by
Paul Lichterman
Department of Sociology
University of Wisconsin
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706

e-mail: lichterm@ssc.wisc.edu

Forthcoming in The Hedgehog Review, Vol. 3, no. 1, Spring 2001.

A different version of this paper was given as a lecture in the "Diversity Reconsidered"
Colloquium Series, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, March 4, 1999.

From tribalism to translation:
Bridging diversity for civic renewal

by
Paul Lichterman

When Americans imagine cultural diversity, we often have in mind diverse identities. When we argue about cultural diversity, the arguments are often about identities, too. Critics of cultural diversity worry that Americans focus too little on common experiences--as Americans, as human beings--and dwell too much on particular racial, sexual, or gender identities. Proponents of cultural diversity seek out the particularity and celebrate diverse identities. A fascination with identity either has made Americans tribal or else has opened Americans' minds and given voice to the silenced. Either way, big things are at stake: It is not just university course syllabi, or Columbus Day ceremonies, but the way Americans think about a collective heritage. No wonder, then, that cultural identity claims have been loud and impassioned, and the scholarly debates about them have been heated, too.

I want to turn our attention to a quieter, much less remarked upon, yet very powerful kind of cultural diversity. We can hear it if we listen in on everyday talk in citizen groups. I hope to make a convincing case for the power of very ordinary, diverse customs of American civic life. Listening to this quieter world of cultural diversity will help us understand what makes civic life more public-spirited, or more divisive. It will help us understand why the claims people make on behalf of diverse identities seem shrill and tribalistic some of the time. Let me begin my case with two scenarios:

Members of a gay coalition against the political right are talking about federal welfare spending cuts. They argue over whether to adopt the issue as one of their own. One man lectures coalition members that most members of the gay and lesbian community will not think that "poor people" on welfare need concern them. The man assumes that members of "the gay community" are interested primarily in gay-identified issues; he also figures that few members of the community would stop to think that some welfare recipients might be gay. Some of the gay coalition members urge volunteers to get out the gay vote by leafletting in gay neighborhoods on behalf of a city council candidate who says she is pro-gay. In all, it sounds as if the coalition is propounding what critics of identity politics have called tribalism: The coalition is promoting an essential, exclusive, gay identity. It assumes lesbians and gays will care about welfare reform only if welfare can be shown to be a properly lesbian and gay issue. It assumes gays and lesbians vote for candidates only when the candidates have weighed in on the correct side of "their" specific issues. Perhaps narrow-minded from the standpoint of public-spirited citizenship, the interest-group realism in play here would strike few as surprising.

Yet, coalition members are not always so tribal. In fact, they have broad-ranging concerns. At the coalition's gay youth task force, members try to prioritize a long line of issues. The issues that get the most votes of concern from the group are "attacks on critical thinking programs," and English-Only ballot initiatives. The most clearly gay youth-related issue written on the poster paper in front of the group----the Christian right's attempts to end sex education--comes in second to last place. These proponents of gay identity, in other words, do not always act like stalwart members of a gay tribe.

Let me introduce one other scenario. A citizen environmental group has been pressuring the chemical companies ringing a small industrial city to handle its toxic waste more safely. The group wants lots of local residents to go to a public hearing about a company that a state agency has cited for storing hazardous wastes improperly. A recent accident on company grounds is particularly damning evidence of negligence: A large steel drum suddenly lurched skyward and exploded. The environmental group's board members excoriate the company. The chairman angrily points out that there were a lot of minority people working at the site, some of whom hardly even speak English. "It's like murder!" Another board member declares it is "genocide." The mostly black board members are indignant that a black woman at the public hearing defended the company and said it was being picked on unfairly. Referring to this woman, the chair says that some of "our people" were on the wrong side. He is especially dismayed that a "black man", as he put it, is now working for the company and trying to rectify its bad reputation. This scenario, again, implies tribalism at work: This largely African American group assumes that other African American residents have exactly the same interests, that they wear racial identity like a team logo stitched onto their shirts as they go out into public life.

