can: Have people break into pairs before discussing a topic in the larger group. At certain times have each person in the circle make a comment. (People can pass if they want to.) Follow a guideline that everyone speaks once, before anyone speaks twice. Invite the quieter people to lead part of the meeting. Talk about the problem openly in a meeting, and invite the more vocal people to try to speak less often. Between meetings, ask the quieter people what would help them speak, or ask them for their ideas on how a meeting should be run. A high school basketball team has to practice and play on many afternoons and evenings. One team member is a recent immigrant whose family requires her to attend the birthday parties of all the relatives in her extended family. The coach is angry with the parents for this requirement, because it takes his player away from the team. How do we understand this? How can this be resolved? Families have different values, especially when it comes to family closeness, loyalty, and responsibility. In many immigrant and ethnic families, young people are required to put their family's needs first, before the requirements of extra-curricular activities. Young people from immigrant families who grow up in the U.S. often feel torn between the majority culture and the culture of their families; they feel pressure from each cultures to live according to its values, and they feel they have to choose between the two. As community workers, we need to support and respect minority and immigrant families and their values. It may already be a huge concession on the part of a family to allow a teenager to participate in extracurricular activities at all. We need to make allowances for the cultural differences and try to help young people feel that they can have both worlds--instead of having to reject one set of values for another. As community builders, it helps to develop relationships with parents. If a young person sees her parents have relationships with people from the mainstream culture, it can help her feel that their family is accepted. It supports the teen in being more connected to her family and her community--and also, both relationships are critical protective factors for drug and alcohol abuse and other dangerous behaviors. In addition, in building relationships with parents, we develop lines of communication, so when conflicts arise, they can be more easily resolved.

As you are building relationships with people who have different cultural backgrounds than your own, you will probably make mistakes at some point. That happens. Don't let the fear of making mistakes keep you from going ahead and building relationships.

If you say or do something that is insensitive, you can learn something from it. Ask the affected person what bothered or offended them, apologize, and then go on in building the relationship. Don't let guilt bog you down.

Learn to be an ally

One of the best ways to help you build relationships with people of different cultures is to demonstrate that you are willing to take a stand against discrimination when it occurs. People will be much more motivated to get to know you if they see that you are willing to take risks on their behalf.

We also have to educate ourselves and keep informed so that we understand the issues that each group faces and we become involved in their struggles--instead of sitting on the sidelines and watching from a distance. Educate yourself about other cultures by doing your own research, don't ask others to do it for you. There are many resources in this chapter to help you learn. 

Friendship is powerful. It is our connection to each other that gives meaning to our lives. Our caring for each other is often what motivates us to make change. And establishing connections with people from diverse backgrounds can be key in making significant changes in our communities.

As individuals, and in groups, we can change our communities. We can set up neighborhoods and institutions in which people commit themselves to working to form strong relationships and alliances with people of diverse cultures and backgrounds. We can establish networks and coalitions in which people are knowledgeable about each other's struggles, and are willing to lend a hand. Together, we can do it.

Online Resources

Brown University Training Materials :  Cultural Competence and Community Studies: Concepts and Practices for Cultural Competence  The Northeast Education Partnership provides online access to PowerPoint training slides on topics in research ethics and cultural competence in environmental research. These have been created for professionals/students in environmental sciences, health, and policy; and community-based research. If you are interested in receiving an electronic copy of one the presentations, just download their Materials Request Form (found on the main Training Presentations page under "related files"), complete the form, and email it to [email protected] .

The Center for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services  collects and describes early childhood/early intervention resources and serves as point of exchange for users.

Chapter 8: Respect for Diversity in the "Introduction to Community Psychology" explains cultural humility as an approach to diversity, the dimensions of diversity, the complexity of identity, and important cultural considerations.

Culture Matters  is a cross-cultural training workbook developed by the Peace Corps to help new volunteers acquire the knowledge and skills to work successfully and respectfully in other cultures.

Diverse Teams Feel Less Comfortable — and That’s Why They Perform Better from the Harvard Business Review.

Exploring Community-led Racial Healing Models to Deepen Partnerships between Community Development and Healthcare  from the Build Healthy Places Network.

The International & Cross-Cultural Evaluation Topical Interest Group , an organization that is affiliated with the American Evaluation Association, provides evaluators who are interested in cross-cultural issues with opportunities for professional development.

The Multicultural Pavilion  offers resources and dialogue for educators, students and activists on all aspects of multicultural education.

The National Center for Cultural Competence  at Georgetown University increases the capacity of health care and mental health programs to design, implement and evaluate culturally and linguistically competent service delivery systems. Publications and web links available.

National Public Radio's Life Kit project  discusses the importance of having parents talk about social identities with their children.

SIL International makes available " The Stranger’s Eyes ," an article that speaks to cultural sensitivity with questions that can be strong tools for discussion.

Study, Discussion and Action on Issues of Race, Racism and Inclusion : a partial list of resources utilized and prepared by Yusef Mgeni.

Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack : Reflect on how your privilege allows you to walk through the world in order to better connect with others in this essay by Peggy McIntosh.

Organizations:

Center for Living Democracy 289 Fox Farm Rd PO Box 8187 Brattleboro, VT 05304-8187 (802) 254-1234

National Coalition Building Institute (NCBI) 1835 K Street, N.W., Suite 715 Washington, D.C. 20006 (202) 785-9400

Re-evaluation Counseling 719 Second Avenue North Seattle, WA 98109 (206) 284-0113

Southern Poverty Law Center 400 Washington Ave. Montgomery, AL 36104

Print Resource

Axner, D. (1993).  The Community leadership project curriculum . Pomfret, CT: Topsfield Foundation.

Banks, J. (1997).  Educating citizens in a multicultural society . New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Brown, C.,& Mazza, G. (1997).  Healing into action . Washington, DC: National Coalition Building Institute.

DuPraw, M.,& Axner, M. (1997).  Working on common cross-cultural communication challenges . In Martha McCoy, et. al., Toward a More Perfect Union in an Age of Diversity. Pomfret, CT: Topsfield Foundation, 12-16.

Ford, C. (1994).  We can all get along: 50 steps you can take to end racism . New York, NY: Dell Publishing.

Kaye, G., & Wolff, T. (1995).  From the ground up: A workbook on coalition building and community development . Amherst, MA: AHEC/Community Partners. (Available from Tom Wolff and Associates.)

McCoy, M.,&  et al. (1997).  Toward a more perfect union in an age of diversity: A guide for building stronger communities through public dialogue . Pomfret, CT: Topsfield Foundation.

McIntosh, P. (1988).  White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women's studies . Wellesley, MA: Center for Research on Women, Wellesley College.

Okihiro, G. (1994).  Margins and mainstreams: Asians in American history and culture . Seattle, WA: The University of Washington Press.

Takaki, R. (1993).  A different mirror: A history of multicultural America . Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

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Essays about Culture and Identity: 9 Examples And Prompts

Writing essays about culture and identity will help you explore your understanding of it. Here are examples that will give you inspiration for your next essay.

Culture can refer to customs, traditions, beliefs, lifestyles, laws, artistic expressions, and other elements that cultivate the collective identity. Different cultures are established across nations, regions, communities, and social groups. They are passed on from generation to generation while others evolve or are abolished to give way to modern beliefs and systems.

While our cultural identity begins at home, it changes as we involve ourselves with other groups (friends, educational institutions, social media communities, political groups, etc.) Culture is a very relatable subject as every person is part of a culture or at least can identify with one. Because it spans broad coverage, there are several interesting cultural subjects to write about.

Our culture and identity are dynamic. This is why you may find it challenging to write about it. To spark your inspiration, check out our picks of the best culture essays. 

1. Sweetness and Light by Matthew Arnolds

2. how auto-tune revolutionized the sound of popular music by simon reynolds, 3. how immigration changes language by john mcwhorter, 4. the comfort zone: growing up with charlie brown by jonathan franzen, 5. culture and identity definition by sandra graham, 6. how culture and surroundings influence identity by jeanette lucas, 7. how the food we eat reflects our culture and identity by sophia stephens, 8. identity and culture: my identity, culture, and identity by april casas, 9. how america hinders the cultural identity of their own citizens by seth luna, 1. answer the question, “who am i”, 2. causes of culture shock, 3. your thoughts on dystopia and utopia, 4. gender inequality from a global perspective, 5. the most interesting things you learned from other cultures, 6. the relationship between cultural identity and clothes, 7. describe your culture, 8. what is the importance of honoring your roots , 9. how can a person adapt to a new culture, 10. what artistic works best express your country’s culture, 11. how has social media influenced human interaction, 12. how do you protect the cultures of indigenous peoples, 13. are k-pop and k-drama sensations effectively promoting korea’s culture , 14. what is the importance of cultural diversity.

“… [A]nd when every man may say what he likes, our aspirations ought to be satisfied. But the aspirations of culture, which is the study of perfection, are not satisfied, unless what men say, when they may say what they like, is worth saying,—has good in it, and more good than bad.”

Arnolds compels a re-examination of values at a time when England is leading global industrialization and beginning to believe that greatness is founded on material progress. 

The author elaborates why culture, the strive for a standard of perfection, is not merely driven by scientific passions and, more so, by materialistic affluence. As he esteems religion as “that voice of the deepest human experience” to harmonize men in establishing that ideal society, Arnolds stresses that culture is the effort to “make reason and the will of God prevail” while humanizing gained knowledge to be society’s source of “sweetness and light.”

“Few innovations in sound production have been simultaneously so reviled and so revolutionary. Epoch-defining or epoch-defacing, Auto-Tune is indisputably the sound of the 21st century so far.”

Reynolds shows how Auto-Tune has shaped a pop music genre that has cut across cultures. The article maps out the music landscape Auto-Tune created and examines its impact on the culture of song productions and the modern taste for music. While the author debunks accusations that Auto-Tune destroyed the “natural” process of creating music, he also points out that the technology earned its reverence with big thanks to society’s current custom of using technology to hide blemishes and other imperfections.

Looking for more? Check out these essays about culture shock .

