In Search of Meaning: A Study of the Sociology Of Ethnicity, Culture and Symbolism, and its Implications for a Policy of Multiculturalism

Abstract

The basic postulate of this thesis is that Multiculturalism as government policy in Australia fails because it attempts an unstated, conceptual division between what the thesis will define as cultural pluralism and what it will define as structural pluralism. The thesis suggests that government perpetuates this division partly out of its own conceptual limitations, but mostly out of an ideological imperative to control and direct social relations so that it retains government; in this instance, it seeks to appease ethnic voters and voters intellectually sympathetic to ethnic concerns.