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In social sciences, the representations of space depend largely on “images of break, rupture and disjunction” (Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 6). In this sense, nations are separated in terms of fragmented spaces, divided by different colors, names and other symbols which are designed to indicate what distinguishes selfness from otherness. This representation evokes some important issues that are going to be discussed in this article. The first issue relates to space and the division of nations into imaginary territorial boundaries. Different from what we see in the maps, boarders are not fixed edges that separate peoples from different states, but rather areas of intense exchange and confluence of peoples to whom the meaning of the territorial division is not as clear as the maps demonstrate. 

The second issue discusses the question of unity within a state. Through the association of material and symbolic dimensions (Gregory 1994), we assume that each State represent a national unity and we read these representations as such. In this sense, we assume that France is the homeland of French people and French culture; Poland of the Polish, Argentina of the Argentinian and so on. Nevertheless, this “assumed isomorphism of space, place and culture” takes for granted the cultural diversity within each State (Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 7).

 The fact that nation-states are based on the presumption of cultural unity, political and institutional autonomy, and legitimate monopoly of a territory (Smith 2010), obscures the actual representation of the division of nations in the world scale. The inherently hybridity of the human agency and social organization will be the main concern of this article. The main objective is to discuss the nation-state, not as an cultural unity representative of a nation, but the nations within the institutional and political representation of an unifying state. But before getting into this discussion, it is necessary to present some definitions of the terms that will be used throughout this article.  

1 - CONCEPTS

In this section, I will present the definition of four terms I identify as being paramount to the understanding of the main issue discussed in this article, they are: nation, state, community or ethnie and national identity. Some of these terms’ definitions overlap and are used interchangeably in the studies analyzed for this article. Therefore, the intention of this section is not to distinguish one term from the other or adopt the most suitable one for the examination of the issue under discussion, but to offer a better understanding of the concepts that will be used henceforth. 

1.1 - Community or Ethnie

Pain (2001) points out that community is a poorly defined term. The Dictionary of Human Geography defines community as a “social network of interacting individuals, usually concentrated into a defined territory” (Johnston 2000: 101). However, other concepts understand communities as  a form of human association that can be spatial or non-spatial. In this sense, community is a highly flexible and rarely coherent entity that can exist without conflict and speak with one voice (Pain 2001). 

Therefore, communities are social constructions and they can represent several different types of groups at the same time (Pain 2001), such as: clubs, conspiracies, gangs, teams, parties and so on (Gellner 2006). For the purpose of this article, I want to narrow down the definition of community to a single factor that will be relevant to the discussion of the topic at issue. This definition is presented by Smith (2010) in terms of ethnie or ethnic community.  According to the author, ethnic community “usually has no political referent, and in many cases lack a public culture and even a territorial dimension, since it is not necessary for an ethnic community to be in physical possession of its historical territory” (Smith 2010: 12-3). 

Hence, communities are not human groups concentrated in a territory, rather they are imagined communities (Anderson 2010). In this sense, communities are abstract notions to which a group of people share the same sense of belonging based on their ethnicity and origin in the homeland, although this homeland may not represent a physical space. Therefore, the notion of community is based on the representation of space, the indication of a real space and its characteristics, or on space representations, the idea or idealization of a place in terms of a desired space with no specific physical reference.

1.2 - Nation

According to the Dictionary of Human Geography, nation is “a product of nationalism”  (Johnston 2000: 486). It is the foundation of a national community and it “uses geography or imaginative geographies of place and landscape, to create and consolidate conceptions of primordial nationhood” (Johnston 2000: 487). The formalization of a nation is the nation-state, which will be discussed in the following subsection. 

The difference between a community and a nation is based on two main traits: the political unity (Gellner 2006) and the spatial linkage (Smith 2010). According to Smith, a nation “must reside in a perceived homeland of its own, at least for a long period of time, in order to constitute itself as a nation” (Smith 2010: 13). For this author, a nation has a space referential, even if they don’t reside in the territory anymore and the link  between community and space is created through cultural and historical values. 