“… [T]he heavy immigration that countries like Italy are experiencing will almost certainly birth new kinds of Italian that are rich with slang, somewhat less elaborate than the standard, and… widely considered signs of linguistic deterioration, heralding a future where the “original” standard language no longer exists.”

American linguist McWhorter pacifies fears over the death of “standard” languages amid the wave of immigration to Europe. On the contrary, language is a vital expression of a culture, and for some, preserving is tantamount to upholding a cultural standard. 

However, instead of seeing the rise of new “multiethnolects” such as the Black English in America and Kiezdeutsch in Germany as threats to language and culture, McWhorter sees them as a new way to communicate and better understand the social groups that forayed these new languages.

“I wonder why “cartoonish” remains such a pejorative. It took me half my life to achieve seeing my parents as cartoons. And to become more perfectly a cartoon myself: what a victory that would be.”

This essay begins with a huge fight between Franzen’s brother and father to show how the cultural generation gap sweeping the 60s has hit closer to home. This generation gap, where young adults were rejecting the elders’ old ways in pursuit of a new and better culture, will also be the reason why his family ends up drifting apart. Throughout the essay, Franzen treads this difficult phase in his youth while narrating fondly how Peanuts, a pop culture icon at the time, was his source of escape. 

“…Culture is… your background… and Identity is formed where you belong to… Leopold Sedar Senghor and Shirley Geok-Lin Lim both talks about how culture and identity can impact… society…”

In this essay, Graham uses “To New York” by Senghor and “Learning To Love America” by Lim as two pieces of literature that effectively describe the role of culture and identity to traveling individuals. 

The author refers to Sengho’s reminder that people can adapt but must not forget their culture even if they go to a different place or country. On the other hand, Lim discusses immigrants’ struggle to have double identities.

“Culture is something that surrounds all of us and progress to shape our lives every day… Identity is illustrated as the state of mind in which someone or something distinguishes their own character traits that lead to determining who they really are, what they represent.”

Lucas is keen on giving examples of how his culture and surroundings influence an individual’s identity. She refers to Kothari’s “If you are what you eat, then what am I?” which discusses Kothari’s search for her identity depending on what food she eats. Food defines a person’s culture and identity, so Kothari believes that eating food from different countries will change his identity.

Lucas also refers to “Down These Mean Streets” by Piri Thomas, which argues how different cultural and environmental factors affect us. Because of what we encounter, there is a possibility that we will become someone who we are not. 

“What we grow is who we are. What we buy is who we are. What we eat is who we are.”

Stephens’ essay teaches its readers that the food we grow and eat defines us as a person. She explains that growing a crop and harvesting it takes a lot of effort, dedication, and patience, which mirrors our identity. 

Another metaphor she used is planting rice: it takes skills and knowledge to make it grow. Cooking rice is more accessible than cultivating it – you can quickly cook rice by boiling it in water. This reflects people rich in culture and tradition but who lives simpler life. 

“Every single one has their own unique identity and culture. Culture plays a big role in shaping your identity. Culture is what made me the person I am today and determines who or what I choose to associate myself with.”

Casas starts her piece by questioning who she is. In trying to learn and define who she is, she writes down and describes herself and her personality throughout the essay. Finally, she concludes that her culture is a big part of her identity, and she must understand it to understand herself.

“When it comes to these stereotypes we place on each other, a lot of the time, we succumb to the stereotypes given to us. And our cultural identity is shaped by these expectations and labels others give us. That is why negative stereotypes sometimes become true for a whole group or community.”

In this essay, Luna talks about how negative stereotyping in the United States led to moral distortion. For example, Americans are assumed to be ignorant of other countries’ cultures, making it difficult to understand other people’s cultures and lifestyles. 

She believes that stereotyping can significantly affect an individual or group’s identity. She suggests Americans should improve their intellectual competence by being sensitive to other people’s cultures.

14 Prompts on Essays about Culture and Identity

You can discuss many things on the subject of culture and identity. To give you a starting point, here are some prompts to help you write an exciting essay about culture. 

If you are interested in learning more, check out our essay writing tips and our round-up of the best essay checkers .

Understanding your personality is vital since continuous interaction with others can affect your personality. Write about your culture and identity; what is your personality? How do you define yourself? Everyone is unique, so by writing an essay about who you are, you’ll be able to understand why you act a certain way and connect with readers who have the same values. 

Here’s a guide on writing a descriptive essay to effectively relay your experience to your readers.

Sometimes, people need to get out of their comfort zone and interact with other individuals with different cultures, beliefs, or traditions. This is to broaden one’s perspective about the world. Aside from discussing what you’ve learned in that journey, you can also focus on the bits that shocked you. 

You can talk about a tradition or value that you found so bizarre because it differs from your culture. Then add how you processed it and finally adapted to it.

Dystopia and Utopia are both imagined worlds. Dystopia is a world where people live in the worst or most unfavorable conditions, while Utopia is the opposite. 

You can write an essay about what you think a Dystopian or Utopian world may look like, how these societies will affect their citizens, etc. Then, consider what personality citizens of each world may have to depend on the two worlds’ cultures.

Today, more and more people are fighting for others to accept or at least respect the LGBTQ+ community. However, countries, territories, and religions still question their rights.

In your essay, you can talk about why these institutions react the way they do and how culture dictates someone’s identity in the wrong way. Before creating your own, feel free to read other essays and articles to learn more about the global gender inequality issue. 

The world has diverse cultures, traditions, and values. When you travel to a new place, learning and writing about your firsthand experiences with unique cultures and rituals will always be an interesting read.

In this prompt, you’ll research other cultures and how they shaped their group’s identity. Then, write about the most exciting aspects you’ve learned, why you found them fascinating, and how they differ from your culture.

Those proud of their culture will wear clothes inspired by them. Some wear the same clothes even if they aren’t from the same culture. The debate over cultural appropriation and culture appreciation is still a hot topic. 

In this essay, you may start with the traditions of your community or observances your family celebrates and gathers for. Then, elaborate on their origins and describe how your community or family is preserving these practices. 

Learning about your roots, ancestors, and family cultures can help strengthen your understanding of your identity and foster respect for other cultures. Explore this topic and offer examples of what others have learned. Has the journey always been a positive experience? Delve into this question for an engaging and interesting essay.

When a person moves country, it can be challenging to adapt to a new culture. If there are new people at work or school, you can interview them and ask how they are coping with their new environment. How different is this from what they have been used to, and what unique traditions do they find interesting?

Focus on an art piece that is a source of pride and identity to your country’s culture, much like the Tinikling of the Philippines or the Matryoshka dolls of Russia. Explore its origins and evolution up to its current manifestation and highlight efforts that are striving to protect and promote these artistic works.

The older generation did not have computers in their teen years. Ask about how they dated in their younger years and how they made friends. Contrast how the younger generation is building their social networks today. Write what culture of socialization works better for you and explain why.

Take in-depth navigation of existing policies that protect indigenous peoples. Are they sufficient to serve these communities needs, and are they being implemented effectively? There is also the challenge of balancing the protection of these traditions against the need to protect the environment, as some indigenous practices add to the carbon footprint. How is your government dealing with this challenge?

A large population is now riding the Hallyu or the Korean pop culture, with many falling in love with the artists and Korea’s food, language, and traditional events. Research how certain Korean films, TV series, or music have effectively attracted fans to experience Korea’s culture. Write about what countries can learn from Korea in promoting their own cultures.

Environments that embrace cultural diversity are productive and innovative. To start your essay, assess how diverse your workplace or school is. Then, write your personal experiences where working with co-workers or classmates from different cultures led to new and innovative ideas and projects. Combine this with the personal experiences of your boss or the principal to see how your environment benefits from hosting a melting pot of cultures.

If you aim for your article to effectively change readers’ perspectives and align with your opinion, read our guide to achieving persuasive writing . 

Aisling is an Irish journalist and content creator with a BA in Journalism & New Media. She has bylines in OK! Magazine, Metro, The Inquistr, and the Irish Examiner. She loves to read horror and YA. Find Aisling on LinkedIn .

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Articles on Cultural ties

Displaying all articles.

First Nations people often take on the ‘cultural load’ in their workplaces. Employers need to ease this burden

Nina Sivertsen , Flinders University ; Courtney Ryder , Flinders University , and Tahlia Johnson , Flinders University

Maasai beads: the interplay between Europe and Africa

Vanessa Wijngaarden , University of Johannesburg

Can football help Britain boost its post-Brexit  trade?

Simon Chadwick , University of Salford

How ‘Asiavision’ could be a boon for cultural diplomacy

Jess Carniel , University of Southern Queensland and Damien Spry , University of Sydney

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• Neuroscience

How Culture Wires Our Brains

Cultural values may leave a greater impact on our brain more than our behaviors..

Posted January 26, 2017 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

Culture has been called “an amalgam of values, meanings, conventions and artifacts that constitute daily social realities” (Kitayama & Park, 2010). As a system of meaning and shared beliefs, culture provides a framework for our behavioral and affective norms.

Countless studies in cultural psychology have examined the effect of culture on all aspects of our behavior, cognition , and emotion , delineating both differences and similarities across populations.

More recently, findings in cultural neuroscience have outlined possible ways that the cultural scripts we learn during childhood and the cultural practices we observe as adults influence our brains.

First, what is cultural neuroscience?

As an interdisciplinary field of research, cultural neuroscience investigates the relationship between culture and the brain, particularly, the ways in which culture “both constructs and is constructed by the mind and its underlying brain pathways” (Kitayama & Park, 2010).

Exactly how might culture wire our brains? According to findings from cultural neuroscience, the mechanism has to do with the brain’s plasticity, or the brain’s ability to adapt to long-lasting engagement in scripted behaviors (i.e. cultural tasks ). The capacity of our brains to undergo structural changes from recurrent daily tasks has been well documented (e.g., larger hippocampi — a region that is intimately involved in spatial memory — of London taxi drivers ; increased cortical density in the motor cortex of jugglers ).