But the environmental group does not mean to advocate for black identity. The group's mission statement says the group represents low-to-moderate income people--not just African Americans. A long-time member insists the group will work on behalf of anyone who lives in the area and cares about pollution. The group has made door-to-door organizing sorties into Vietnamese and Spanish-speaking neighborhoods. And black members of the group are hardly black nationalists; they are very cool to the cultural politics of one young member who suggests that the group ought to tell the EPA in Washington to include on its list of endangered species "the black male." Yet, sometimes group members talk with a narrow sense of who their community is, and they narrow their horizons of concern.

These two scenarios suggest that we cannot know whether a group is always inclusive or exclusive just by knowing whether the group is officially an identity-based one or not. Different civic groups have different styles of commitment, apart from the identities they represent. They have different customs of "being a group" together. Sometimes the same group even has different customs for different situations--and it cultivates narrow partisanship in some settings, but open-minded citizenship in others. I am referring to what I will call "group-building customs." Diverse group-building customs constitute an important, if under-appreciated, form of American cultural diversity.

Group-building customs affect the ways groups assert identities, the ways groups discuss social issues. James Hunter has observed that most citizens are much less certain about social issues than we would guess from hearing professional publicists battling over red-button topics like abortion or school prayer in the nightly news. Group-building customs are the easily unnoticed context, the backdrop to the noisy show. American group-building customs bid us to accommodate ourselves to shrill partisanship in the larger arenas of debate, and to allow ourselves more open-ended, self-critical discussions mainly in smaller, less visible spaces. Advocates of civic renewal, people who care about broad-minded, public-spirited civic discussion, need to pay more attention to group-building customs.

I want to advance three counterintuitive claims: First, to understand the effects of identity claims and identity politics on public life, we should look beyond the identities themselves and listen closely to how people build groups around those identities. That is, we need to take the world of everyday interaction seriously. Second, civic renewal depends not on suppressing differences in group customs, but bridging them and sustaining them. On this point, I'll introduce the notion of a "cultural translator," someone who understands different group customs and helps groups communicate with one another across the sometimes formidable barriers that customs create. I have come across a number of cultural translators in ten years of ethnographic work on American civic life. Finally, I argue that the ability to translate between customs depends on a cultural ethos that few promoters of civic engagement appreciate: individualism.

When I go to activist or volunteer groups to discover group-building customs at work, I listen to the ways members talk about, or imply, what makes a good member. And I listen to the way the group maps itself into the world of groups and institutions outside the group. Building civic groups matters to many scholars who wonder whether or not American civic life is fast dying. In Robert Putnam's well-known formulation, civic engagement--from the smallest neighborhood dinner-party circuits to the biggest national associations--has declined steeply in the past thirty years. The nation appears to be losing its "social capital," the sum total of social networks, social norms, and mutual trust that keep public life going. There is a great virtue in the generality of a concept such as social capital; it gives us a common measure to use if we want to take massive inventories of group life in America and see what has changed historically. But it is not a sensitive tool if we want to understand different ways people create groups. The differences matter greatly. That is why I attend to the customs of group life.

In some groups, for instance, it is customary for each member to contribute actively, equally, personally, to the group, on the notion that good members invest a lot of themselves in the group and a good group resonates with individual voices. Other groups, like the environmental alliance pictured at the start, assume that a good group is one in which people speak with one communal voice whenever possible: a hearty chant more than a harmony of different voices. Some citizen groups customarily relate their efforts to a local world of municipal agencies, neighborhoods, churches, and businesses; the environmental group is, again, an example. Other citizen groups, also locally based, see their work on a national or even world stage. They imagine themselves on a map that includes political parties, social movements, cultural trends, capital flows. Some groups, such as the gay coalition introduced above, picture themselves in an arena of sharply demarcated allies and enemies, while others pursuing the same causes imagine a public world in which group identities are more fluid.

These are not the "exotic" customs of t.v. travelogues. But they are very powerful. I find there are relatively few sets of these customs. Any of these sets of customs can operate in volunteer, activist, or religious groups, creating similar styles of engagement across groups with very different purposes. To illustrate, I want to introduce just three sets of customs that I have found repeatedly in ethnographic work.