This definition relates to Anderson’s (2006) concept of imagined communities, where people identify more with a nation through their shared culture, ethnic unity and certain symbolic representations of space, than with physical space itself. For Gellner the major trait that defines a nation is the political unity achieved through “in terms of will and of culture” (2006: 54). Gellner (2006) does not include the term territory in the definition of nation. This author recognizes that many nations do not have a homeland,  but share the same territory with other nations of the same nation-state. For this reason, he perceives political unity as the main defining characteristic of nations. 

1.3 - State or Nation-State

The difference between nation and nation-state or state is based on two major characteristics, the territory and political institutions. Whereas the nation has political unity and shared cultural values, myths and history, the state is a formalization of these traits under political institutions and norms that legitimize the monopoly of a nation over a certain physical space. In this sense, states are perceived as unifying entities with a unique set of traits symbolically represented in venues such as: national anthem, flag, sport, official religion, language, territory, political regiments and institutions. In short, is the formalization of the legal establishment of a nation. 

 According to the Dictionary of Human Geography, nation-state is “the combination of national governance and national governamentality that emerged as the norm of European state-making in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (Johnston 2000: 489). For Gellner, the State is “that institution or set of institutions specifically concerned with the enforcement of order” (2006: 4). For Smith, states are defined as “a set of autonomous institutions, differentiated from other institutions, possessing a legitimate monopoly of coercion and extraction in a given territory” (2010: 12). From an objective perspective, the main traits of a State is the legitimate use of force and the monopoly of a certain territory.

A State is the formalization of a nation, in other words the legitimization of a nationhood through the establishment of a jurisdiction. Smith (2010) and Gellner (2006) agree that the State can emerge without the nation and vice-versa. However, both authors also agree that nationalism usually is the driving force for the emergence of States. In this sense, nations desire to some degree self-determination, autonomy and sovereignty, therefore, they seek to possess a sovereign state of their own. In Gellner’s words, every nation seeks its “own political roof” (2006: 2).

1.4 - National Identity

National identity is the sentiment of belonging, solidarity and identification to a nation. According to Smith (2010), national identity is different from nationalism, because nationalism is usually defined as patriotism, which entails citizenship, loyalty to the larger territorial state and its institutions. This term became widely used in the eighteenth century, perhaps because of the widespread concern with identity and individualism of the modern society (Smith 2010). 

In Smith’s view national identity is the 

continuous reproduction and interpretation by the members of a national community of a pattern of symbols, values, myths, memories and traditions that compose the distinctive heritage of nations, and variable identification of individual members of that community with that heritage and its cultural elements (2010: 20).

Mavroudi (2010) argues that this notion promotes the sentiment of nation-ness or us-ness in relation to otherness. It is through national identity that individuals and communities distinguish themselves from others and create the sense of uniqueness and autonomy necessary to legitimate a nation and a state. However, as pointed out by Anderson (2006), this process embodies many subjective notion and the most important of all notion raises a simple question posed by Gupta and Ferguson, that is, “what does us stands for?” (1992: 14).

2 -   NATIONAL UNITY

Ernest Gellner (2006) argues that nationality is not, in fact, an innate attribute of humanity. And Anderson’s (2010) insightful argument is that a nation is a symbolic community. Hence, it’s a narrative of a people’s history, literature, traditions that gives meaning and importance to their monotonous existence and creates sort of a destiny to the community, as form of guaranty of continuity (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). In this sense, nations and states are social constructs and, therefore, they are socially contested (Gupta and Ferguson 1992).

As discussed in the previous section, states emerge presumably as ‘homogenous’ communities, through the establishment of norms such as “societal behavior, culture, ethnicity and history” (Shapiro 200). However, this is a very simplistic and purist conception that overlooks the diverse nature of human behavior (Laraia 1986). According to Gregory, this need to form concepts of nation through unity and homogeneity is shaped by the “intensified bureaucratization through space, which involves the installation of juridico-political grids by means of which social life is subject to systematic surveillance and regulation by the state” (1994: 401). 