Analogously, in order to process various cultural functions with more fluency, culture appears to become “embrained” from accumulated cultural experiences in our brains. Numerous fMRI studies have shown how cultural background can influence neural activity during various cognitive functions. For instance, cross-cultural differences in brain activity among Western and East Asian participants have been revealed during tasks including visual perception, attention , arithmetic processing, and self-reflection (see Han & Humphreys, 2016 for review).

Culture and self-construal

One of the widely studied traits to interpret cross-cultural differences in behavior, cognition, and emotion is self-construal. Self-construal refers to how we perceive and understand ourselves. Western cultures promote an independent self-construal, where the self is viewed as a separate, autonomous entity and the emphasis is on the self’s independence and uniqueness. East Asian cultures, on the other hand, foster an interdependent self-construal, with a self that is more relational, harmonious and interconnected with others.

Recent cultural neuroscience studies have given a glimpse into the interaction between self-construal, culture, and the brain. In particular, research has suggested that self-construal mediates differences in brain activity across different cultures by activating a framework for various neural processes involved in cognition and emotion. In other words, because the self is formed in the context of our cultural scripts and practices, continuous engagement in cultural tasks that reflect values of independent or interdependent self-construals produces brain connections that are “culturally patterned.” This neural blueprint, according to researchers, is the foundation of the cultural construction of the self.

One way researchers have studied the influence of cultural values on neurocognitive processes is by priming participants towards independent and interdependent construals and then examining how the brain reacts to various situations afterward. Priming can be done, for example, by asking participants to read stories containing different pronouns (“we” or “us” for interdependent self-construal and “I” or “me” for independent self-construal) and asking them to think about how similar or different they are to others.

Findings have demonstrated various differences in neural activity after priming for independent or interdependent construals. For instance, priming has been shown to modulate the response to other people’s pain, as well as the degree with which we resonate with others. In another study , when participants were primed for independent construals during a gambling game, they showed more reward activation for winning money for themselves. However, when primed for interdependent construals, participants showed similar reward activation as when they had won money for a friend.

Culture also appears to influence the way the self is represented in our brains. In one experiment , Western and Chinese participants were asked to think about themselves, their mothers, or a public person. The fMRI data showed that the same parts of the brain (Medial Prefrontal Cortex) were activated when both groups thought about themselves. However, unlike with the Western participants, the MPFC was also activated among Chinese participants when they thought of their mothers. These results were interpreted as suggesting that the Chinese participants (interdependent self-construals) use the same brain area to represent both the self and their mothers, while the Western participants use the MPFC exclusively for self-representation.

Recent cultural neuroscience research is shedding light on how culture shapes our functional anatomy, biases our brains, affects our neural activity, and even influences the way we represent the self and others in our brains. Whether due to daily activities or genes , when neurons fire repeatedly in scripted ways for a prolonged time (essentially what cultural practices entail), brain pathways can be reinforced and established – all to enable a more seamless execution of cultural tasks and to “facilitate a cultural and biological adaptation” (Kitayama & Park, 2010).

Thus, as some researchers have suggested, our endorsement of particular cultural values may leave a greater imprint on our brains than on our behaviors.

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Gardner, W. L., Gabriel, S., & Lee, A. Y. (1999). “I” value freedom, but “we” value relationships: Self-construal priming mirrors cultural differences in judgment. Psychological Science, 10 (4), 321-326.

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Han, S., & Humphreys, G. (2016). Self-construal: a cultural framework for brain function. Current Opinion in Psychology, 8 , 10-14.

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Kitayama, S., & Park, J. (2010). Cultural neuroscience of the self: understanding the social grounding of the brain. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 5 (2-3), 111-129.

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Marianna Pogosyan, Ph.D. , is a lecturer in Cultural Psychology and a consultant specialising in cross-cultural transitions.

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• Cultural Identity Essay: Exhaustive Writing...

Cultural Identity Essay: Exhaustive Writing Guide, Topic Ideas, Examples

Are you required to submit an identity essay as part of your college or university admission application? Cultural identity essay is an academic assignment not just for students who want to start higher education but also for those in their first, second, or even third year.  It’s an essay that can be assigned at any academic level. This academic paper is popular because professors want to know more about the student’s personal life to build rapport. Before you start writing the essay, it’s essential first to understand the definition of cultural identity.

What is Cultural Identity?

It’s what you identify with or feel most that you belong to based on heritage, religion, traditions, language, rituals, ethnicity, social class, and other community norms. Your cultural identity can influence how you react or interpret the world around you and give you a sense of belonging. Therefore, before you embark on the writing process, first ask yourself, “what is my cultural identity?” or what is cultural identity in your own words? Your answers will go a long way in helping you learn more about your roots, strength, strong beliefs, and influences that have shaped who you are today. Besides, thinking through the answers to those two questions helps you to come up with main points to use in an essay and share your identity perceptions. 

What is a Cultural Identity Essay?

A well-written cultural identity essay tells the reader how your culture has shaped who you are, your personality, beliefs, outlook, background, and point of view. It’s more like a mini-biography but focuses more on your culture and its peculiarities.  Since cultural identity is a broad topic, there are numerous angles you can focus on to make your essay fascinating from start to finish. For example, you can talk about rituals or unique cultural events that have influenced your personality, a special location, influential people in your community, or racial stereotypes in the USA.

 Cultural Identity Essay Structure

Like any other academic paper, a cultural identity essay structure will be composed of three crucial components: introduction, body, and conclusion. Writing in the first person is recommended, especially when including emotions, feelings, and personal experience. However, if you’re writing a short story or analyzing Jane Collier and Milt Thomas's theory, you can write the essay in the third person.

How to Write a Cultural Identity Essay

If it’s your first time writing a cultural identity essay, you might have difficulties writing text that meets academic standards. The wide array of information available online can be confusing. However, a well-written cultural identity essay example from our writer and the information provided in this post can be an excellent guide. Hers how to write a good cultural identity essay.

Start with Topic Selection

How do you start a cultural identity essay? The first step to writing a quality cultural identity paper is to choose a specific focus area. If you intend to talk about your culture, then good topic examples would be:

• Influential people in your community
• Habits that are inherent only to your culture
• Specific cuisine that tells about your culture
• How cultural orientation has affected your self-concept
• A place of significance that tells about your culture
• Cultural significance in art and how it influenced your personality
• Self-awareness and cultural identity
• Specific ingredients and traditional foods from your region
• A specific cultural event that influenced your personality
• How your cultural orientation and characteristics facilitate or hinder social competency in a multicultural setting

In case you don’t want to write about yourself, you can focus on how culture relates to education, politics, ethnicity, nationality, religion, social status, or any other unique factor. Some topic examples include:

• Cultural identity and health equity
• Cultural identity in a learning environment
• Evaluating Cultural Identity Using Caryl Phillips Cambridge
• Cultural identity and globalization
• The role of language in building cultural identity
• The position of cultural identity in society
• Racial stereotypes in America
• Cultural identity development in ethnic minority
• Sexuality, gender, and cultural identity
• Cultural difference between America and China
• Impact of culture identity change on family

 After getting a good topic, the next step is to develop a thesis statement that focuses on the paper. Next, create an outline. This involves coming up with several main points that you will include in your essay. Ensure they are relevant to the topic. Then assign each point to a specific paragraph.

Write the Introduction

Start with a sentence that will catch the reader’s attention (hook). Follow that up with background information on the topic, then end the introduction with a thesis statement. The first paragraph is a vital part of your cultural identity essay since it tells the reader why that topic is important to you and how it made you the person you are today. Remember, the introduction is only meant to introduce the topic and not really everything. So keep it brief; not more than 10% of the maximum word count. 

Main Body of a Cultural Identity Essay

Present your analysis in this part of the essay. Since this will be the bulky part of your paper, use it to prove your thesis by showing how the events or what you are talking about shaped your cultural identity. Don’t forget to start each paragraph with a topic sentence and show instead of telling. Present the evidence while keeping the thesis statement in mind. 

Remember the main points you used to create an outline, summarize them, and then paraphrase the thesis to wrap up the essay. Remind the reader how your culture has influenced your personality. Use words that express the emotions you have about your cultural identity. Overall, the last paragraph of a cultural identity essay should paraphrase the meaning of cultural identity in your own words and its impact on you. 

Bottom Line

Are you still having trouble coming up with a good topic to write about? If you have been staring at a blank page for hours wondering, “How can I explain my cultural identity?” there is a solution. Acemyhomework has subject experts that are ready to assist you. 

Just give the writer the information to incorporate, and you shall have a high-quality cultural identity essay within the agreed deadline. Students from all academic levels have benefited immensely from our service and reading our identity essay examples. Contact us now and let us create a paper that will boost your academic performance.

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The Role of Cultural Heritage in Shaping Territorial Identities

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This chapter specifically explores the nexus between cultural heritage and territorial identity both conceptually and empirically. A first part of the chapter is dedicated at theoretically describing the connections and associations that link cultural heritage and territorial identity, among others heritage is seen as a source of individual memories, emotions and well-being, as a source of community cohesiveness as well as inspiration for common narratives and political communities. The second part of the chapter is dedicated at empirically explore the relationship between cultural heritage and the four different expressions of territorial identity as identified in Chapter  4 . Through a multilevel multinomial logit model cultural heritage is proved to show strong connections with a sense of belonging to a wider community and to generate a multicultural, flexible and cosmopolitan atmosphere.

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Panzera, E. (2022). The Role of Cultural Heritage in Shaping Territorial Identities. In: Cultural Heritage and Territorial Identity. Advances in Spatial Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94468-1_5

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Cultural Diversity Essay & Community Essay Examples

If you’ve started to research college application requirements for the schools on your list, you might have come across the “cultural diversity essay.” In this guide, we’ll explore the cultural diversity essay in depth. We will compare the cultural diversity essay to the community essay and discuss how to approach these kinds of supplements. We’ll also provide examples of diversity essays and community essay examples. But first, let’s discuss exactly what a cultural diversity essay is. 

The purpose of the cultural diversity essay in college applications is to show the admissions committee what makes you unique. The cultural diversity essay also lets you describe what type of “ diversity ” you would bring to campus.