The most well-known group-building customs in civic life today are the ones that create interest groups. The phrase itself is a common coin, so I should clarify: I use the term to designate a group in which being a responsible member means acting strategically, as efficiently as possible, for a unitary interest, and counting on other members to do so too. Members imagine themselves a sharply bounded group, in an arena of competing or opposing groups also sharply bounded. The lesbian and gay coalition I introduced at the start acted like an interest group some of the time. We could say most if not all public groups have "interests" to pursue, but not all groups define themselves so strongly in terms of strategic efforts and unitary interests.

Interest groups are ubiquitous in America. They trade on such a commonsensical understanding of public life that many scholarly writers assume any rational group is an interest group. But even the most unquestionably "rational" interests operate only through words, images, and symbols that define what counts as an interest to begin with. Interest groups are not simply natural or self-evidently logical responses to objective, material reality. We create them through customs; those customs are cultural, valuable to group members even when they frustrate the ends that group members seek.

Interest group customs dissuade group members from talking about the varied interests that they often claim as their own when they are outside the group. The assumption is that open-ended, self-critical talk about interests is unnecessary, perhaps a waste of time. That kind of talk will not help groups "do things" and be effective in civic life. Interest group members end up sounding more shrill and tribal than they are in other contexts.

To return quickly to the gay coalition: The founding members had envisioned the coalition uniting with other groups in a larger network to combat the political right. They conceived the network the way many citizen coalitions do: an interest group of interest groups, each imagined to be composed of members who carry one unambiguous interest. I would hear people imply that "the gay community" should unite with "the African American community," thus enlarging the sum of "the progressive community." Yet, we already saw that lesbian and gay members of this coalition were not nearly as single-minded in their gay identity as their group-building customs would suggest. They had other interests, too. The coalition had to work at hardening the boundaries around its own community of interest. Were they simply adapting to the "real" world of politics? Why did coalition members do this work?

At least part of the reason is that interest group customs led members to treat gay identity as the basis for a single interest, even when that was not strategically wise. They assumed that "realistic," "effective" groups have to be interest groups. In the discussion of welfare reform I pictured earlier, members had clearly cared about poor people. Still, the coalition assumed a gay group should care about poor people, or about a city council candidate, by making welfare or municipal issues into gay issues. They continued observing these interest group customs even when one black, gay leader bitterly challenged coalition members for presuming there could be a unitary, gay interest. Race mattered too, he argued reasonably enough. Interest group customs threatened to lead to a cycle of fragmentation that critics often attribute to identity claims--gay and black, in this case--by themselves.

The larger gay and progressive communities ended up hearing an interest group express a single identity with a single interest to match. This is one instance of my introductory claim that group-building customs end up foregrounding shrill partisanship and sequestering more flexible, multivalent notions of identity and interest in smaller forums. Similarly, at a public forum, one speaker was slated to talk about the rising threats to gay youth in public schools. She spoke passionately about poverty, about how dismal the chances were for kids from low-income families to complete college. Then she apologized for sounding like she was getting off the point. Wasn't she supposed to talk about lesbian and gay youth? And that is the point: When people follow interest group customs, they work at hardening boundaries, and they simplify group members' understanding of each other: You can belong if you're gay--and it does not matter what else you are. The certainties of interest group politics trump the multivalence of open-minded citizenship, and make for far more digestible sound bites, too.

Some of those gay coalition members met weekly in another building a few miles away. These same people would then follow a different set of group-building customs. And they would have quite different kinds of conversations about public issues. They would follow the customs of what I call personalized groups.

Personalized group members relate to one another as empowered selves, each of whom carries a great deal of responsibility for realizing the group's goals. Personalized groups accentuate individual voices, within the collectivity. The bonds of personalized groups obligate each individual member to make a deeply personalized contribution to the whole. A personalized group is not a therapy group, much less a collection of selfish individuals using each other for private ends. Personalized groups tend to draw hazier boundaries between their own community and others on the social map; empowering individuals more, they emphasize group boundaries somewhat less. But empowering individuals in these groups does not mean ignoring the common good. It means making room for individualized contributions to it.

These group-building customs are familiar to many grassroots political organizations and religious fellowships. And like the customs of interest groups, these have a strong, but different, influence on how groups discuss identities and issues. Personalized groups can brook a lot more open-ended, exploratory, values-driven discussion than can interest groups that assume the purpose of talking together is to promote the group interest in the most strategic way possible.