This bureaucratization through space is a form of imposing discipline and power maintaining a symbolic order and stability in terms of space. Therefore, the states control and manipulate belonging within defined boundaries. In this sense, being a migrant, cross-boarder or an immigrant might be a vulnerable position, since the political structure of a state is based on the presumption of unity and homogeneity (Mavroudi 2010). 

This is a very sensitive issue, since there are more nations in the world than states (Gellner 2006). First, because of the assumption that there is a natural relation among people, place and culture (Gupta and Ferguson 1992). The fact that a community belong to a specific territory or that certain territory belongs to a community defies the fluidity and changeability of the human agency. Furthermore, it creates tension between minority groups that recognized themselves as a distinct ethnical groups, such as a diaspora, or migrant and immigrants. 

This notion also overlooks the stateless nations, such as the Kurdish, who are not related to any physical territory and, therefore, suffer the pressure of certain nations that see them as outsides. The legitimacy of the state control over a territory is a major issue in a culturally diverse global village, where the flux of individuals have been increasingly intensified by globalization process. The need to control a certain territory to secure self-determination and autonomy is one of the most contradictory and remarkable traits of a state. 

Anderson (2006) discusses the reification of a state as legitimate representation of a nation and the place of birth or place of origin as an attribute of belonging. As a social construction, states are imagined communities based on the perceptions of the nations of the abstract representations the physical space has. The division of spaces among groups of people is a very fluid and uncertain process, by all means contested. As people move around the globe forming polarized or sparse human communities, the motivations for this movement and change can only be traced by states in terms of political grids to control and manipulate the entrance and permanence (Gregory 1994). 

This control of the state can be easily observed in term of migration and immigration processes where certain groups of people are authorized or denied access to a certain territory. There are other factors that implicate the legitimacy of a state, that is the nations within the same territory that feel they have been excluded or repressed by the nation-state, where they start promoting nationalist movements to vindicate their own territory, given their representativity and ethnic unity within the state. In this sense, because states compress a number of nations in the same territory, the nations that feel overlooked or repressed somehow defy the unity of the state and demand their own share of the territory.

3 - NATIONAL TERRITORY  

Gellner (2006) explains the compression of several different ethnic communities as part of the same ‘state’ on the basis of a mathematical equation, where there are more nations in the world than viable states to accommodate them. For this reason, nations that feel excluded of a society demand through nationalist movements and  disputes or struggles it’s own ‘political roof’. The main issue here is the diversity of the states that are formed under the myth of national unity. 

 Mavroudi (2010) argues that national identity and nations have created an illusions of homogeneity, which is necessary for the establishment of a nation and a state. In other words, they create the illusion of a natural and essential connection among people, place and culture to justify the demand for a territory and political institutions. Nonetheless, Anderson (2006) points out that nations or states were never homogenous. As imagined communities, states have elements that are shared by groups of individuals in different levels and scales, furthermore they are interpreted in different ways. Gregory (1994) has presented the notion of representation of space and space representation, where individuals read spaces based on their subjective understanding of their ‘space value’, which involves its material and symbolic dimension. In this sense, conceptions of space, demarcation of territory and grids or property are representations of certain claims. 

In other words, the fact that states demarcate the space is an abstract notion of what the territorial space should be, but it is very different from what the concrete space is in fact. That is, the space of everyday life, a space that is not only “enframed, constrained, and colonized by economy and by the state” (Gregory 1994: 402), but also re-signified by groups of people who related to those spaces and occupy them in a daily basis. In this sense, the boundaries of a city or a state can be clear cut in a map, but in fact the fluidity and permeability of human agency is much different in the concrete space. 

