ABSTRACT
Since 2001 the governance of the UK as a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society has seemed increasingly problematic, with principles which underpinned that governance from the 1960s widely questioned. Yet the trajectory of the postmillennium period also presents a paradox. For despite misgivings about the growing diversity of British society, and often open hostility towards multiculturalism, government policy has, in a complex dialectical relationship with the reality of everyday lives, emphasized religion as a mode of recognizing and working with minorities. Thus the construction of difference and diversity in Britain has moved from ‘race’ (as in ‘race relations’ in the 1950s and 1960s), to ‘ethnicity’, to ‘culture’, and thence ‘faith’. Drawing on anthropology, sociology and history, this chapter explores
these discursive shifts from a documentary, rather than normative, perspective. There is enough of the latter in political philosophy and in speeches by political and religious leaders; indeed, in public debates on difference and diversity there is often little else. By focusing on the UK the chapter has the advantage of looking in depth at one nation-state. The disadvantage is that public debates on multiculturalism cannot be fully comprehended without taking into account the wider context in which they are embedded. There is a cross-national interweaving of political, academic and popular discourse, embracing a skein of vocabulary, sources, tropes, ideas, instances and paradigms, but this intertextuality cannot be addressed here.