So some of those same gay coalition members who expressed a narrow partisanship in the coalition, talked their way to a much more nuanced kind of identity when they met as members of a self-named "queer" group. Provocative name notwithstanding, the queer group entertained more self-critical, civic-minded talk about gay politics than did the coalition. They criticized the idea of a homogenous "gay community," and sometimes they criticized each other. They talked about how gender and race sometimes mattered more for someone's chances in society than would sexual identity. They said they cared about their city and its political life, and did not want to be agents of fragmentation. Rather than acting like single-minded partisans, they expected each other to cultivate some thoughtful distance from their identities as lesbians and gay men. They expected each other to take those identities multivalently, with a respectful eye out for the claims of other groups. Their group-building customs enabled them to entertain a self-critical stance toward gay identity that would have been out of place if not threatening in an interest group. Individually nuanced opinion made sense in a personalized group--the customs made upholding rigid boundaries less important, and valorizing individuals more important, even when members were critical of gay community leaders.

Personalized groups are not necessarily ones based on a specific identity. Since the 1960s, many grassroots activists--environmentalists and peace activists, for instance--have emphasized a highly personalized kind of commitment. Practicing what I have called personalized politics, they have stressed that personal "empowerment" must accompany empowerment of their organizations. Their political groups honor, but also expect, a great deal of individual participation. These activists practice political obligation in private as well as public life. They apply their political principles to their decisions about whether to work as genetic engineeers or teachers, whether to share parenting with partners or work 80-hour weeks, whether to buy organic produce or save money. Only occasionally are they the reactive, self-righteous scolds that the media have disparaged as "politically correct." Rather, they think carefully through their social responsibility in a very personal way, and expect group involvements to both nurture and reflect their quests to live a good life.

Personalized groups do not always need to be small and intimate. Occasionally, they fold in members of different communities; they can produce their own form of "network." One example is a loose, religious grouping I followed, roughly 100 people who attended monthly dialogues on controversial issues, sponsored by an urban religious service network. Evangelical Protestants, liberal Lutherans, a few Catholics, and a few people who reject institutionalized religion altogether sat around tables of eight, with cheap boxed dinners, and discussed the moral meaning of race, or the morality of welfare reform. They promised to listen to each other without judging, to aim for understanding instead of convincing. A personalized form of togetherness enabled the participants to listen to each other and hold judgment, instead of hauling out the big guns of religious argument. "Personalized togetherness" is not a contradiction terms: The people at these dialogues shared a responsibility to tune in to each other's individualized contributions, take them seriously; these sessions were not just free-for-alls of selfish expression. Sometimes the participants showed a kind of civic bravery--at one of these forums the local Christian Coalition contact person and the leader of a gay Methodist caucus sat at the same table, each sharing his image of a good family.

The larger point is that potentially divisive, identity-based claims can become more open-minded in the context of personalized groups. The customs of these groups produce some weaknesses, too: Personalized groups take a lot of time, and sometimes a draining emotional investment. And they tend to remain relatively marginal to mainstream, mass-mediated arenas of debate. The trouble is not that such groups are always too idealistic or impractical. Nor do they simply lack strategic value; sometimes, groups need to spend serious time talking through their members' different identities and interests so that the differences can enrich the group rather than fracture it. Rather, the biggest trouble is that these group customs run up against a widespread understanding among Americans that effective politics or effective volunteering means single-minded, single-interest initiatives intended to oppose well-defined foes, tackle narrowly defined problems, or administer simply defined tasks. "Realistic" politics and "effective" volunteering, that is, follow interest group customs. It is the larger culture with its emphasis on interest groups, as much or more than the customs of personalized groups, that tends to limit this form of civic engagement to smaller spaces.

Finally, there are the customs of what I call local communitarian groups. With these customs, group members relate to one another as faithful adherents of long-standing religious, political, or ethnic traditions. They depend on one another to uphold the public goods articulated in those traditions. More than many interest groups, local communitarian groups can make moral arguments. They don't need to finesse traditions out of deference to individuals who may have different commitments, they way members of personalized groups might. And they dare to draw communal boundaries quite sharply around those who embody the group's traditions.