Furthermore, the interpretation of space can be limited to some iconic attributes that are shared by groups of people, for instance the Eiffel Tower is a clear representation of the French nation for most people, as the Statue of Liberty is for the American nation, the Redemption Christ is for the Brazilian nation and so on. These are mere local symbolic items of a culture, that represents a very narrow view of the diversity of the national culture of each country. However, they are also important representation of the imagined community that can be interpret by any group of people, nationals or internationals based on their knowledge of the physical territory. 

In short, the spatial division of the states have different interpretation depending on perspective through which they are being overviewed. The monopoly of the state over a national territory can cause tension among nations within this state, specially if they feel they are being repressed or overlooked within a certain state. Nonetheless, if a nation desire to establish their own state and vindicate a monopoly of a territory, usually they replicate the same unity myth the states they are going against to justify the legitimacy of their pledge and their right for self-determination.

NATIONAL IDENTITY - SPACE AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY

Nation is a discourse - a way to build order and organize meanings in a way individual can identify and build their own identity. It’s an imagined community, to use Benedict Anderson term. It is an invented tradition that stands for a number of practices, symbolic or ritualistic that aim at creating values and norms of behavior through repetition, which results automatically in continuity with a suitable historical past (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Tradition, therefore, is another symbolic form to impose order and discipline creating this illusionary perspective of stability to society.

 It is the functional myth, maintained by the manipulation of territorial boundaries and political unity.  Ernest Renan said that three things constitute the spiritual principle of a nations unity: “the shared possession  of a rich legacy of memories.., the desire to live together and the desire to persevere” (cited in Hall 1992: 30). So, national identities result of a reunion of two half of the national equation, as observed by Hall (1992), the sum of culture and politics coherent; plus cultures reasonably homogeneous to have their own political agenda. But can national identity be such an unifying force? 

Most nations consists of separate cultures that were unified throughout a long violent process of conquest, in which the weakest was suppressed by the conquerer. In this sense, one can argue that national identities were strongly generalized. Hence, instead of thinking of unified national cultures, we should think of them as a discourse device that represents the difference as unity and identity. Especially in the globalized society, one is forced to convey that nationality or even ethnicity is actually a fabric where various characteristics are sewed together in order to provide a discourse of meanings. 

Space plays an important role in this signifying process, where communities related to places, either concrete or abstract spaces, to form their national identity and their share notion of selfness. Therefore, as they become more structured the territorial control becomes more important as a defining feature of belonging to include or assimilate the desirable nations and to exclude and repressed the unwanted ones. In this process, tensions arise and most communities feel the need to rescue their historical ancestry and reaffirm their ethnic unity and authenticity to justify their claims. 

Sometimes, this attempt leads to the replication of the unfair system the nations were fighting against, Smith (2010) believes that this conservative notion of state-making based on the European model of the eighteenth and nineteenth century is changing, in a slow process from a generation to the other. This would lead to more pluralistic and accommodating political grid divisions of space. Nonetheless, Mavroudi (2010) points out to the opposite direction where she sees the reemergence of xenophobic and racists movements that repress and exclude visible minorities, migrants and immigrants out of irrational fear of difference and the inability to deal with the inherently diversity of society today. 

My conclusion is in between both assumptions. On the one hand, I see the resistant movements pointed out by Mavroudi (2010) specially racist irrational rants against visible minorities and immigrants that are segregated as outsiders and aliens in a supposedly cohesive state. On the other, I know I understand Smith’s (2010) generational theory, since I am part of a small group of people that try to change the ways we have understand and arranged society so far. However, whether this understanding will stem to better social structures in the future is a question that is still open to discussion. 

REFERENCES

Bauman, Zygmunt. 2005. Liquid Life. Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity.

Gellner, E. 2006. Nations and Nationalism. New York: Cornell University Press.

Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson. 1992. "Beyond "Culture": Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference." Cultural Anthropology 7(1):pp. 6-23.

Hall, Stuart. 1992. A identidade cultural na pós-modernidade; tradução Tomaz Tadeu da Silva e Guacira Lopes Louro: Rio de Janeiro: DP&A.

