Fall Issue — October 2007
The Ties that Bind
An Associate Professor of Philosophy Comes Full Circle With Her Past
by Laura Czekaj
Immigrating to Canada at the tender age of six, Sonia Sikka assumed her Indian culture would be swept aside in favour of assimilation into her newly adopted country. But when it came time for her to forge her own cultural identity, Sikka found that the person she had become remained strongly linked to the culture she thought she had left behind.“Rather than pretending that it isn’t there, I have sought to turn towards it and try to understand it,” she says. “I have allowed my interest in India to express itself and flourish.”
The associate professor in the Department of Philosophy has dedicated much of her work to discovering the roots of cultural identity. It’s a process in which people draw on certain shared traditions in light of the difficulties that they now face and thereby imagine their future, she explains.
Sikka argues that identities are always evolving and changing, and are affected by inequalities of power between groups. In instances where people feel that their identity is being threatened, they may tend to fixate on their identity and turn it into something static as a way of asserting themselves against the perceived threat, she says.
The project that Sikka is currently working on will bring her full circle with her own past as she delves into cultural identity in India. She will be examining how Indian identity has formed in reaction to colonialism, through Hindu and Muslim relations, and in opposition to the caste system. In this regard, she will pay particular attention to the group called Dalits, previously labeled as “untouchables.” Today, the caste system is officially illegal in India and nondiscrimination on that basis is enshrined in the Indian constitution.
Sikka’s previous research has focused on Johann Gottfried Herder, an 18th century German philosopher, who was a founding father in the analysis of cultural identity and its importance to people. Herder’s work has influenced theories on multiculturalism and about which factors are important to establishing cultural identity, such as language.
Much of Sikka’s work can be applied to Canadian culture, which is more often associated with hockey and the Mounties than a common cultural history.
“Canadians can develop a collective identity without asking people to give up a sense of connection to their diverse origins,” says Sikka. “Living in a nation where different ethnicities and different cultural identities are respected is part of what people think of as being Canadian.”