The African-American environmental group I introduced at the start is a good example. Though the group insisted it was an environmental alliance open to any local residents, the group assumed that being a member meant accepting a single, morally grounded communal will unquestioningly--the will of "the community" as constructed by the group. Group members derided local residents who pursued lawsuits against local industries to win compensation for their chronic skin conditions and their smoke-damaged property: These were simply "self-interested" individuals who were not really part of "the community." When the group's staffperson came under scrutiny from the alliance's national sponsor for not having kept close enough track of finances, the group's own board gave him a unanimous vote of support--though not because they disagreed with the national sponsor's evaluation. The staffperson was worth supporting because of how hard he worked "for the community." One woman said "when you do the best you can do, there's nothing else you can do." A more strategically minded group would fire someone whose best is not good enough. But this group insisted on hanging together with a staffperson who showed communal commitment.

This group's communal togetherness gave it a number of strengths for sure, including a ready source of legitimacy from "the community" that it had constructed quite convincingly. But the unitary, highly bounded sense of identity in local communitarian groups leads to tribalism sometimes, even when members intend the group focus on issues, not identities. While local communitarian groups can sustain the kinds of deeper discussion that are frequently off-limits in interest groups, they end up producing their own form of narrowness in relation to the larger civic world.

* * *

These vignettes picture a world of cultural diversity that we often misrecognize, or equate with the identities that groups claim or the issues that they pursue. But these diverse group-building customs do not map in a simple way onto identity politics, or more conventional kinds of politics. Identity-based politics or a more general, citizen politics might follow the customs of interest groups, personalized groups, or local communitarian groups.

These different customs produce their own kinds of divisions in civic life. Those divisions can make it difficult to create broad alliances, even when citizen groups agree on the issues at stake. Consider, for instance, two environmental groups that shared an environmental justice discourse. That is, they called corporations and governments to task for allowing a disproportionate share of toxic hazards to fester in low-income communities. But different group-building customs created misunderstandings and missed connections: When one would-be ally with a personalized style tried to work with the African American environmental group, it found that its own, individual-affirming, consensus decision-making group process was not fast enough to keep up with an organizer from the other group, who assumed his tightly bound "community" would turn out for rallies even at short notice. It was almost as if these groups operated in different civic worlds; for all practical purposes, they did.

If we are serious about the possibilities for making civic involvement a richer, more enlivening, more integral part of everyday life, we will have to take group-building customs seriously. They are much more than mere curios for social scientists--extra detail in the big picture. People do not become active citizens in the abstract. Citizenship happens through lived traditions that make "going public" meaningful in practice. Taking group-building customs seriously, we then have to ask how groups with different customs can ever talk together and work together for the greater good. How can a democratic civic order arise from these everyday worlds of diversity?

One very practical, popular answer resonates in the endless enthusiasm for networks in American civic life, those interest groups writ large. Networks coalesce around specific issues while retaining their communal differences. In this vision, particular group-building customs do not matter much, as long as groups commit themselves to a strategically driven network that transcends those particular customs. In concrete terms, this means that environmental leaders, or gay and minority and progressive leaders, agree to strategize together and build coalitions around specific issues without getting into a lot of ideological or moral discussion. That is just what has happened increasingly in grassroots politics since the 1970s.

Networks and their constituent interest groups are undeniably important, a sometimes indispensible feature of civic life in a large, diverse society. But by themselves, they will not help realize a vision of civic renewal. If so much of activist and volunteer life is embodied in professionally staffed networks pursuing single-issue causes, then where can people have deeper, open-ended discussions about social priorities? How can more interest groups lead to a more vibrant civil society, one in which people can talk about values in some depth? The instrumental network approach to civic life embodies the assumption that ultimate social and moral priorities are more private than public matters, and that depth is usually dangerous.

Maybe it is only realistic to assume most of political life must happen in interest groups that thin out traditions, highlight efficiency over mutual learning, and harden boundaries between identities. But careful participant observation research, not just normative commitments alone, tell me there is at least one alternative. It is not so unrealistic, sociologically, to envision a civic sphere that makes deeper, more other-regarding dialogue possible. How, then, will wide-ranging, morally informed civic discussion engage people beyond the relatively small enclaves of personalized or communitarian citizen groups? I find one answer in what I call "cultural translation."

