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Over the years, Western generalizations about certain Asian countries, such as Thailand or Japan, as "remarkably homogenous" have become less common. There is increasing recognition of cultural and other diversity within Asian societies. It is less clear to what extent there is multiculturalism in Asia, in the sense of the official recognition and accommodation of cultural diversity by national authorities. This book offers engagements with the topic of multiculturalism from three partially connected perspectives: historical, theoretical, and ethnographically critical. To varying degrees, all the chapters situate cultural diversity historically in their separate case studies. In addition to country studies on China, Japan, India, Sri Lanka, and six countries in Southeast Asia (Burma, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand), there is one chapter on foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong and Singapore.
Kymlicka's chapter on liberal multiculturalism offers the second key element of the book, a discussion of the fundamental aspects of multiculturalism that juxtaposes Asian examples with Western ones. The question of the relative fit of Western notions in Asian societies may suggest the "Asian values" arguments of Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad and Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, which declared Asian specificity to justify authoritarian rule and a disregard for certain standards regarding human rights. The contributors sidestep that issue for various good reasons, but many of them offer critical engagements with the topic of multiculturalism and its Western assumptions. It is here that I find the book most rewarding, descriptively and analytically. It is not a given that multiculturalism, as the term is understood, delivers on its supposed promise of liberal improvement to previously authoritarian or unjustly monocultural societies. This expectation, which may be the crux of the matter, imports a particular understanding of history (past, present, and future) and social life in terms of ethnocultural units as interest groups...