We’ll also highlight a diversity essay sample for three college applications. These include the Georgetown application essay , Rice application essay , and Williams application essay . We’ll provide examples of diversity essays for each college. Then, for each of these college essays that worked, we will analyze their strengths to help you craft your own essays. 

Finally, we’ll give you some tips on how to write a cultural diversity essay that will make your applications shine. 

But first, let’s explore the types of college essays you might encounter on your college applications. 

Types of College Essays

College application requirements will differ among schools. However, you’ll submit one piece of writing to nearly every school on your list—the personal statement . A strong personal statement can help you stand out in the admissions process. 

So, how do you know what to write about? That depends on the type of college essay included in your college application requirements. 

There are a few main types of college essays that you might encounter in the college admissions process. Theese include the “Why School ” essay, the “Why Major ” essay, and the extracurricular activity essay. This also includes the type of essay we will focus on in this guide—the cultural diversity essay. 

“Why School” essay

The “Why School ” essay is exactly what it sounds like. For this type of college essay, you’ll need to underscore why you want to go to this particular school. 

However, don’t make the mistake of just listing off what you like about the school. Additionally, don’t just reiterate information you can find on their admissions website. Instead, you’ll want to make connections between what the school offers and how you are a great fit for that college community. 

“Why Major” essay

The idea behind the “Why Major ” essay is similar to that of the “Why School ” essay above. However, instead of writing about the school at large, this essay should highlight why you plan to study your chosen major.

There are plenty of directions you could take with this type of essay. For instance, you might describe how you chose this major, what career you plan to pursue upon graduation, or other details.

Extracurricular Activity essay

The extracurricular activity essay asks you to elaborate on one of the activities that you participated in outside of the classroom. 

For this type of college essay, you’ll need to select an extracurricular activity that you pursued while you were in high school. Bonus points if you can tie your extracurricular activity into your future major, career goals, or other extracurricular activities for college. Overall, your extracurricular activity essay should go beyond your activities list. In doing so, it should highlight why your chosen activity matters to you.

Cultural Diversity essay

The cultural diversity essay is your chance to expound upon diversity in all its forms. Before you write your cultural diversity essay, you should ask yourself some key questions. These questions can include: How will you bring diversity to your future college campus? What unique perspective do you bring to the table? 

Another sub-category of the cultural diversity essay is the gender diversity essay. As its name suggests, this essay would center around the author’s gender. This essay would highlight how gender shapes the way the writer understands the world around them. 

Later, we’ll look at examples of diversity essays and other college essays that worked. But before we do, let’s figure out how to identify a cultural diversity essay in the first place. 

How to identify a ‘cultural diversity’ essay

So, you’re wondering how you’ll be able to identify a cultural diversity essay as you review your college application requirements. 

Aside from the major giveaway of having the word “diversity” in the prompt, a cultural diversity essay will ask you to describe what makes you different from other applicants. In other words, what aspects of your unique culture(s) have influenced your perspective and shaped you into who you are today?

Diversity can refer to race, ethnicity, first-generation status, gender, or anything in between. You can write about a myriad of things in a cultural diversity essay. For instance, you might discuss your personal background, identity, values, experiences, or how you’ve overcome challenges in your life. 

However, don’t feel limited in what you can address in a cultural diversity essay. The words “culture” and “diversity” mean different things to different people. Above all, you’ll want your diversity essays for college to be personal and sincere. 

How is a ‘community’ essay different? 

A community essay can also be considered a cultural diversity essay. In fact, you can think of the community essay as a subcategory of the cultural diversity essay. However, there is a key difference between a community essay and a cultural diversity essay, which we will illustrate below. 

You might have already seen some community essay examples while you were researching college application requirements. But how exactly is a community essay different from a cultural diversity essay?

One way to tell the difference between community essay examples and cultural diversity essay examples is by the prompt. A community essay will highlight, well, community . This means it will focus on how your identity will shape your interactions on campus—not just how it informs your own experiences.

Two common forms to look out for

Community essay examples can take two forms. First, you’ll find community essay examples about your past experiences. These let you show the admissions team how you have positively influenced your own community. 

Other community essay examples, however, will focus on the future. These community essay examples will ask you to detail how you will contribute to your future college community. We refer to these as college community essay examples.

In college community essay examples, you’ll see applicants detail how they might interact with their fellow students. These essays may also discuss how students plan to positively contribute to the campus community. 

As we mentioned above, the community essay, along with community essay examples and college community essay examples, fit into the larger category of the cultural diversity essay. Although we do not have specific community essay examples or college community essay examples in this guide, we will continue to highlight the subtle differences between the two. 

Before we continue the discussion of community essay examples and college community essay examples, let’s start with some examples of cultural diversity essay prompts. For each of the cultural diversity essay prompts, we’ll name the institutions that include these diversity essays for college as part of their college application requirements. 

What are some examples of ‘cultural diversity’ essays? 

Now, you have a better understanding of the similarities and differences between the cultural diversity essay and the community essay. So, next, let’s look at some examples of cultural diversity essay prompts.

The prompts below are from the Georgetown application, Rice application, and Williams application, respectively. As we discuss the similarities and differences between prompts, remember the framework we provided above for what constitutes a cultural diversity essay and a community essay. 

Later in this guide, we’ll provide real examples of diversity essays, including Georgetown essay examples, Rice University essay examples, and Williams supplemental essays examples. These are all considered college essays that worked—meaning that the author was accepted into that particular institution. 

Georgetown Supplementals Essays

Later, we’ll look at Georgetown supplemental essay examples. Diversity essays for Georgetown are a product of this prompt: 

As Georgetown is a diverse community, the Admissions Committee would like to know more about you in your own words. Please submit a brief essay, either personal or creative, which you feel best describes you. 

You might have noticed two keywords in this prompt right away: “diverse” and “community.” These buzzwords indicate that this prompt is a cultural diversity essay. You could even argue that responses to this prompt would result in college community essay examples. After all, the prompt refers to the Georgetown community. 

For this prompt, you’ll want to produce a diversity essay sample that highlights who you are. In order to do that successfully, you’ll need to self-reflect before putting pen to paper. What aspects of your background, personality, or values best describe who you are? How might your presence at Georgetown influence or contribute to their diverse community? 

Additionally, this cultural diversity essay can be personal or creative. So, you have more flexibility with the Georgetown supplemental essays than with other similar diversity essay prompts. Depending on the direction you go, your response to this prompt could be considered a cultural diversity essay, gender diversity essay, or a college community essay. 

Rice University Essays

The current Rice acceptance rate is just 9% , making it a highly selective school. Because the Rice acceptance rate is so low, your personal statement and supplemental essays can make a huge difference. 

The Rice University essay examples we’ll provide below are based on this prompt: 

The quality of Rice’s academic life and the Residential College System are heavily influenced by the unique life experiences and cultural traditions each student brings. What personal perspective would you contribute to life at Rice? 

Breaking down the prompt.

Like the prompt above, this cultural diversity essay asks about your “life experiences,” “cultural traditions,” and personal “perspectives.” These phrases indicate a cultural diversity essay. Keep in mind this may not be the exact prompt you’ll have to answer in your own Rice application. However, future Rice prompts will likely follow a similar framework as this diversity essay sample.

Although this prompt is not as flexible as the Georgetown prompt, it does let you discuss aspects of Rice’s academic life and Residential College System that appeal to you. You can also highlight how your experiences have influenced your personal perspective. 

The prompt also asks about how you would contribute to life at Rice. So, your response could also fall in line with college community essay examples. Remember, college community essay examples are another sub-category of community essay examples. Successful college community essay examples will illustrate the ways in which students would contribute to their future campus community. 

Williams Supplemental Essays

Like the Rice acceptance rate, the Williams acceptance rate is also 9% . Because the Williams acceptance rate is so low, you’ll want to pay close attention to the Williams supplemental essays examples as you begin the writing process. 

The Williams supplemental essays examples below are based on this prompt: 

Every first-year student at Williams lives in an Entry – a thoughtfully constructed microcosm of the student community that’s a defining part of the Williams experience. From the moment they arrive, students find themselves in what’s likely the most diverse collection of backgrounds, perspectives, and interests they’ve ever encountered. What might differentiate you from the 19 other first-year students in an Entry? What perspective would you add to the conversation with your peer(s)?

Reflecting on the prompt.

Immediately, words like “diverse,” “backgrounds,” “perspectives,” “interests,” and “differentiate” should stand out to you. These keywords highlight the fact that this is a cultural diversity essay. Similar to the Rice essay, this may not be the exact prompt you’ll face on your Williams application. However, we can still learn from it.

Like the Georgetown essay, this prompt requires you to put in some self-reflection before you start writing. What aspects of your background differentiate you from other people? How would these differences impact your interactions with peers? 

This prompt also touches on the “student community” and how you would “add to the conversation with your peer(s).” By extension, any strong responses to this prompt could also be considered as college community essay examples. 

Community Essays

All of the prompts above mention campus community. So, you could argue that they are also examples of community essays. 

Like we mentioned above, you can think of community essays as a subcategory of the cultural diversity essay. If the prompt alludes to the campus community, or if your response is centered on how you would interact within that community, your essay likely falls into the world of college community essay examples. 

Regardless of what you would classify the essay as, all successful essays will be thoughtful, personal, and rich with details. We’ll show you examples of this in our “college essays that worked” section below. 

Which schools require a cultural diversity or community essay? 

Besides Georgetown, Rice, and Williams, many other college applications require a cultural diversity essay or community essay. In fact, from the Ivy League to HBCUs and state schools, the cultural diversity essay is a staple across college applications. 

Although we will not provide a diversity essay sample for each of the colleges below, it is helpful to read the prompts. This will build your familiarity with other college applications that require a cultural diversity essay or community essay. Some schools that require a cultural diversity essay or community essay include New York University , Duke University , Harvard University , Johns Hopkins University , and University of Michigan . 