Cultural translation enables groups with different customs to talk to each other. A cultural translator understands different group customs, and can translate ideas between groups with different customs, as I will illustrate below. Cultural translators can take a group's customs reflectively, critically, if empathetically, from the standpoint of other groups.

The translation metaphor condenses themes in important writings about public life and morality. First of all, translation is about communication, and as Jürgen Habermas has stressed, a vibrant public sphere is one in which people communicate freely, self-critically, in good will, about common concerns. Participants in the ideal public sphere practice a communication ethic. But I am stressing a kind of communication that does not figure much in Habermas's vision of a good public sphere--communication across different customs of going public. Alongside the communication ethic, I envision a translation ethic. The cultural translator notion is also congenial in some ways to a communitarian viewpoint, because it presupposes that group customs have worthwhile visions of the good implicit in them; personalized groups presuppose the dignity of the individual, and communitarian groups uphold the binding force of shared tradition. But in contrast with many communitarians, I am arguing that there is more than one good way to produce communal bonds: Different group-building customs produce different kinds of group solidarity, not just more or less solidarity. The African-American environmental group's local-communitarian customs were good for some kinds of collective action, and so were those of the more personalized, ecumenical association. And sometimes groups need to constitute themselves as interest groups; I argue, simply, that this notion of group life looms too large in Americans' imagination of public interchange. Finally, cultural translation implies a thoughtful ambivalence that Zygmunt Bauman has characterized as the hallmark of postmodern, moral personhood because confident certainty--about oneself, one's cultural authorities--is philosophically deceptive, and blinds us to suffering.

The cultural translator may also sound like the figment of an academic imagination. But I have heard at least incipient, if sometimes fleeting, attempts at cultural translation in almost all of the activist and volunteer groups I have explored as an ethnographer. As these engaged citizens find out, cultural translation does not take special, technical skill beyond an attentive ear and a willingness to accept that little customs may have big ramifications for civic life.

Sometimes one group member takes the leading "translator" role for the group. One activist in a suburban environmental group I studied, for instance, spent a lot of her energy assuring timid fellow suburbanites that they could agree with the flamboyant, urban protestors who demonstrated against a local firm that had poisoned the groundwater, without having to act or sound like them. Speaking out politically in the "family-oriented," suburban milieu was not customary or polite; it was scary. This activist translated the customs and the environmentalist message of youthful, urban, personalized politics, so that one homemaker in her group could get to the point of saying that she felt comfortable at a rally with those youthful, "like-minded citizens."

To illustrate cultural translation a little further, I want to introduce James Shaver, from the African American environmentalist group I have described already. Shaver identified as an African American, and very self-consciously decided to settle in Hillview, a low-income, predominantly black city, so that he could use his college education to assist the people that he identified with there. But it wasn't an easy or romantic identification with the oppressed. Shaver in fact risked surprising if not offending other members of his group with some of his viewpoints, including his hunch that Christianity was in some ways "our worse enemy" as he put it. He also affirmed some of the black identity politics that seemed completely foreign to other members of his group. He is the one who suggested that the group should petition the EPA to name the black male an endangered species.

At the same time, Shaver knew how to work with interest groups, and public agencies accustomed to dealing with interest groups. He could translate his group's morally infused demands into technical plans that county agencies could understand. He could do that while respecting, even revering, his group's own customs. With Shaver's help, the group remained visible, and understandable in a broader, public arena of interest groups, all the while maintaining the moral motivations that kept board members committed to the group. Shaver was willing to criticize his recently adopted home community from more cosmopolitan standpoints he had learned in college, but he also grounded himself in black Hillview, keeping other communities and other standards visible on his moral horizon. He was a cultural translator.

What does cultural translation sound like in everyday language? What metaphors and symbols make it possible to be a cultural translator? Translators do not simply arise ex nihilo; they are not tradition-defying, cultural stunt men. I suggest that the culture of individualism makes it possible for cultural translators to do their public-spirited work.

