“Is multiculturalism bad for women?” This question is a fundamental criticism of multiculturalism. While recognising minority cultures which have been neglected in secularised modern regimes, multiculturalism is perceived to be suppressing individual freedoms through the cultural conventions to which it grants approval. Women are particularly vulnerable to becoming victims of such oppressive cultural conventions. However, young Muslim women in Britain have opinions contrary to this mainstream discourse about multiculturalism in contemporary Western society. They enjoy religious freedom and develop their religious knowledge in Britain’s multicultural society. It empowers them to research Islam with their own hands and make Islam adaptable to their lives in the Western world. In other words, they “humanise the sacred” by independently interpreting religious teachings to strike a balance between Islamic values and citizenship in the Western world. This paper investigates the important roles of multiculturalism in Muslim women’s engagement in the interpretative practice of Islam and their use of religious knowledge for their integration into Western society by analysing the attitudes of second-generation （and third-generation and so on） Muslim women in Britain regarding wearing or not wearing a hijab.

View full abstract

This article investigates the “post-multicultural era” in France and the conditions and lives of racial and ethnic minorities who inhabit this environment. Using the term “post-multicultural era” to describe French society is not a completely straightforward matter; in France, multiculturalism has always been understood as irreconcilable with French republicanism. As a result, it has never taken root and has often been the object of mistrust and even rejection. However, there is an underlying but significant change that demands more rights for minorities.
On the one hand, new forms of blatant discrimination have emerged over the past 15 years under the name of “sexual democracy,” which functions to justify the exclusion of racial and ethnic minorities under the pretext of defending “sexual minorities.” On the other hand, new types of practices have appeared within anti-discrimination movements, such as the “non-mixité （unmixed）” movement, which demands safe spaces reserved exclusively for victims of racial, sexual, and other types of discrimination.
Contrary to the sharp criticisms of “non-mixité,” which argue that it will inevitably lead to social division and dangerous“ communautarisme（ self-segregation or clannishness in French）,” its advocates claim that the practices of “non-mixité” are not the ultimate goal, but rather a provisional and necessary step to achieve “color-brave universalism” and overcome the traditionally binary opposition between “color-blind” and “color-conscious.”

View full abstract

Multiculturalist thoughts have migrated from their original context to broader one, where they have often been taken as “theories” which could have universal validity. Those “theories”, however, were originally political ideas developed in a specific society at a specific time. Therefore, contextualized examination is necessary for precise evaluation of their validity. Based on this insight, the paper examines the liberal multiculturalist thought of Will Kymlicka, repositioning it into the context of Canadian Indigenous politics in which it was originally embedded.
This examination involves comparing Kymlicka’s ideas with critical Indigenous thoughts. Confronting the political situation to which Kymlicka responded, Indigenous thinkers have viewed and responded to it differently. The limitation of his thought becomes clearer by taking it not only within the liberalist framework, but by contrasting it with Indigenous thoughts deriving from different traditions. The paper pays special attention to Indigenous thoughts of “resurgence”, especially those of Taiaiake Alfred and Leanne Simpson, and compares them with Kymlicka’s argument. As the axes of comparison, I focus on the differences in their responses to （1） the “politics of recognition” institutionalized by the colonial state and （2） restrictions of individual freedom by gendered norms. What is proposed through this “dialogue of political thoughts” is a fundamental turn in the arguments on cultural multiplicity, from pursuing whatever “ism” or “theory” for pushing multiplicity into the single value world toward dealing with the multiplicity of value worlds themselves.

