The work of political scientist Robert Putnam on social capital and community values and their relationship to ‘diversity’, or racialised difference, has been heavily popularised, feeding into the current genre of apocalyptic cultural commentary. It has also been taken up at the highest government levels in both the US and the UK as containing the answer to multifarious social and cultural problems. The basic lesson that emerges from Putnam’s research is that high levels of diversity currently have a negative impact on levels of social capital. It is an approach that, as argued here, displays serious methodological and analytical shortcomings.
Allan Bloom (1930-1992) graduated from the University of Chicago in 1955 and went on to publish a number of works on political theory, among them the critical translation and interpretation The Republic of Plato (1968) and the translation and introduction to Rousseau’s Emile (1978). Bloom gained an international reputation for his critique of contemporary society and university policy, The Closing of the American Mind (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1987), and was widely hailed by conservative commentators as an authoritative voice on contemporary cultural problems.
2.
The Closing of the American Mind, op. cit., p. 75.
3.
Robert D. Putnam , Bowling Alone: the collapse and revival of American community ( New York, Simon & Schuster , 2000), p. 25.
4.
Ibid.
5.
Ibid., p. 506.
6.
Australian Policy Online, <http://www.apo.org.au/webboard/items/00021.shtml>.
7.
Bowling Alone, op. cit., p. 506.
8.
From an interview on The Connection, National Public Radio (11 July 2000).
9.
See <http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/saguaro/communitysurvey/index.html>; <http://www.bettertogether.org>; <http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/saguaro>; <http://www.bowlingalone.com>.
10.
See Bob Edwards and Michael Foley , ‘Social capital and civil society beyond Putnam’ , American Behavioral Scientist (Vol. 42, no. 2, September 1998).
11.
‘Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital,’Journal of Democracy (January 1995), p. 67 .
The absence of Pierre Bourdieu from any serious consideration by Putnam is striking, until one realises that Bourdieu’s work is in many ways anathema to Putnam’s. The salient distinction is Bourdieu’s relentless attention to the unequal accumulation and distribution characteristic of all forms of capital (social, cultural, human, etc.). See Pierre Bourdieu , ‘The forms of capital’, Richard Nice, tr., Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by John Richardson ( New York, Greenwood Press , 1986).
14.
and Ben Fine , ‘The developmental state is dead - long live social capital?’ , Development and Change (Vol. 30, 1999), pp. 1-19 .
15.
Robert Putnam , with Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Nanetti , Making Democracy Work: civic traditions in modern Italy ( Princeton, Princeton University Press , 1993).
16.
In a brief report to Australian Policy Online, Andrew Leigh, an intern for Putnam, notes that the question of ‘social capital and diversity’ has been the central concern of Putnam’s research team since 2001. See <http://www.apo.org.au/webboard/items/00021.shtml>.
17.
‘The kindness of strangers?’ , The Economist (26 February 2004).
18.
David Goodhart , ‘Too diverse?’ , Prospect Magazine (February 2004).
19.
<http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/saguaro/>.
20.
Susan Delacourt , ‘How ethnic diversity breeds distrust: after Sept. 11, cultural tension is biggest challenge facing governments, expert argues’ , Ottawa Citizen (6 December 2001).
21.
‘Racialised’ difference differs from ‘racial’ difference because it highlights the process of producing difference (social, cultural, biological, religious, etc.) as race. We do not understand diversity as something that is simply there to be identified but rather as something that must be insisted upon and continually maintained. Diversity, then, works and even exists only through relations of power. Its very conceptualisation thus becomes an important question for interpreting research on social capital.
22.
<http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/saguaro/communitysurvey/results3.html>. Since last summer, a note has been added to the page which claims the ‘preliminary’ nature of these conclusions.
23.
<http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/saguaro/communitysurvey/results3.html>. This is an odd trinity of ‘new’ culinary forms to be presented against ‘traditional American cuisine’. The ‘chimichanga’ is regional and quite rare in Mexico, owing its wide proliferation in the US to the marketing strategies of frozen food distributors, Taco Bell, and school lunch menus, if not to the US invasion and appropriation of Northern Mexico in 1848. ‘Kimche’ is a Korean speciality whose dissemination in the US dates at least to the refugees that entered the US in the wake of the Korean War and probably to the nineteenth century. ‘Collard greens’ refer to the American South and are typically associated with African American cuisine, or ‘soul food’. They could only be excluded from the realm of ‘traditional American cuisine’ in the same way that some would exclude the presence of African Americans from ‘traditional American society’. Finally, the figurative language itself is weak, given that the ‘stew’ thus proposed would have no culinary appeal.
24.
It is an unfortunate coincidence that Putnam’s Los Angeles is also the apocalyptic setting of Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down (1993), a film in which Michael Douglas plays the universal white man beset by the three communities symbolised in Putnam’s ‘multicultural stew’: Mexican, Korean and black.
25.
Some scholars have been moving towards these types of questions. For new work on the relations between social capital and diversity that does not always echo Putnam’s, see Paula D. McClain , ‘Social capital and diversity: an introduction’ and Rodney E. Hero, ‘Social capital and racial inequality in America,’ Perspectives on Politics (Vol. 1, no. 1, 2003).
26.
The obvious counter-example here would be Brazil, where people have generally registered tolerant attitudes toward racialised difference for decades, and yet quite visible informal and institutionalised racism persists. For a recent review of race relations and state policy in Brazil, see Mala Htun , ‘From ‘‘racial democracy’’ to affirmative action’ , Latin American Research Review (Vol. 39, no. 1, 2004).
27.
Bowling Alone, op. cit., p. 28.
28.
and The American Prospect (Vol. 13, no. 3, 11 February 2002).
29.
Statistics on civilian deaths resulting from the invasion and occupation of Iraq vary widely. The non-profit group Civic reports more than 5,000 civilians killed during the so-called major combat phase in Iraq between March 20 and May 1, 2003. The Project on Defense Alternatives estimates between 3,200 and 4,300 civilian casualties during this same period. In military action to date, the website Iraq Body Count estimates up to 16,500 civilians killed. A Johns Hopkins study published in The Lancet estimates that as many as 100,000 civilians have died in Iraq as a direct or indirect result of the invasion and occupation.