Someone as committed and community-minded as James Shaver may not sound like an individualist, so my claim bears some elaborating: Individualism is a broad heritage; we can think of it as several cultural stands with different histories and different social purposes. Many sociologists, and political progressives, disdain individualism because we usually think of individualism in its consumerist, or entrepreneurial, or corporate articulations. We routinely condemn individualism as the ideological grease that keeps the wheels of capitalism and the bureaucratic state functioning. Again, we can benefit from a more careful sociology without losing hold of a normative vision. Individualism is not just an ideology; it is also a moral tradition. It has more as well as less public-spirited strands.

One of those strands is what I have called "personalism." Personalism highlights individuality and personal, moral authenticity. It can highlight these qualities within communal memberships that give substance to our individuality. In everyday life, personalism does not necessarily oppose individuals to communities or to public commitments. Rather, personalism is the tradition of seeking out what Charles Taylor has called a morality that is "indexed" to a personal vision, a morality that resonates deeply within the self but is not reducible to "self-interest" in the sense of political or economic liberalism. It is a tradition familiar to many Americans through the romanticism of Emerson and Whitman.

Of course its newer and cheaper variants are familiar to even more Americans, through pop psychology nostrums and the dubious wisdom of t.v. talk shows. Personalism certainly can motivate selfish quests to fulfill one's own needs at the expense of others'. Sociologists who criticize therapeutic self-centeredness, or the fuzzy and entrepreneurially-driven thinking of the "personal growth" industry, are not simply inventing phantoms. But their criticisms do not exhaust this part of the tradition of individualism either, and they neglect or underestimate moral sentiments that, arguably, motivate many Americans at least some of the time.

At its best, personalism bids us to create an individualized relationship with the communities we affirm as moral guides. More personalism does not always mean less communal obligation. Personalism can promote a kind of communal obligation that works this way: People depend on one, are obligated to another, to make a highly individualized contribution to the community. It is a contribution that strengthens the community and expresses oneself authentically. Personalism is the tradition behind the "personalized" community-building customs I described earlier.

Personalism is also what makes cultural translation possible. Cultural translators like James Shaver stand with the communities they engage, but in a personalized relation to them. They have enough individual detachment, enough thoughtful ambivalence, to take reflectively what community members take for granted. Though he does not use the term, moral philosopher Zygmunt Bauman has pictured a deeply personalized ethical commitment in Postmodern Ethics, one that happens amidst "the multitude of traditions, some surviving against the odds, some others resurrected or invented, which vie for loyalty and the authority to guide personal conduct--albeit without a hope of establishing a commonly agreed hierarchy of values and norms." The diverse group-building customs I have been describing are a crucial part of this diverse world of cultural authorities that Bauman pictures. The cultural translator's response to that diversity is a highly ethical one, and neither a flight from ethics nor from community.

James Shaver's own moral language, his self-understandings, reflect the more ethically-minded strands of personalism alive in American culture: It is telling that he worshipped "the Creator," not the Christian God in Jesus invoked by his group's board members. He respected the cultural and moral weight of boardmembers' Christianity but took a more distanced stance toward it, and crafted a more personalized moral standpoint than most of his group. When he talked about how he got involved in this environmental group, he did not so often say that "we" are carrying on the community's struggle, though he put in many hours of his own time for the group's cause. His sense of membership was different, more personally inflected. He would say, without the least bit of self-promotion, that "I" settled intentionally in a black neighborhood, bringing "my" skills to work for the benefit of "my community." His was a very self-conscious, personalized effort to focus in on one black community that other members took more unself-consciously.

Translators do not aspire to aloof individuality, nor abstract universality shorn of any particular customs. Cultural translation does not mean trying to exist outside communities, nor shifting randomly or impulsively from one community to another. In the role of cultural translator, people identify with at least one "home" community, but they do not identify uncritically with home communities. They sustain an allegiance to larger causes, nurtured by but not limited to the concrete experiences of home. Neither are translators the cultural bricoleurs celebrated in some postmodern cultural studies. Translators maintain social bonds with the communities they adopt. They maintain a sense of obligation that is hard to talk about within postmodern terms of debate that define culture mainly in terms of discursive power and resistance. The social bonds that translators maintain with their communities are ambivalent, flexible. But they are still bonds, and we need a different language to talk about them than the usual language of self-sacrifice for the greater good that is the most commonsensical when we talk about social bonds. James Shaver did not embark on a selfish, solidarity-busting attempt to turn his citizen's group around to his viewpoints. But neither did he sacrifice his personal spirituality, nor his black cultural politics, to become a virtuously conforming member of Hillview's black Christian community. His individuality as a public person developed in critical, but empathetic, relation to the Hillview community that he adopted as his own.

