Cultural diversity is the quality of diverse or different cultures, as opposed to monoculture, as in the global monoculture, or a homogenization of cultures, akin to cultural decay. For example, before Hawaii was conquered, the culturally diverse Hawaiian culture existed in the world, and contributed to the world's cultural diversity. Now Hawaii has been westernized; the vast majority of its culture has been replaced with Western or American culture. The phrase cultural diversity can also refer to having different cultures respect each other's differences. The phrase cultural diversity is sometimes misused to mean the variety of human societies or cultures in a specific region, or in the world as a whole; but these phenomena are multiculturalism rather than cultural diversity. The culturally destructive action of globalization is often said to have a negative effect on the world's cultural diversity.
Read more about Cultural Diversity: Overview, Opposition and Support, Quantification, Cultural Heritage, Ocean Model of One Human Civilization, Cultural Vigor, Defense
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or diversity:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“What we have to do ... is to find a way to celebrate our diversity and debate our differences without fracturing our communities.”
—Hillary Rodham Clinton (b. 1947)