View full abstract

Japan’s elderly care insurance system provides reproductive labor as a social service through public-private partnership. Social service involves an employer providing services with government finances and to consumers who purchase those services. It represents a case in which reproductive labor heretofore performed in the private sphere has shifted to the public sphere. This change dates back to the 19th century. At that time, “things social” were developed as a “combination of systems, technology and knowledge of the population such as birth rates, mortality rates and life expectancy.” Welfare systems were based on this. Reproductive labor, which is a process involved in the reproduction of life, has become “social” and of public interest by being included in the welfare system.
This paper discusses the problems associated with the elder care insurance system focusing on both workers and users. First, is it possible to view women migrant workers taking care of elderly people as wage labor in the public sector as an “advance?” The welfare system, which was “social” in the 19th century made reproductive labor visible but it is still considered women’s work. Second, the national pension system has nationality requirements while the elder care insurance system has relaxed nationality conditions, allowing people without Japanese nationality to use the system. Some Koreans in Japan are not eligible for the national pension system but are eligible for the elder care insurance system. If the national pension system is a system based on national sovereignty and the eldercare insurance system is a system based on biopower, then biopower also includes the “non-citizens” excluded by national sovereignty. The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct reproductive labor in the future through these two considerations.

View full abstract

“The right of self-determination” has been the basis of women’s claim for access to abortion since 1980s. However, at the same time, feminism argues that women’s claim for self-determination does not simply depend on property rights, that women’s self-determination does not necessarily deny the moral value of a fetus, and that a pregnant woman’s “self” does not exist without a fetus. It is the concept of “rights” that has often been avoided. Is it necessary to avoid the use of “rights” in order to pay attention to a fetus? Does self-determination without a “right” deserve to be called “determination”? Does feminism really dispense with the concept of “rights”? This paper looks into the arguments done by Carl Schmitt, Jacques Derrida, Ernest Laclau and Drucilla Cornell to inquire into the constitutive relationship between the subject and the act of determination, to clarify the issues inherent in Japanese feminism, and finally to discuss the importance of the claim for “rights.”

View full abstract

When tracking the thought of Munesuke Mita, there is a general tendency to say that he started as a sociologist engaged in theorizing but then he subsequently abandoned sociology. He turned to a position on the outside of society in order to understand the ‘inversion of the figure and the ground’ in modern society. It has, however, been pointed out that this leads a tendency to leave behind the real world and the issues it presents for sociology. The fact becomes clear this ‘inversion’ was actually linked to the theory conceived in the early 70’s by a reconsideration of his works written during this period especially “Value Space and Decision of Action”（1972）. What directed him at that time was a sense there was an absurd contradiction in human value selection. As a realistic possibility of overcoming the absurdity, he proposed a reconstruction of the ‘value space,’ the whole structure of value a subject faces. The theory required by this attempt is none other than the theory of ‘divulsion from the inside’ of the modern value space. Given the concept of divulsion, his subsequent ‘inversion from the outside’ can be repositioned as a medium for divulsion. Reexamining the dialectically repetitive movement of inversion and divulsion can not only be a new perspective for revisiting Mita’s works systematically, but also be a basic reference when we develop his remaining challenges.

View full abstract

The sociology of knowledge is generally defined as a field of sociology that inquires about the interrelationship between knowledge and social existence. Therefore, its foundation involves a dualistic composition of knowledge and society or mind and matter. This dualistic composition, however, faces a dilemma when prescribing that every piece of knowledge is socially determined, without any exceptions, as its founder, K. Mannheim asserted. If this is so, both poles of the dualism are knowledge and if a social existence is hypostatized as a relatum of knowledge to be explained, this seems to contradict the proposition of the universal social determination of knowledge.
This article is a preliminary study aiming to resolve this fundamental problem in the sociology of knowledge. It proposes a basic orientation of formulating the sociology of knowledge as a knowledge holism. This paper then observes that Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge has characteristic of holism as presented by W. V. O. Quine. In this way, Quine’s holism must conversely be reconstructed as the sociology of knowledge which enables researchers to position A. Schütz’s knowledge theory as a theory that can supplement those of Mannheim and Quine. Schütz’s knowledge theory thus also has a peculiar holistic feature. Lastly, Schütz’s contribution in formulating the sociology of knowledge as a knowledge holism is clarified and the major challenges that remain for solving the fundamental problems of the sociology of knowledge are noted.

View full abstract