New York University

NYU listed a cultural diversity essay as part of its 2022-2023 college application requirements. Here is the prompt:

NYU was founded on the belief that a student’s identity should not dictate the ability for them to access higher education. That sense of opportunity for all students, of all backgrounds, remains a part of who we are today and a critical part of what makes us a world class university. Our community embraces diversity, in all its forms, as a cornerstone of the NYU experience. We would like to better understand how your experiences would help us to shape and grow our diverse community.

Duke university.

Duke is well-known for its community essay: 

What is your sense of Duke as a university and a community, and why do you consider it a good match for you? If there’s something in particular about our offerings that attracts you, feel free to share that as well.

A top-ranked Ivy League institution, Harvard University also has a cultural diversity essay as part of its college application requirements: 

Harvard has long recognized the importance of student body diversity of all kinds. We welcome you to write about distinctive aspects of your background, personal development, or the intellectual interests you might bring to your Harvard classmates.

Johns hopkins university.

The Johns Hopkins supplement is another example of a cultural diversity essay: 

Founded in the spirit of exploration and discovery, Johns Hopkins University encourages students to share their perspectives, develop their interests, and pursue new experiences. Use this space to share something you’d like the admissions committee to know about you (your interests, your background, your identity, or your community), and how it has shaped what you want to get out of your college experience at Hopkins. 

University of michigan.

The University of Michigan requires a community essay for its application: 

Everyone belongs to many different communities and/or groups defined by (among other things) shared geography, religion, ethnicity, income, cuisine, interest, race, ideology, or intellectual heritage. Choose one of the communities to which you belong and describe that community and your place within it. 

Community essay examples.

The Duke and Michigan prompts are perfect illustrations of community essay examples. However, they have some critical differences. So, if you apply to both of these schools, you’ll have to change the way you approach either of these community essays. 

The Duke prompt asks you to highlight why you are a good match for the Duke community. You’ll also see this prompt in other community essay examples. To write a successful response to this prompt, you’ll need to reference offerings specific to Duke (or whichever college requires this essay). In order to know what to reference, you’ll need to do your research before you start writing. 

Consider the following questions as you write your diversity essay sample if the prompt is similar to Duke University’s

• What values does this college community have? 
• How do these tie in with what you value? 
• Is there something that this college offers that matches your interests, personality, or background?  

On the other hand, the Michigan essay prompt asks you to describe a community that you belong to as well as your place within that community. This is another variation of the prompt for community essay examples. 

To write a successful response to this prompt, you’ll need to identify a community that you belong to. Then, you’ll need to think critically about how you interact with that community. 

Below are some questions to consider as you write your diversity essay sample for colleges like Michigan: 

• Out of all the communities you belong to, which can you highlight in your response? 
• How have you impacted this community? 
• How has this community impacted you?

Now, in the next few sections, we’ll dive into the Georgetown supplemental essay examples, the Rice university essay examples, and the Williams supplemental essays examples. After each diversity essay sample, we’ll include a breakdown of why these are considered college essays that worked. 

Georgetown Essay Examples

As a reminder, the Georgetown essay examples respond to this prompt: 

As Georgetown is a diverse community, the Admissions Committee would like to know more about you in your own words. Please submit a brief essay, either personal or creative, which you feel best describes you.

Here is the excerpt of the diversity essay sample from our Georgetown essay examples: 

Georgetown University Essay Example

The best thing I ever did was skip eight days of school in a row. Despite the protests of teachers over missed class time, I told them that the world is my classroom. The lessons I remember most are those that took place during my annual family vacation to coastal Maine. That rural world is the most authentic and incredible classroom where learning simply happens and becomes exponential. 

Years ago, as I hunted through the rocks and seaweed for seaglass and mussels, I befriended a Maine local hauling her battered kayak on the shore. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I had found a kindred spirit in Jeanne. Jeanne is a year-round resident who is more than the hard working, rugged Mainer that meets the eye; reserved and humble in nature, she is a wealth of knowledge and is self-taught through necessity. With thoughtful attention to detail, I engineered a primitive ramp made of driftwood and a pulley system to haul her kayak up the cliff. We diligently figured out complex problems and developed solutions through trial and error.

After running out of conventional materials, I recycled and reimagined items that had washed ashore. We expected to succeed, but were not afraid to fail. Working with Jeanne has been the best classroom in the world; without textbooks or technology, she has made a difference in my life. Whether building a basic irrigation system for her organic garden or installing solar panels to harness the sun’s energy, every project has shown me the value of taking action and making an impact. Each year brings a different project with new excitement and unique challenges. My resourcefulness, problem solving ability, and innovative thinking have advanced under her tutelage. 

While exploring the rocky coast of Maine, I embrace every experience as an unparalleled educational opportunity that transcends any classroom environment. I discovered that firsthand experience and real-world application of science are my best teachers. In school, applications of complex calculations and abstract theories are sometimes obscured by grades and structure. In Maine, I expand my love of science and renourish my curious spirit. I am a highly independent, frugal, resilient Mainer living as a southern girl in NC. 

Why this essay worked

This is one of the Georgetown supplemental essay examples that works, and here’s why. The author starts the essay with an interesting hook, which makes the reader want to learn more about this person and their perspective. 

Throughout the essay, the author illustrates their intellectual curiosity. From befriending Jeanne and creating a pulley system to engineering other projects on the rocky coast of Maine, the author demonstrates how they welcome challenges and work to solve problems. 

Further, the author mentions values that matter to them—taking action and making an impact. Both facets are also part of Georgetown’s core values . By making these connections in their essay, the author shows the admissions committee exactly how they would be a great fit for the Georgetown community. 

Finally, the author uses their experience in Maine to showcase their love of science, which is likely the field they will study at Georgetown. Like this writer, you should try to include most important parts of your identity into your essay. This includes things like life experiences, passions, majors, extracurricular activities for college, and more. 

Rice University Essay Examples

The Rice University essay examples are from this prompt: 

The quality of Rice’s academic life and the Residential College System are heavily influenced by the unique life experiences and cultural traditions each student brings. What personal perspective would you contribute to life at Rice? (500-word limit)

Rice university essay example.

Like every applicant, I also have a story to share. A story that makes me who I am and consists of chapters about my life experiences and adventures. Having been born in a different country, my journey to America was one of the most difficult things I had ever experienced. Everything felt different. The atmosphere, the places, the food, and especially the people. Everywhere I looked, I saw something new. Although it was a bit overwhelming, one thing had not changed.

The caring nature of the people was still prevalent in everyday interactions. I was overwhelmed by how supportive and understanding people were of one another. Whether it is race, religion, or culture, everyone was accepted and appreciated. I knew that I could be whoever I wanted to be and that the only limitation was my imagination. Through hard work and persistence I put my all in everything that I did. I get this work ethic from my father since he is living proof that anything can be accomplished with continued determination. Listening to the childhood stories he told me, my dad would reminisce about how he was born in an impoverished area in a third world country during a turbulent and unpredictable time.

Even with a passion for learning, he had to work a laborious job in an attempt to help his parents make ends meet. He talked about how he would study under the street lights when the power went out at home. His parents wanted something better for him, as did he. Not living in America changed nothing about their work ethic. His parents continued to work hard daily, in an attempt to provide for their son. My dad worked and studied countless hours, paying his way through school with jobs and scholarships. His efforts paid off when he finally moved to America and opened his own business. None of it would have been possible without tremendous effort and dedication needed for a better life, values that are instilled within me as well, and this is the perspective that I wish to bring to Rice. 

This diversity essay sample references the author’s unique life experiences and personal perspective, which makes it one example of college essays that worked. The author begins the essay by alluding to their unique story—they were born in a different country and then came to America. Instead of facing this change as a challenge, the author shows how this new experience helped them to feel comfortable with all kinds of people. They also highlight how their diversity was accepted and appreciated. 

Additionally, the author incorporates information about their father’s story, which helps to frame their own values and where those values came from. The values that they chose to highlight also fall in line with the values of the Rice community. 

Williams Supplemental Essay Examples

Let’s read the prompt that inspired so many strong Williams supplemental essays examples again: 

Every first-year student at Williams lives in an Entry—a thoughtfully constructed microcosm of the student community that’s a defining part of the Williams experience. From the moment they arrive, students find themselves in what’s likely the most diverse collection of backgrounds, perspectives and interests they’ve ever encountered. What might differentiate you from the 19 other first-year students in an entry? What perspective(s) would you add to the conversation with your peers?

Williams college essay example.

Through the flow in my head

See you clad in red

But not just the clothes

It’s your whole being

Covering in this sickening blanket

Of heat and pain

Are you in agony, I wonder?

Is this the hell they told me about?

Have we been condemned?

Reduced to nothing but pain

At least we have each other

In our envelopes of crimson

I try in vain

“Take my hands” I shriek

“Let’s protect each other, 

You and me, through this hell”

My body contorts

And deforms into nothingness

You remain the same

Clad in red

With faraway eyes

You, like a statue

Your eyes fixed somewhere else

You never see me

Just the red briefcase in your heart

We aren’t together

It’s always been me alone

While you stand there, aloof, with the briefcase in your heart.

I wrote this poem the day my prayer request for the Uighur Muslims got denied at school. At the time, I was stunned. I was taught to have empathy for those around me. Yet, that empathy disappears when told to extend it to someone different. I can’t comprehend this contradiction and I refuse to. 

At Williams, I hope to become a Community Engagement Fellow at the Davis Center. I hope to use Williams’ support for social justice and advocacy to educate my fellow classmates on social issues around the world. Williams students are not just scholars but also leaders and changemakers. Together, we can strive to better the world through advocacy.

Human’s capability for love is endless. We just need to open our hearts to everyone. 

It’s time to let the briefcase go and look at those around us with our real human eyes.

We see you now. Please forgive us.

As we mentioned above, the Williams acceptance rate is incredibly low. This makes the supplemental essay that much more important. 

This diversity essay sample works because it is personal and memorable. The author chooses to start the essay off with a poem. Which, if done right, will immediately grab the reader’s attention. 

Further, the author contextualizes the poem by explaining the circumstances surrounding it—they wrote it in response to a prayer request that was denied at school. In doing so, they also highlight their own values of empathy and embracing diversity. 

