Living with Difference:How to Build Community in a Divided World
By Adam B. Seligman, Rahel R. Wasserfall, and David W. Montgomery
“The authors have the courage as well as the philosophical skills to challenge the sentimentalities designed to help us all to just ‘get along.’ Instead, they draw on their pedagogical experience to provide an account of how difference can be lived. This fascinating book has the potential to change the discussion about how we might live at peace without the peace achieved occluding our rightly lasting differences.”—Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University
“Both valuable scholarship and a practical guide for improving intergroup relations, the material is fresh and the work innovative, with new and illuminating insights. I cannot think of a comparable work.”—David Smock,Vice President of the U.S. Institute of Peace
“This book challenges readers to engage intellectual and human experiential resources to acquire empathy and celebrate differences as part of the knowledge of the self. An interdependent and interconnected reality can be realized when we interact with others in fully authentic ways.”—Abdulaziz Sachedina, George Mason University
Whether looking at divided cities or working with populations on the margins of society, a growing number of engaged academics has reached out to communities around the world to address the practical problems of living with difference. This text explores the challenges and necessities of accommodating difference, however difficult and uncomfortable such accommodation may be. Living with Difference draws on fourteen years of the theoretical insights and unique pedagogy developed by CEDAR—Communities Engaging with Difference and Religion. CEDAR has worked internationally with community leaders, activists, and other partners to take the insights of anthropology out of the classroom and into the world. Rather than mitigating conflict by emphasizing what is shared, this work argues for the centrality of difference in creating community: it seeks ways not to overcome or deny differences, but to live with and within them in a self-reflective space and practice. Living with Difference also includes an organizer’s manual for implementing CEDAR’s strategies in one’s own community.
University of California Press
California Series in Public Anthropology
228 pp. 6 x 9
Illustrations: 27 b/w photos
978-0-520-28411-1 $65.00/£44.95 Cloth
978-0-520-28412-8 $19.95/£13.95 Paper