ABSTRACT
We live in an age of diversity, as Steven Vertovec eloquently articulates in the introduction to this Handbook (Vertovec, this volume) – but ours is also the age of equality. And both diversity and equality are open to multiple and potentially competing interpretations by those seeking social change. While it is now commonplace in the social sciences and humanities to emphasize the fl uidity and malleability of collective identities, rejecting reifi ed notions of culture and religion and instead placing a “cosmopolitanized” individual at the heart of the analysis (Beck 2006), the law has traditionally had a hard time dealing with intersectionist, dynamic identities (e.g. Nussbaum 2012). It tends to pin them into fi xed boxes. This is true for individuals, and it is true for collectives such as religious, ethnic, or linguistic minorities. This raises several important questions: who can, and should, speak for a minority community in inter-and intracommunal legal disputes? How are we to defi ne “culture” and “religion” for the purposes of crafting legal policies of reasonable accommodation or exemption, and according to what criteria? Who gets silenced when the state “takes sides” in disputes concerning membership demarcation or the distribution of rights and powers among group members?
