The gift of biculturalism

Sam Smith - Although we mention it from time to time, one of the stunning silences in our society generally - and notably in the media - is about the character and virtues of multiculturalism. You would never know it from the media, for example, but 17% of marriages these days are cross ethnic.

Your editor was partly introduced to this in ninth grade, taking one of two high school anthropology courses in the nation at the time and went on to major in anthropology in college. And growing up in a family of six kids, I learned early that others weren't like me.

As the nation seems to have become increasingly obsessed with singular identity, the fact is that community and life works much better when we learn to get along with those who aren't like us. We need to study, talk and consider this more.

Here is a rare example by  Sandhye Fuchs, in Sapiens,  the daughter of two anthropologists and living in Germany and India. As she writes:

An anthropological life—whether it be one given to you in childhood, one you explore in a university while doing fieldwork, or simply one you adopt as an outlook—is one whose heart beats to the notion of interaction. Personal interaction has the power to counteract the dangers of abstraction. And it allows us to embrace a multiplicity of belonging in such a way that we never have to feel rootless or marginal.

And she notes:

“I think we intuitively learn to fit in,” says a friend whose anthropologist mother also dragged her around the world. “I don’t mean in a follow-the-peer-pressure kind of way. I mean in the sense that you kind of always know what it means to make community and be part of it. And you realize that the process is the same wherever you go.”