Finally, the author ends their cultural diversity essay by describing what excites them about Williams. They also discuss how they see themselves interacting within the Williams community. This is a key piece of the essay, as it helps the reader understand how the author would be a good fit for Williams. 

The examples provided within this essay also touch on issues that are important to the author, which provides a glimpse into the type of student the author would be on campus. Additionally, this response shows what potential extracurricular activities for college the author might be interested in pursuing while at Williams. 

How to Write a Cultural Diversity Essay

You want your diversity essay to stand out from any other diversity essay sample. But how do you write a successful cultural diversity essay? 

First, consider what pieces of your identity you want to highlight in your essay. Of course, race and ethnicity are important facets of diversity. However, there are plenty of other factors to consider. 

As you brainstorm, think outside the box to figure out what aspects of your identity help make up who you are. Because identity and diversity fall on a spectrum, there is no right or wrong answer here. 

Fit your ideas to the specific school

Once you’ve decided on what you want to represent in your cultural diversity essay, think about how that fits into the college of your choice. Use your cultural diversity essay to make connections to the school. If your college has specific values or programs that align with your identity, then include them in your cultural diversity essay! 

Above all, you should write about something that is important to you. Your cultural diversity essay, gender diversity essay, or community essay will succeed if you are passionate about your topic and willing to get personal. 

Additional Tips for Community & Cultural Diversity Essays

1. start early.

In order to create the strongest diversity essay possible, you’ll want to start early. Filling out college applications is already a time-consuming process. So, you can cut back on additional stress and anxiety by writing your cultural diversity essay as early as possible. 

2. Brainstorm

Writing a cultural diversity essay or community essay is a personal process. To set yourself up for success, take time to brainstorm and reflect on your topic. Overall, you want your cultural diversity essay to be a good indication of who you are and what makes you a unique applicant. 

3. Proofread

We can’t stress this final tip enough. Be sure to proofread your cultural diversity essay before you hit the submit button. Additionally, you can read your essay aloud to hear how it flows. You can also can ask someone you trust, like your college advisor or a teacher, to help proofread your essay as well.

Other CollegeAdvisor Essay Resources to Explore

Looking for additional resources on supplemental essays for the colleges we mentioned above? Do you need help with incorporating extracurricular activities for college into your essays or crafting a strong diversity essay sample? We’ve got you covered. 

Our how to get into Georgetown guide covers additional tips on how to approach the supplemental diversity essay. If you’re wondering how to write about community in your essay, check out our campus community article for an insider’s perspective on Williams College.

Want to learn strategies for writing compelling cultural diversity essays? Check out this Q&A webinar, featuring a former Georgetown admissions officer. And, if you’re still unsure of what to highlight in your community essay, try getting inspiration from a virtual college tour . 

Cultural Diversity Essay & Community Essay Examples – Final Thoughts

Your supplemental essays are an important piece of the college application puzzle. With colleges becoming more competitive than ever, you’ll want to do everything you can to create a strong candidate profile. This includes writing well-crafted responses for a cultural diversity essay, gender diversity essay, or community essay. 

We hope our cultural diversity essay guide helped you learn more about this common type of supplemental essay. As you are writing your own cultural diversity essay or community essay, use the essay examples from Georgetown, Rice, and Williams above as your guide. 

Getting into top schools takes a lot more than a strong resume. Writing specific, thoughtful, and personal responses for a cultural diversity essay, gender diversity essay, or community essay will put you one step closer to maximizing your chances of admission. Good luck!

CollegeAdvisor.com is here to help you with every aspect of the college admissions process. From taking a gap year to completing enrollment , we’re here to help. Register today to receive one-on-one support from an admissions expert as you begin your college application journey.

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• The Importance of Cultural Ties

The Importance of Cultural Ties - Essay Example

• Subject: Sociology
• Type: Essay
• Level: High School
• Pages: 2 (500 words)
• Downloads: 7

Extract of sample "The Importance of Cultural Ties"

Cross-culture adoption, a trend that has become more popular in recent years, points to the child's need to maintain close cultural ties with their birth country. In a recent study of Asian American adoptions it was found that while growing up, the children often considered themselves white. As they reached adulthood, that trend had reversed, and most considered themselves Asian American (Dong). As adults, they would seek out ways to connect to their country of birth through language, art, and ethnic organizations.

Many of the adoptees in the survey reported lifelong feelings of alienation and isolation. Nancy Ng, a member on the board of the Palo Alto group Families Adopting in Response (FAIR) asserts the importance of "the need to honor the birth country and raise them with knowledge of their birth culture" (Dong), Developing cultural awareness and close ties to your ethnic heritage is more than just the curiosity to discover who you are. Lacking the knowledge of one's background can lead to more serious issues and manifest in an identity crisis.

Boylston contends, "the sense of loss and isolation since they are no longer living in their birth country, can intensify the stress that an individual faces as they move through the psychosocial stages--trust, autonomy, initiative, industry, personal identity, intimacy, generativity, integrity". For the development of a healthy self-identity, it is vital that we understand not only who we are, but also who we have been and where we came from. This connection to our country of origin extends across generations as children have an intuitive interest in their parent's cultural heritage.

The importance extends to our ancestors and as we discover our family lineage we develop an increased sense of self and greater self-esteem. For some, it may be a religious drive that creates the need for connection. Hong writes of the need for exiled Malaysians to return home when she recounts their desire, "to fulfill (sic) their filial duty to visit the graves of their ancestors, parents, and family". Many people, after generations of living in America, still consider themselves a hyphenated American with a desire to visit the homeland of their ancestors.

Our country of origin is a vital component in the definition we form of ourselves and creates a healthy sense of individual identity. The inability to maintain those ties in our lifetime and across generations can leave us in an isolated sea of confusion. As a society, we need to embrace our cultural differences and encourage the exploration of our past, maintain close ties to our birth country, and preserve our unique and varied ethnic differences.

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A cultural breakaway, importance of cultural relativism in anthropology, how important are the facial expressions of emotion in human communication, cultural studies assignment, anthropology of jewish funeral, the importance of cultural awareness and tolerance in ems, cultural competence and importance of social work, eastern aesthetics: love, society, and culture through asian literature.

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Example sentences cultural ties

Take away loyalty and the cultural ties that underpin fandom, football becomes just another arm of the entertainment industry.

These cultural ties date back to the 1960s with only a short blip between the 1979 revolution and the mid 1980s.

Economic, historic, military, intelligence and cultural ties will continue to bind our two countries long after the rose-tinted spectacles of history have been discarded.

Despite the breakdown, cultural ties have survived, he said.

The do-gooders who run football's governing bodies like to promote the idea that football can be a force for peace and deeper cultural ties .

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What Is a Family Culture? Definition and Examples

Michele is a writer who has been published both locally and internationally.

Learn about our Editorial Policy .

You may know what family values are and even know the different types of family structures, but defining your family culture is a little more complex. A family culture is basically defined as the set of customs and morals your family subscribes to, but it's also much more than that.

Definition of Family Culture

Family culture can relate to just your immediate family or be representative of your extended family and ancestors. To understand the definition of family culture, it's best to break apart these two words.

• One broad definition of family is "a social group in society consisting of people related to each other by various means."
• The definition of culture is "a particular set of customs, morals, codes and traditions from a specific time and place."
• Put these words together and the definition of family culture is "a particular set of customs, morals, codes, and traditions shared by a social group of related people."
• Understanding What Is Considered Immediate Family (and Why It Matters)

Characteristics of a Family Culture

Each family culture is as unique as the family who exemplifies it. While it's impossible to define uniform characteristics of a family culture, there are some things that typically make up family culture.

• Unspoken - Families don't often discuss their culture, they just know what's expected and accepted.
• Elder Expectations - Older generations have a high expectation that younger generations will keep the same values, customs, and overall family culture.
• Reciprocal Relationships - All family members are held to the same standard and expected to reciprocate what's given to them or how they are treated.

Types of Family Cultures With Examples

In 2012, the University of Virginia completed a longitudinal study and identified four types of family cultures common in America. Each type of family culture is almost equally represented by American families from all walks of life, with roughly 20%-25% of families identifying with each type.

Faithful Family Culture

These families take their cues from church or religious communities, including Christianity, Judaism, or Islam.

• They are defined by a strong moral compass that requires all members to have a powerful sense of right and wrong as defined by their belief system.
• Individual happiness and success is not as important as reflecting your God's purpose.
• An example would be a traditional Arab family where grandparents are always consulted for big decisions like marriage because the Koran says the elderly are esteemed.

Engaged Progressive Family Culture

This type of family culture is all about personal responsibility and personal freedom.

• Family members operate off The Golden Rule and what feels right to each person.
• Kids from this type of family culture generally have more freedom at younger ages than other kids.
• This type of family culture is the least religious of all four types.
• A traditional Brazilian family could be an example of this family culture because personal values are important and people respect and expect honesty from each other.

Detached Family Culture

Detached families don't spend a lot of time together because they generally believe all the bad influences of the world will overshadow their influence.

• Low income families are more likely to fall in this category.
• This type of family culture includes a hands-off strategy to parenting and relationships where the belief is that whatever will be, will be.
• Parents who don't keep tabs on their child's grades or school work and families that only eat together when they're watching TV are examples of detached family cultures.

American Dreamer Family Culture

American dreamer family cultures are the most common in the U.S., but only slightly more common than all the others.

• This type of family culture features an optimistic attitude about the abilities of and opportunities for individual members.
• These families have very close relationships where parents pour all their energy into helping their kids succeed in life and avoid as many negative social influences as possible.
• A family where both parents attend every practice and game for their son's basketball team would be an example of American Dreamers.

Importance and Impact of Family Culture

Family culture influences the way each family member thinks, feels, and acts on a daily basis. Your family culture influences things like your moral compass, beliefs, values, and traditions. You might choose a career based on your family culture by picking something you know your family values. You might get really upset if your spouse doesn't get you a birthday gift because your family culture made a big deal out of each person's birthday. From big life choices and actions to small details, family culture is important because it is a big part of what makes you, you.

