The self is an individual's consciousness of his or her own being or identity. Self-awareness means that a person's cognitive, emotive and attitudinal processes can be directed not only toward the exterior environment but can reflect back on the person who is doing the thinking and feeling.
The concepts »I« and »me« are not innate; we have to learn to make ourselves the objects of our own observations, thoughts and feelings – and from there we learn how to control, influence, direct ourselves – through the primary socialization process during our first four or five years. Identifying with the words, definitions and attitudes of others we learn to identify ourselves as if our human environment would consist of so many mirrors, reflecting answers to the question: who am I? Although we are increasingly active in this process – we can internalize, but we can also reject or ignore some of the definitions – we become largely that which we are being defined as. Thus, since our selves, our personalities, our identities are social products, they are also cultural mircocosms. Their content is culture-specific and includes most of the definitions, language, values, norms, art, methods and life ways of the particular culture of our socialization process. And if our primary, and later, our secondary socialization processes contain elements from not just one but two or more cultures, then we may become multicultural persons with multicultural identities.
Multiple personality? Split personality? Schizophrenia? No. These psychopathological diagnoses are applied to describe illnesses, extreme disorientation, impaired intellectual and emotional functioning. In an evryday sense, as healthy, well adjusted individuals, we all are »multiple personalities« to various degrees as we perform our roles which are expected of us as occupant of our various statuses. We don't just behave differently as, say, parents, employees, lovers, church service, party or conference participants, but in many ways we exhibit different identities, we are different persons. As multicultural immigrants from, say, Mexico, Italy or India, we are different persons visiting our relatives from Guadalajara, Genoa or Gujarat on a Sunday afternoon and working in our American place of employment: an office, a shop or a hospital the next day.
Most people are also multicultural at least passively, in another sense. Their culture may contain elements adopted from other cultures. Due to such cultural diffusion, a Ukrainian of Kiev, for example, may enjoy the music of the Hungarian Béla Bartók while listening to the radio invented by the Italian Marconi and reading the novel of the Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marques. In the United States we write with the Roman alphabet and use the Arabic numerals.
But truly and actively multicultural people are usually those who have, as parts of their identities, internalized and who simultaneously maintain larger portions of the definitions, language, values, norms, art, methods and life ways of different cultures.
Such multicultural identity maintenance is not without its difficulties and conflicts but it also can be the source of invaluable assets.
Some of the difficulties may be caused by the differences between the two or more cultures possessed by the same individual. A culture's values – i.e. basic assumptions – may call for monotheism, another's for polytheism. A culture's value-based beliefs may define members of another culture as inferior or hostile. One's customs and mores may prescribe almost complete covering of a female's body in public, another's may not prescribe bare face, decolletage or uncovered legs. One language may not have one-word definitions for some concepts as others do. »My sister«, for example, can mean húgom (my younger sister) or nôvérem (my older sister) in Hungarian. The word: »god« may be a proper noun in one language, an attribute in another and entirely prohibited in a third. These difficulties can be relatively easily reconciled by multicultural individuals if the differences are perceived with open, tolerant and humane cultural relativism instead of with judgemental, dogmatic, supremacist ethnocentrism. Many multiethnic regions of the world attest to this, where numerous communities of different cultures lived or still live side by side like in Switzerland and South Tyrol, in Transylvania and the Bánát or in Finland, Sweden and New Mexico, sharing their distinct food, music and work methods with one another, many of their members intermarrying, learning each other's languages, enjoying each other's customs and not just tolerating, but honoring each other's values and mores. From the multicultural person's point of view, such tolerance is natural and necessary. Every person strives to maintain a well-adjusted balance between the different, sometimes strainingly, stressfully, threateningly different demands of the different statuses one occupies, everybody seeks to avoid role-conflicts, identity-crises. A multicultural person, thus, searches for the commonalities between his or her different cultures, for the reconciliation of the contrasts, for the enjoyment of the differences, thereby seeking harmony between different parts of his or her identity – we all want to be at peace with ourselves.
The more serious trouble is usually of exogenous origin.
The ethnic, historic national content of one's cultural identity – i.e.: national consciousness may be emphasized during primary and secondary socializations to include positive emotional elements toward one's cultural community: love, support, solidarity, loyalty, resulting in nationalism. If sustained ethnocentric, antagonistic, prejudicial, supremacist, xenophobic, negative stereotyping, scapegoating propaganda and demagoguery adds hostile, force-legitimating, violence – justifying elements to such positive nationalism, then hateful chauvinism may develop, resulting in dangerous, sometimes lethal conflicts, like the new anti-minority language laws in Slovakia and in Romania and like the recently revealed mass graves in the Balkans.
When two cultures, two ethnic groups collide – usually caused by political, economic, military or other power – instigations and coercive manifestations – then the inter-cultural conflicts can become intrapersonal conflicts for a multicultural individual. When Americans deported 120–200000 Japanese-Americans into concentration camps in 1942, when Turks punish Kurds for being Kurdish, when Slovaks and Romanians discriminate against Hungarians in Slovakia and in Romania by disallowing their language and culture transmission, teaching and maintenance, then multicultural Japanese-Americans, Turkish Kurds, Slovakian and Romanian Hungarians suffered and suffer devastating personal anxieties besides the social-political discrimination and aggression which they had to and have to endure.
But being multicultural can also be a source of immeasurable assets to members of the concerned cultures. A multicultural person can be a resource, a bridge and a role model.
A resource, because he or she may possess easily and readily accessible vital information about a culture's content, about which members of another culture could become cognizant only by great difficulties, if at all.
A bridge, because, given the right conditions and circumstances, a multicultural person may be ready, willing and able to »translate« some elements of a culture to members of another culture, to serve as an interpreter, a go-between, a goodwill ambassador between members of the different cultures.
A role model, because in a world which, from time to time, suffers from intolerance, xenophobia, chauvinism, prejudice, discrimination and bigotry, multicultural individuals may possess, by personal, psychological necessity, traits of tolerance, cultural relativism, non-judgmental openness toward differences in human manifestations.
The society of the United States of America seems, in the past forty years, to progress from insisting on the »melting pot« metaphor to the acceptance, even promotion of the image of the »mosaic«, where the gestalt, which means that the whole is more than, and different from the sum of its parts, also means, that the component parts have to retain, preserve their individual characteristics, otherwise there is no whole, no picture. Instead of »melting down« the different cultural components, we increasingly recognize the value and importance of being and remaining unique and distinct and providing those valuable differences – those treasured heritages – to the constitution of the whole.
We increasingly recognize that societal unity does not have to demand uniformity, social solidarity does not have to rely on homogeneity; cooperation and pluralism, integration and individual and group autonomy can be successfully coexisting features in multilingual, multicultural, multinational, poliethnic societies if those societies not only profess but ensure the practice of freedom, democracy, tolerance and equal rights for their members.
In the face of the historically and potentially genocidal and ethnocidal alternatives, we can do no less than foster, encourage, even demand that ethnic autonomy, cultural heritage maintenance and education, representation, self-determination and franchise become one of the codified and guaranteed fundamental human rights in every region, every country of the world.