Cultural translation presupposes that civic groups want to learn how to talk to one another and to state agencies, that they want to expand civic democracy itself. Willingness to engage in translation does not imply that groups will agree on issues, even when their positions are quite close--like those of the would-be environmental coalition partners I mentioned before. Translation implies only that groups are all willing to inhabit the same civic realm and maintain its baseline of solidarity. It is a large empirical and political question how much groups may differ in their interests or identities and still be willing to translate their group meanings to one another, in hopes of more discussion, if not agreement. Cultural translators can facilitate a more vibrant civic life--they can replace marginalization or fragmentation with communication, as James Shaver was trying to do. They offer an alternative to the thin instrumental ties and hardened group boundaries that characterize interest groups and networks. But they hardly guarantee a unity of interests in civil society.

Even so, translation is not for everyone. Some groups do not want to deepen civic interchange, or know why people in other groups talk the way they do. Earlier I described the monthly public forums sponsored by an ecumenical association; one of those forums was devoted to the question "what is a good family?" On their way into the meeting hall, the gay Methodist congregational leader and the local Christian Coalition contact from an evangelical church both passed a half-dozen picketers walking the parking lot with signs reading "Homosexuality is a sin." The Christian conservative inside the meeting hall did not differ much in his reading of the Bible from the picketers outside. He identified the picketers as friends of his. But he was willing to participate in go-arounds of individual sharing; he was willing to respect and enact the customs of this monthly dialogue, even if his home community was much less personalized. He said he wished the picketers would come inside and talk. The picketers declined his invitation. They had nothing to say to this assembly; "light and darkness don't mix," they intoned.

I have focussed on the divisions that translation can engage, in part because the debates about cultural diversity have already paid so much attention to groups at the shrill, far ends of the political and cultural spectra. It is just as important to understand the many instances of failed communication between groups that are committed to civic life even if they disagree on issues, or word similar issues differently. Cultural translation will be meaningless for people who have no sense of civic life as a good in itself. Those people remind us that civic life relies ultimately on a tradition of liberal rights protected by the state, and not just on the traditions that civil society nurtures more autonomously. The picketers and the people who went inside to talk at the forum all knew that the picketers had a right to express their opinions, but not to infringe on other people's right to hold their discussion. Solidarity in civil society depends partly on those rights.

Respecting those rights, however, need not keep people from honoring different group-building customs. Some group-building customs invite more moral exploration and dialogue than interest group customs typically do, and they depend on traditions other than the tradition of universal rights. Cultural translation can help groups that are not purely interest groups stay civicly engaged instead of withdrawing into tribalism, as the black environmental group was tempted to do somtimes. And cultural translation can keep groups with diverse customs talking to one another, even enriching one another, instead of second-guessing one another's self-interested realism in a dance of cynical expectations.

In going from tribalism to translation, I am assuming that communication in local civic life really does matter. It matters that some board members in the environmental group said that the company's practices amounted to genocide. It matters that for at least an hour or two, views from the religious right and left could get aired around the same table. These little scenes from civic life beyond the spotlights, and countless other scenes like them, will matter even more if we develop more nuanced ways to talk about group life, and the place of individuality within group life. Newscasters, policymakers, activists and volunteers often communicate a folk orthodoxy that hinders group-building in a diverse society. They--many of us--assume that realistic citizen groups, groups worth our attention, are tightly bound interest groups. And we mistrust the kind of individuality I have discussed in this essay, because we assume it only weakens groups. We assume, too, that morally informed, critical discussion is not much a part of the "real world." And we end up creating a public life that confirms our assumptions.

But once we let ourselves become fluent in the different kinds of group customs, we accept that there really are different ways to build groups around public issues. We part with the very unsociological assumption that brittle boundaries and homogenous interests are simply natural. And we learn that a culturally diverse society may need more individualism of a certain sort, not less, if it is going to host lively interchange between groups with diverse customs, diverse definitions of good citizenship. Then, civic renewal becomes a little more realistic.