How to Determine Family Culture

Determining what type of family culture you're from could be simple or seem impossible. The trick is to look at similarities between the lives of the majority of your family members. Do many of you work in the same occupational field? Do you have certain family obligations that can never be missed? Do many of you act the same way when you're happy, sad, or angry? Do you view certain groups of people in an overly negative or positive way? These similarities in values, beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and customs make up your family culture.

Define Your Family Culture

A healthy family culture highlights the importance of family values that are shared amongst the group. Those who veer away from the family culture may encounter culture and family issues . Families are influenced by all kinds of factors, so you'll find different family cultures around the world.

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ILR - SET M Family/Cultural Ties question

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Hi all, Filling out the online application for ILR. There are 3 sets of questions related to applicants connections to -family -friends -social group/cultural ties in county of birth or countries where they have lived for over 5 years. So far we have answered the questions relating to family and friend members in country of birth - Japan. I have two queries in relation to this: A) As we are applying for ILR and my wife has lived here in the UK for over 5 years now, should we also be listing ties in the UK? (have currently considered this is any other country but the UK but it is not clear) B) For the Social Group/Cultural ties section we were unsure what to put so have just put that my wife grew up with her family in Japan so her cultural background is Japanese. Does this suffice? Thanks for help in advance.  

A) Not really sure what to say on this one... an argument could be made either way. B) Yes, that would suffice. I was born and raised in Canada (although, I am Nikkei-jin) and that is the only country I had ever spent any significant time in, prior to my arrival here in the UK, so I just specified that I was born and raised in Vancouver, thus I consider myself to be socially and culturally Canadian.  

Thank you. That is what I thought for the second too. I am not sure about the first one. There is a section later on that gives a larger word count/characters to to answer with (A only has 500 characters) that asks about any other reason why she should remain in the UK. We have mentioned our son and my family within that so I suppose I could add to my response to A) so I could say please see that section for details about ties to the UK?  

A) Just answer the question asked. Don't also include ties to the UK here, that isn't what's asked for. This question isn't of much consequence if you meet the requirements for ILR, they're not going to send you back to Japan just because you have family there  

Thank you Clever-Octopus and West Coast - your support is much appreciated.  

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Putin focuses on trade and cultural exchanges in Harbin, China, after reaffirming ties with Xi

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin laid flowers on Friday at a WWII memorial in Harbin during his state visit to China.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, attend an informal meeting in Beijing, China, on Thursday, May 16, 2024. (Mikhail Metzel, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

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Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and Chinese President Xi Jinping, second left, walk during an informal meeting in Beijing, China, on Thursday, May 16, 2024. (Mikhail Metzel, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, is welcomed by Chinese officials at an airport upon his arrival in Harbin, China, on Friday, May 17, 2024. (Matvey Fedorov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, and Russian President Vladimir Putin attend a signing ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Thursday, May 16, 2024. (Rao Aimin/Xinhua via AP)

In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, Chinese President Xi Jinping, left, and Russian President Vladimir Putin wave gesture during a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Thursday, May 16, 2024. (Ju Peng/Xinhua via AP)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and Chinese President Xi Jinping attend a concert marking the 75th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Russia and China and opening of China-Russia Years of Culture at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing, China, on Thursday, May 16, 2024. (Alexander Ryumin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and Chinese President Xi Jinping shake hands during a concert marking the 75th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Russia and China and opening of China-Russia Years of Culture at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing, China, on Thursday, May 16, 2024. (Sergei Guneyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and Chinese President Xi Jinping attend an informal meeting in Beijing, China, on Thursday, May 16, 2024. (Mikhail Metzel, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Chinese President Xi Jinping, center, gestures speaking to Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, during an informal meeting in Beijing, China, on Thursday, May 16, 2024. (Mikhail Metzel, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and Chinese President Xi Jinping leave a concert marking the 75th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Russia and China and opening of China-Russia Years of Culture at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing, China, on Thursday, May 16, 2024. (Alexander Ryumin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

BEIJING (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin focused on trade and cultural exchanges Friday during his state visit to China that started with bonhomie in Beijing and a meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping that deepened their “ no limits ” partnership as both countries face rising tensions with the West.

Putin praised China at a China-Russia Expo in the northeastern city of Harbin, hailing the growth in bilateral trade. He will also meet with students at Harbin Institute of Technology later Friday. Harbin, capital of China’s Heilongjiang province, was once home to many Russian expatriates and retains some of those historical ties in its architecture, such as the central Saint Sophia Cathedral, a former Russian Orthodox church.

Though Putin’s visit is more symbolic and is short on concrete proposals, the two countries nonetheless are sending a clear message.

“At this moment, they’re reminding the West that they can be defiant when they want to,” said Joseph Torigian, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute.

At the exhibition in Harbin, Putin emphasized the importance of Russia-China cooperation in jointly developing new technologies.

“Relying on traditions of friendship and cooperation, we can look into the future with confidence,” he said. “The Russian-Chinese partnership helps our countries’ economic growth, ensures energy security, helps develop production and create new jobs.”

Putin started the second day of his visit to China on Friday by laying flowers at a monument to fallen Soviet soldiers in Harbin who had fought for China against the Japanese during the second Sino-Japanese war, when Japan occupied parts of China.

At their summit on Thursday, Putin thanked Xi for China’s proposals for ending the war in Ukraine , while Xi said China hopes for the early return of Europe to peace and stability and will continue to play a constructive role toward this. Their joint statement described their world view and expounded on criticism of U.S. military alliances in Asia and the Pacific.

The meeting was yet another affirmation of the friendly “no limits” relationship China and Russia signed in 2022, just before Moscow invaded Ukraine.

Putin has become isolated globally for his invasion of Ukraine. China has a tense relationship with the U.S., which has labeled it a competitor, and faces pressure for continuing to supply key components to Russia needed for weapons production.

Talks of peacefully resolving the Ukraine crisis featured frequently in Thursday’s remarks, though Russia just last week opened a new front in the Ukraine war by launching attacks at its northeastern border area. The war is at a critical point for Ukraine , which had faced delays in getting weapons from the U.S.

China offered a broad plan for peace last year that was rejected by both Ukraine and the West for failing to call for Russia to leave occupied parts of Ukraine.

In a smaller meeting Thursday night at Zhongnanhai, the Chinese leaders’ residential compound, Putin thanked Xi for his peace plan and said he welcomed China continuing to play a constructive role in a political solution to the problem, according to China’s official Xinhua News Agency. They also attended events to celebrate 75 years of bilateral relations.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Russia has increasingly depended on China as Western sanctions have taken a bite. Trade between the two countries increased to $240 billion last year, as China helped its neighbor defray the worst of Western sanctions.

European leaders have pressed China to ask Russia to end its invasion in Ukraine, to little avail. Experts say China and Russia’s relationship with each other offer strategic benefits, particularly at a time when both have tensions with Europe and the U.S.

“Even if China compromises on a range of issues, including cutting back support on Russia, it’s unlikely that the U.S. or the West will drastically change their attitude to China as a competitor,” said Hoo Tiang Boon, who researches Chinese foreign policy at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. “They see very little incentive for compromise.”

Xi and Putin have a longstanding agreement to visit each other’s countries once a year, and Xi was welcomed at the Kremlin last year.

Wu reported from Bangkok. AP writer Vladimir Isachenkov in Tallin, Estonia, contributed to this report.

Putin focuses on trade and cultural exchanges in Harbin, China, after reaffirming ties with Xi

BEIJING (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin focused on trade and cultural exchanges Friday during his state visit to China that started with bonhomie in Beijing and a meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping that deepened their " no limits " partnership as both countries face rising tensions with the West.

Putin praised China at a China-Russia Expo in the northeastern city of Harbin, hailing the growth in bilateral trade. He will also meet with students at Harbin Institute of Technology later Friday. Harbin, capital of China’s Heilongjiang province, was once home to many Russian expatriates and retains some of those historical ties in its architecture, such as the central Saint Sophia Cathedral, a former Russian Orthodox church.

Though Putin’s visit is more symbolic and is short on concrete proposals, the two countries nonetheless are sending a clear message.

“At this moment, they’re reminding the West that they can be defiant when they want to,” said Joseph Torigian, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute.

At the exhibition in Harbin, Putin emphasized the importance of Russia-China cooperation in jointly developing new technologies.

“Relying on traditions of friendship and cooperation, we can look into the future with confidence,” he said. “The Russian-Chinese partnership helps our countries’ economic growth, ensures energy security, helps develop production and create new jobs.”

Putin started the second day of his visit to China on Friday by laying flowers at a monument to fallen Soviet soldiers in Harbin who had fought for China against the Japanese during the second Sino-Japanese war, when Japan occupied parts of China.

At their summit on Thursday, Putin thanked Xi for China’s proposals for ending the war in Ukraine, while Xi said China hopes for the early return of Europe to peace and stability and will continue to play a constructive role toward this. Their joint statement described their world view and expounded on criticism of U.S. military alliances in Asia and the Pacific.

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The meeting was yet another affirmation of the friendly “no limits” relationship China and Russia signed in 2022, just before Moscow invaded Ukraine.

Putin has become isolated globally for his invasion of Ukraine. China has a tense relationship with the U.S., which has labeled it a competitor, and faces pressure for continuing to supply key components to Russia needed for weapons production.

Talks of peacefully resolving the Ukraine crisis featured frequently in Thursday’s remarks, though Russia just last week opened a new front in the Ukraine war by launching attacks at its northeastern border area. The war is at a critical point for Ukraine, which had faced delays in getting weapons from the U.S.

China offered a broad plan for peace last year that was rejected by both Ukraine and the West for failing to call for Russia to leave occupied parts of Ukraine.

In a smaller meeting Thursday night at Zhongnanhai, the Chinese leaders’ residential compound, Putin thanked Xi for his peace plan and said he welcomed China continuing to play a constructive role in a political solution to the problem, according to China’s official Xinhua News Agency. They also attended events to celebrate 75 years of bilateral relations.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Russia has increasingly depended on China as Western sanctions have taken a bite. Trade between the two countries increased to $240 billion last year, as China helped its neighbor defray the worst of Western sanctions.