Hutnyk, J. 2005. "Hybridity." Ethnic and Racial Studies 28(1):79-102.

Inglis, F. 1976. "Nation and Community: A Landscape and its Morality." Higher Education Quarterly 30(4):444-461.

Isla P, A. 2003. "Los Usos Políticos De La Memoria y La Identidad." Estudios Atacameños:35-44.

Johnston, R. J. 2000. The Dictionary of Human Geography. 4th ed. Oxford, UK ;; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers.

Laraia, Roque de Barros. 1986. Cultura: Um conceito antropologico. Ed.14. Rio de Janeiro. BR: Jorge Zahar. 

Mavroudi, E. 2010. "Nationalism, the Nation and Migration: Searching for Purity and Diversity." Space and Polity 14(3):219-233.

Meyer, John W., John Boli, George M. Thomas and Francisco O. Ramirez. 1997. "World Society and the Nation-State." The American Journal of Sociology 103(1):pp. 144-181.

Pain, Rachel. 2001. Introducing Social Geographies. London: Arnold.

Shapiro, M. J. 2000. "National Times and Other Times: Re-Thinking Citizenship." Cultural Studies 14(1):79-98.

Smith, Anthony D. 2010. 

As an assessor for international affairs of the Ministry of Culture of Brazil, I became involved in the discussion and elaboration of a pluralistic and transversal agenda for cultural policy, based on the principles of decentralization, cultural diversity and democratic participation. My involvement in this process inspired me to ask questions I have never thought of asking before, for instance: why cultural diversity is so important? why should the government promote a decentralized agenda? why participation should be encouraged? In my ‘naive’ view of the world, there was no need to protect cultural diversity, because, as Laraia has argued human beings are cultural beings, diverse by nature and unique in themselves. However, as I got involved with the governmental agenda for culture in my country, I came to realize I had a narrow view of the issues I was working with. 

For this reason, I decided I needed help in understanding some of these issues and I sought the academic sphere to help me unwind many of the questions I could only begin to ask. My main questions were about cultural diversity and the involvement of society in the formulation of cultural policy. I wanted to understand how society got involved in the discussion of cultural diversity and if cultural diversity was a demand of civil society or a political discourse to justify the interest of certain groups. My curiosity in understanding these issues led me to two sociologists who have been discussing the relations between identity in post-modern society, Stuart Hall (1992) and Zygmunt Bauman (2004). 

Bauman has argued that identity is a fiction “born out of the crisis of belonging” (2004: 20) in the eighteenth century, when modern society went through important changes. In the same vein, Edward Said (2000) points out that the decline of old institutions such as family, religion and dynastic bonds allowed the rise of invented memories as a coherent identity for people who adopted these narratives as symbolic references of belonging. At this point, I started understanding the importance of national identity for the discussion of terms such as identity and cultural diversity. 

Stuart Hall (1992) states that there is no ontological conceptualization for identity. Identity is an unconscious process that starts at birth and continues throughout our life as we try to find our “I” in the “view” of others. Identity exists as something imaginary or fantasized. It lingers incomplete, it is always in “process” of “being formed”. This way, Hall argues that instead of talking of identity, it would be more accurate to talk in terms of identification, and regard it as an ongoing process. As I read the arguments and assumptions of these two sociologists, I started to question the conceptualization of cultural diversity from a different perspective. I understood that I should be asking ‘why’ are we protecting and promoting cultural diversity in a pluralistic, democratic and decentralized way, but ‘who’ is we and why is this issue so important for ‘us’. 

In my search for these answers, I couldn’t find a suitable response on the sociological approach to the issue. The macro analysis of the issues of identity and cultural diversity often draws conclusions based on a ruling elite that establishes discourses and narratives, but it doesn’t explain how these discourses are included in the vernacular creating the divisions between pariahs or outcasts and the citizens or nationals. For this reason, I decided to take the Memory/History and Reconstructions of Identities course in the Anthropology department. From the brief description of the course, I felt most of my questions could be answered from an anthropological perspective. 

