“Us, Them, and Others: Response to my Interlocutors”

Elke Winter’s book, Us, Them, and Others: Pluralism and National Identity in Diverse Societies, was the winner of the 2012 John Porter Prize from the Canadian Sociological Association (CSA). The Porter Prize is awarded annually to the best non-fiction book published in Canadian sociology. It is widely regarded as the top recognition that can be received by a Canadian sociologist. The Prize is named in honour of the late John Porter, author of the influential Vertical Mosaic, and one of Canada’s most well-known sociologists.

I feel extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to respond to Catherine Frost’s and Howard Ramos’ sympathetic and probing comments on Us, Them, and Others: Pluralism and National Identity in Diverse Societies. Both scholars have written extensively on multiculturalism, national identity, immigration, and human rights in Canada. It is a privilege to exchange ideas with them about my book. A special thanks to the editors of this journal, as well as to the Association for Canadian Studies and to the Canadian Ethnic Studies Association for having included the Author Meets Critics session from which these contributions result in their joint conference entitled Revisiting 40 Years of Multicultural Policy in Canada.

My interlocutors raise a number of important issues, more than I can fully address in this short reply. In the interest of synthesizing, I will address four broad categories of questions raised: the first concerns the model of triangular relations and the issue of othering; the second relates to the issues of normativity, negotiation and intention; the third addresses the question of power and the dynamics between majority/minority relations; and the fourth deals with the sample and time frame. Proceeding this way permits reflections on themes arising across the comments. To set the stage, let me first briefly restate the central motivation for writing the book and its core themes.

Located at the intersection of sociology, political science, normative theory, and communication studies, Us, Them and Others deals with the formation of pluralist group identities. My main motivation for writing this book was to find answers to the following questions: How does a national majority come to view itself as “multicultural”? What brings it to integrate a positively connoted conception of diversity into its self-definition of who “we” are and want to be? Put yet in another way, under which conditions are binary us/them relations broken up to include the recognition of others within our midst? Concentrating on Canada, the book pays particular attention to the complex relations between the national majority, historically recognized ethnocultural or “national” minorities, and immigration-related diversity. The empirical study incorporates the findings from an analysis of English-language newspaper discourses during the 1990s into a theoretical framework inspired by Weberian sociology. It was this combination of empirical findings and a dynamic theory of interethnic group relations that led me to develop a model that defines pluralism as changing sets of triangular social relations, where the compromise between unequal groups—“us” and “others”—is rendered meaningful through the confrontation with real or imagined outsiders (“them”). On the one hand, the analysis sheds a new light on the astonishing resilience of Canadian multiculturalism in the late 1990s—at a time when multicultural policies in other countries had come under heavy attack. On the other hand, it is my hope that the study—and the model of pluralism in particular—provide a template for analyzing the relations between different ethnocultural collectivities and their pluralist accommodations in other contexts and countries.

Othering and the Model of Triangular Relations

Overall, my interlocutors present three concerns with respect to my interpretation of the processes of othering and the model of triangular relations. First, there is the question of whether the model of triangular relations really transcends binary us/them relations or whether “‘we’ against ‘them’” remains the dominant boundary and the model thus “resembles more commonly used dualistic understandings of power” (Ramos 2011, 270; see also Frost 2011, 258). Second, there is a concern “that the triangular dynamics Winter identifies [could] actually deepen the experience of being othered” (Frost, 257). According to Frost, those...