European leaders have pressed China to ask Russia to end its invasion in Ukraine, to little avail. Experts say China and Russia’s relationship with each other offer strategic benefits, particularly at a time when both have tensions with Europe and the U.S.

“Even if China compromises on a range of issues, including cutting back support on Russia, it’s unlikely that the U.S. or the West will drastically change their attitude to China as a competitor,” said Hoo Tiang Boon, who researches Chinese foreign policy at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. “They see very little incentive for compromise.”

Xi and Putin have a longstanding agreement to visit each other’s countries once a year, and Xi was welcomed at the Kremlin last year.

Wu reported from Bangkok. AP writer Vladimir Isachenkov in Tallin, Estonia, contributed to this report.

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Eric Adams’s Brother Has a New Gig: Black-Tie Philanthropy

Bernard Adams has joined forces with a former model to start an organization that aims to improve New York City children’s access to arts and culture.

By Dana Rubinstein and William K. Rashbaum

More than two years ago, Mayor Eric Adams’s brother Bernard uprooted his life as a Virginia parking administrator and came to New York City to work in his older brother’s nascent administration. But that job, as a deputy police commissioner, did not work out as planned.

Now, Bernard is leveraging his relationship with the mayor to launch a foray into philanthropy.

In partnership with Alisa Roever, a self-described jet-setter who was friends with Ivana Trump and celebrated Easter this year at Mar-a-Lago, Bernard Adams has founded an organization whose goal is to connect New York City’s youth to arts and culture, according to the website for the new group, Angels Helpers NYC.

The organization had been planning to host a black-tie gala at the restaurant Osteria La Baia, but then switched venues to 432 Park Avenue, a skyscraper on Manhattan’s so-called Billionaire’s Row . The gala was to feature the mayor and a former Miss World Ukraine , Anna Zaiachkivska, as “special guests,” according to an invitation for the event next Thursday. Tickets to the dinner cost between $500 and $1,000.

But on Thursday, Ms. Roever said the organization was postponing the gala, citing scheduling issues with some of the children who were supposed to perform.

Incorporated in March, the nonprofit’s mission is a noble and expansive one, according to its New York State registration papers: It is “committed to dealing with mental health issues, preventing cruelty to children, fostering support for abused women and children, and embarking on educational, literary, and scientific endeavors.”

“These initiatives aim not only to explore treatments for diseases and illnesses but also to provide assistance to the needy in and around New York City,” it goes on, adding that it aims to join forces with businesses and government agencies.

Nothing in city law or ethics guidelines appears to prohibit the mayor’s brother from creating a philanthropic nonprofit, but his leadership role raises the potential that donors to the mayor’s campaign, which is currently the subject of a federal criminal investigation, will contribute to the organization as a way to curry favor with him.

Fabien Levy, a spokesman for the mayor, had no immediate comment.

Ms. Roever said the organization has not done any charitable work yet. On its webpage , a large picture features dozens of children involved in Highbridge Voices, a Bronx organization that provides musical instruction to local children.

Richard Owen, the Highbridge Voices chief executive, said it was his understanding that his organization was supposed to reap a portion of the proceeds from the now-postponed gala.

He had considered the timing of the partnership “very fortunate,” given how badly his organization was hit by the pandemic. Mr. Owen said he believed he had been connected to Angels Helpers via one of his board members.

He declined to comment on Ms. Roever’s contention that there were scheduling issues with his musicians.

The leadership team of Angels Helpers NYC includes Ms. Zaiachkivska, who is listed as the gala’s co-chair, and Ms. Roever, the organization’s co-founder.

Ms. Roever is a former model who has written for Haute Living, a Florida-based luxury magazine, where an author page describes her as “a full-time wife, mother and jet-setter.” She is also acquainted with the mayor: Her Instagram page features photos of the two socializing, as well as images of her at some of the mayor’s go-to establishments, including the private club Zero Bond and Osteria La Baia, one of his favorite restaurants .

Ms. Roever said she met Bernard Adams at a charitable event for the Noel Shoe Museum Gala at the Metropolitan Club in October. “We connected on a passion to help people in need,” she said in a text message. At the event, Mr. Adams donated a pair of his brother’s shoes, she recalled.

Bernard Adams did not respond to requests for comment. The mayor is a retired police captain.

His role and whereabouts have been somewhat shrouded in recent months, after he left the city’s employment. A retired New York Police Department sergeant, he was first hired shortly after Eric Adams became mayor in January 2022; The New York Post reported that the mayor installed Bernard as a deputy police commissioner, a position that was expected to pay about $240,000 a year. After an outcry, the mayor, a retired police captain, changed his mind and said his brother would instead fulfill a diminished role, overseeing the mayor’s security, for a salary of $210,000.

Amid the furor, the mayor retroactively sought guidance from the New York City Conflicts of Interest Board, which ruled that the his brother could earn no more than $1 a year . Bernard Adams, who had a $64,000-a-year pension, lasted a year under those circumstances.

Around the same time, the mayor’s Department of Education named Bernard Adams’s wife, Sharon Adams, a “strategic initiative specialist,” with a salary of $150,000, according to The City, a nonprofit publication . The mayor said that all hiring decisions are merit-based.

Like her husband, Ms. Adams is trying on other new roles. Campaign records indicate she is now serving as treasurer of the mayor’s re-election campaign.

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times. More about Dana Rubinstein

William K. Rashbaum is a Times reporter covering municipal and political corruption, the courts and broader law enforcement topics in New York. More about William K. Rashbaum

Explore Our Coverage of the Adams Administration

Trip to Rome : Mayor Eric Adams’s three-day trip to the Italian capital, where he met Pope Francis at the Vatican  and visited a welcome center for migrants , was a brief respite from varied troubles at home.

A ‘Hidden’ Tax: Adams is resurrecting a budget gimmick  and charging New York City’s own Water Board more than $1.4 billion in rent, which will pass on the costs to ratepayers.

Cracking Down on Campus Protests: Adams defended the arrests of nearly 300 protesters  and said he would not allow the protests to disrupt the city.

An Aggressive and Expensive Legal Team: With Adams and his top aides facing several investigations, he is amassing a team of high-powered lawyers  paid by his donors and city taxpayers.

Walking Back Budget Cuts: Adams released a revised $111.6 billion budget, which included $2.3 billion that would restore  some funding for schools and cultural institutions.

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In W. Va. primary, establishment candidates for governor highlight culture war issues

An aerial view of the West Virginia State Capitol Building. Primaries Tuesday will decide who's facing off for governor in November. Wirestock/Getty Images/iStockphoto hide caption

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — With incumbent Gov. Jim Justice reaching his term limit and running for the U.S. Senate, a field of Republicans is competing to replace him in a primary Tuesday. While they address issues specific to the mountain state, like the future of coal production and low school scores, the national debate over transgender rights is filling many of their campaign ads.

"Fairy tales aren't facts, a boy is not a girl," says an ad for candidate Chris Miller. "I'm fighting to make sure that girls are never forced to play sports with guys," says one from candidate and current Attorney General Patrick Morrisey.

A political action committee ran one ad that referred to transgender children as "monsters." The rhetoric worries some West Virginians, like Billy Wolfe with the West Virginia ACLU.

"Their campaigns are built on demonizing people, and villainizing people to score cheap political points," Wolfe said. "We know that this kind of rhetoric not only affects young people, it also leads to legislation that causes real harm."

West Virginia went for former President Donald Trump in the last two elections and leans heavily Republican. So the winner of the GOP primary will probably be a frontrunner in November as he takes on the lone Democrat, three-term Huntington Mayor Steve Williams. The Republicans are pitching voters with appeals based on their pro-Trump, anti-Biden credentials and pledges to fight transgender rights.

The four main contenders are firmly in the state's GOP establishment. There's three-term Attorney General Morrisey, known for mounting legal challenges against the Obama and Biden administration on things like environmental regulation.

He faces opposition from former member of the West Virginia House of Delegates Moore Capito. Capito (pronounced CAP-ee-toh) is the son of West Virginia U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito and grandson of the late Gov. Arch Moore.

There's also car dealership magnate Miller, whose mother is Republican U.S. Rep. Carol Miller. And there's three-term Secretary of State Mac Warner, who says he's tried to stay out of the attack-ads fray.

"Getting excited doesn't solve the issues needed to assess what's going on," Warner said.

On the major issues, it can be hard to distinguish between them. All four candidates are strongly pro coal, saying that renewable energy is welcome but fossil fuels are still key to the future of the country's power supply.

"Our fossil fuels are going to lead this country in the grid stabilization that we are going to require over probably my children's lifetime," Capito said. "We have to ensure that our coal and natural gas in West Virginia are leading the way."

The candidates also tout plans for improving the state's lagging educational results in ways that mostly continue a trend toward private schooling.

"Every year, the legislature is taking more and more money out of public schools and they're putting that into private schools," said Marybeth Beller, political scientist and associate professor at Marshall University. "And we don't have any solid data to show that the private schools are doing any better whatsoever. Yet, we continue to put money into the private sector."

The economy is in fairly good shape, so that's less of an issue. The candidates do talk about policy alternatives in forums and interviews but in campaign ads it's largely broad conservative brush strokes and culture wars rhetoric.

"One of the things that we know in science is that hate and fear mobilize voters," Beller said.

Checking in with about 15 lunch-hour voters recently in Charleston, in the shadow of the Capitol dome, many say they are turning off — literally — like Linda Workman from South Charleston.

" My husband automatically clicks every ad off as soon as it comes on," Workman said. "They're all the same. I don't believe anything anyone says."

That sentiment gives some hope to backers of the one contender in the Democratic primary, also on Tuesday. Huntington Mayor Williams can reserve his campaign push for the general election. That gives some hope to Democrats in the red state.

State Del. Mike Pushkin, chair of the West Virginia Democratic Party, said Williams offers an alternative to "this ridiculous cultural-war stuff that we see on the other side."

Randy Yohe covers state government for West Virginia Public Broadcasting.