For my surprise, this course has taught me more than I expected. Once more, I felt I should revise my questions about identity and cultural diversity. Instead of questioning who is ‘we’, I learned from the literature on memory and identity that I should first ask who am ‘I’ in relation to ‘we’. As I dove into the literature, I began to question the silences and absences in the discourses and the narratives of the ever-changing identity formation process. I realized that I was not interested in discussing identity and cultural diversity as two intrinsically related issues, but that my goal is to find out the missing pieces or the silences in the cultural diversity and identity discourse. 

At first, I thought I should explore the involvement of civil society in the formulation of the cultural diversity discourse and policy as way to show how this process is a top-down strategy of elite groups to promote their interest. But the literature on memory and identity has changed my view of the issue. As I read Radstone (2000), Gupta and Ferguson (1992), Sassen (2008), Sharma (2006) and Said (2000), I realized that ‘identity’ is has become a reified concept in post-modern society with no clear definition; a venue for justifying the domination of certain groups over others. Although I adopt Hall’s definition of a fluid and open-ended process of identification, I also realized I should explore how the issue of identity is included in society today in relation to the nation, especially in terms of citizenship. 

Through citizenship, nation-states legitimize national identity and, as a consequence, their autonomy over its territory and people (Mavroudi 2010). They separate who is the insider and the outsider by controlling the territorial boarders. In other words, the nation-states create the illusion of a natural and essential connection among people, place and culture (Gupta and Ferguson 1992) through which they include or assimilate the desirable peoples and exclude and repressed the unwanted ones.  In this sense, citizenship becomes a venue for legitimizing a discourse of nation-ness or nationality. At the same time, this process also creates silences and marginalization considering that the elaboration of a national discourse is usually based on the narratives of the conqueror and not the the weakest (Mavroudi 2010), the heroes and not the masses (Said 2000).

At this moment, I started to question the discourse of citizenship in the light of cultural diversity, in other words, which people are not considered citizens of a nation and why. I became especially interested in minority groups and their claims for affirmative actions. The most important contributions for me was the work of Said and Sassen. Based on Said’s article on Memory, Invention, Identity, the issue of human social spaces brought to my attention the question of pre-colonial civilizations and their dimly recognized role in the discourse of national identity, especially their claims and demands for recognition and human rights. This brings me to Sassen’s discussion about the emergence of centrifugal multiplication of particular/specialized assemblages of Territorial, Authority and Rights (TAR) that unsettles the existing normative arrangements and produces a new type of segmentation in the state apparatus. 

Sassen contends that there has been a proliferation of new normative orders which was once ruled by the state and the dominant logic of centripetal unifying normative framing. However she argues that these new normative frames can coexist with older orderings, but they bring consequences that may be strategic of the larger normative questions. She does not dismiss the role of the state as an normative body, but she argues that these assemblages are unsettling the older national frameworks in an complex and illegible way.

Sassen’s approach is particularly interesting when analyzing the issue of national identity, specially if we consider that the changes that occur in society reflects in the individual and vice-versa creating a symbiotic flow (Hall 1992). If the changes in modern society created national identity as a substitute for traditional institutions as argued by Said (2000) and Bauman (2004); the changes suggested by Sassen will also have an impact at the individual level. My intent is to look at the discourses of affirmative action of contemporary society in relation to cultural diversity to see what is being registered as memory and what is being silenced. 

REFERENCES

Bauman, Z. 2004. Identity. Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity.

Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson. 1992. "Beyond "Culture": Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference." Cultural Anthropology 7(1):pp. 6-23.

Hall, Stuart. 1992. A identidade cultural na pós-modernidade; tradução Tomaz Tadeu da Silva e Guacira Lopes Louro: Rio de Janeiro: DP&A.

Laraia, Roque de Barros. 1986. Cultura: Um conceito antropologico. Ed.14. Rio de Janeiro. BR: Jorge Zahar. 

