Everyday Multiculturalism : the Mundane Uses of Cultural Difference

The paper supports the importance of developing a sociologically informed perspective on culture and cultural difference capable of grasping the ambivalent nature of difference: its character of ongoing social production and its effectiveness connected with the capacity to institutionalize such a construction in a social fact. A sociologically informed conception of cultural difference emphasises the fact that the use of categorical distinctions, and the moral and symbolic orders generated through them, always involve both enabling and constraining functions. To avoid the cul de sac in which an excessive and ill-posed attention to cultural difference have pushed multiculturalism, the paper presents the idea of everyday multiculturalism that focuses on ways in which cultural difference is concretely used by individuals in their daily interactions.