Cultural and ethnic fundamentalism

The Scholar Series Each year, SIPP benefits from the appointment of two Senior Fellows, one appointed by the University of Regina and the other by the Government of Saskatchewan. [...] Setting aside the focus on monotheistic religions, the process of fundamentalism is dualism: binary categories of right and wrong, good and evil, are established by elites who presume to know the content of the categories, and who consider that they can judge and prescribe sanctions for those who deviate from the correct formulations. [...] When it is a valorization of some, and an erasure of others; when its fictive and mythic elements resonate for some and alienate others, it is, at best, irrelevant and at worst, dramatizes oppressive and offensive strands within the political culture, which, according to Guibernau, is precisely what nation-states try to create.4 5 Nationalism “as a political principle holds that the nation and the [...] Nationalism wears the Janus face of positive collective pride in common identification, and the dangers of xenophobia and the legitimation of intolerance. [...] Colonialism, in its typical processes of denigration of indigenous political and cultural forms, and imposition of colonial ones, constructs the colonised as subordinate and deficient, save for the ameliorating influence of colonial influences.