Mavroudi, E. 2010. "Nationalism, the Nation and Migration: Searching for Purity and Diversity." Space and Polity 14(3):219-233.

Radstone, S. (ed.) 2000. Memory and Methodology, Oxford: Berg. Read “Working with Memory: an Introduction”, pp. 1-21 

Said, E. 2000. “Invention, Memory and Place.” Critical Inquiry 26 (2): 175-92.

Sassen, S. 2008. “Neither global nor national: novel assemblages of territory, authority and rights.” Ethics & Global Politics 1 (1-2): 61-79.

------. 2006. Territory, Authority, Rights : From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Sharma, A. 2006. "Introduction: Rethinking Theories of the State in an Age of Globalization" in Aradhana Sharma & Akhil Gupta. 2006. The Anthropology of the State: A Reader. Ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Cultural diversity is a combination of two complex concepts which make up for an even more complex one. From an anthropological point of view, culture and diversity are intrinsically related, given that culture is a characteristic of human beings and human beings are unique, therefore culturally diverse (Laraia 1986). Nonetheless, since 1970, society has been changing in such a fast pace and in so many ways, that some critical theorists began to wonder what would be the consequences of all these changes (e.g. Hall 1992; Bauman 2005; Giddens 1990). The global market that was seen by many free trade negotiators as the  key to development began to be perceived as a dangerous cultural obliterating process (UNESCO 1999; Álvarez 2005).  

Given the unequal socioeconomic distribution of wealth in the world, the concern of critical theorist is that trade liberalization is disadvantageous for developing countries which cannot protect their markets from the competitive commercial strategies of developing countries (Beltrame 2005). In fact, the validity of this argument lies on the asymmetrical relation amongst countries and the potential of some specific countries to control and manipulate the means of production. What social theorists have been arguing is that local markets and developing countries are not able to compete with the ones from developed countries, and, because capitalist liberalism prerogatives are based on consumerism, the more globalization advances the more societies will have to adapt themselves to the global market rules, leaving behind their local culture, their traditions and their customs (Segovia 2005).   

Since, asymmetry  is a characteristic of contemporary society, this competition for the market share will soon lead to the substitution of the old processes and systems of meanings for the globalized ones, in an mutative adaptation process which will slowly obliterate local culture and tradition or not (Hall 1992). Some theorists have been defending this argument and promoting debates about the damages globalization has caused to society by commodifying culture, goods and services and homogenizing creative processes and cultural values (UNESCO 1999; Álvarez 2005). It is noteworthy that this argument has a strong economical appeal, for it  is focused on the issues of globalization and free trade as the two major dangers to cultural diversity. but it doesn’t give much evidence about how cultural diversity is being obliterated or how society is being homogenized or if this process is actually perceived by society as harmful. 

As mentioned in the first paragraphs, cultural diversity is an intrinsic characteristic of human nature. Therefore, why is “society” concerned that globalization or free trade is going to obliterate cultural diversity? Better yet, what society is worried about it? It is important to understand that critical social theorists often use the term society without  providing a clear definition to which society they are referring to. 

My argument is that societies have different characteristics, sometimes as many characteristics as individuals. Therefore, it is important to indicate the society that is being investigated in order to verify if the assumptions above are true in each context they take place. For this reason, this research proposes to analyze two countries that regard the issue of cultural diversity as a key element of their public policy, that is: Brazil and Canada. 

Both of these countries have taken the issue of the defense of cultural diversity as a major concern of their cultural policy and has demonstrated their concern in the national level as well as the international (Álvarez 2005). Given the cultural diversity of both countries, it will be interesting to examine in which arena the concerns about cultural diversity arises and what part society takes in the construe of the axis of these concerns. As stated before, globalization and free trade is often appointed as the evil cause of the cultural obliterating process. In the case of Brazil and Canada, do these concerns arise because of globalization and free trade or do these societies have other concerns when it comes to protecting cultural diversity?