Cultural Hybridism Essay

Cultural Hybridism: rethinking the question of “diversity” in traditional communities in the contemporary context
Brazil is a country of the encounter between many cultures during centuries: Indigenous, African, European, and Asian cultures. For a long time, the false idea of racial democracy prevailed having into account the multiplicity of ethnic groups that hybridized to form the Brazilian nation. However, between 1950 and 1970, some sociologists - among them, Florestan Fernandes - influenced by a materialistic vision of society and Marxist Theory, deconstruct the racial democracy myth by demonstrating the social injustices occurred during the process of social integration of the black people in the bulge of modern capitalism. Under such

We question, however, the notion of Cultural Diversity brought in the discursive dimension of the social practices geared toward these communities. Although we have advanced in the discussion on the notion of "culture" exists in the governmental agenda, we question the extent to which social interventions, in the mediation of the local powers, are reflecting this advance. In some local institutional dimensions, the discourse can still be based on an essentialist multicultural exoticism - for example, an exaggeratedly Afrocentrist perspective - which brings a notion of Cultural Diversity coined in a mystical and distant origin, not considering the intertextual branches occurred in the process of cultural hybridization. The traditional communities, in turn, strategically utilize some traditional cultural elements for the reach of the social rights in the face of historical injustices, contextualizing the contemporary demands in the process of fighting. That is what Spivak () calls strategic

Many points of social claims of these communities are still, in the political field, in a shallow discussion, demanding an insistent pressure from the social movements. In this sense, an uninterrupted questioning is required about the principle that governs the multicultural policy and how these discourses unfold in the various social processes. According to Hall (2011), for a more progressive logic of multiculturalism, two conditions are required: a deep expansion of democratic practices of the social life and the refusal to any essentialist and ethnically exclusionary racial