Talk:Cultural assimilation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is supported by the Sociology WikiProject, which gives a central approach to Sociology and related subjects on Wikipedia. Please participate by editing the article Cultural assimilation, or visit the project page for more details on the projects.
Start	This article has been rated as Start-Class on the quality scale.
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the importance scale.

Confused Notion

It seems to me that "Cultural Assimilation" is being wildly confused with "indoctrination." A group or individual can be "assimilated" into the general population without necessarily needing to do anything. The group or individual is merely accepted "as they are." It's society that changes to accomodate the "outsider." With "indoctrination," which is what is actually being defined here, it's the individual or group that much change to accomodate the customs, practices and values of the society in which they wish to be accepted.

Assimilation is a good thing and equates to acceptance. Indoctrination, however, is perhaps the highest (or lowest) form of prejudice.

Dudekabob 18:24, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

Assimilation: to render similar.

Indoctrination: to instruct in a doctrine, principle, ideology, etc., esp. to imbue with a specific partisan or biased belief or point of view.

It follows from these definition that the two phenomenons are different.

Assimilation is not a bad thing in itself. If I move to another country and adopt the language and customs of the people that welcomed me as part of their group. It is usually the immigrant who makes the effort to adapt to his/her adoptive country. Society does not learn the language of all their immigrants (obviously) and by that it is evident that it is the newcomer that changes the most. Assimilation becomes a major problem for human rights when we are talking about an entire community of language/culture that finds itself forced to adapt to the social rules of a new society. That is the history of most immigrants in history: being driven out to escape poverty, misery or simply death. -- Mathieugp 01:42, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Bias?

This page is extremely biased. This attitude seems to be pretty common in modern sociology (and is consistent with the famous "Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated" Borg mantra from Star Trek). Whether the basis for this is simply a preoccupation with ethnic or cultural identity over individual identity or a general disregard for (American/Western) culture hardly matters, it is still opinion and should not be confused with fact.

1) It presumes that assimilation is an inherently bad or forced process. As the article on Americanization (which links directly to assimilation) demonstrates this is not the case.

2) It presumes assimilation is an absolute and unidirectional process: that there is a "loss of all characteristics which make the newcomers different". This somewhat offensively implies a loss even of individual characteristics and furthermore that the absorbing culture lacks internal variety of its own. Likewise, it also presumes that it is an entirely one way process, and that the dominant culture is immutable. On a related note, it also misrepresents the notion of the melting pot along these lines. The melting pot page give a far more nuanced treatment of the topic; I would suggest that the assimilation topic be redirected to it.

Assimilation should be considered with Acculturation. The dictionary often regards them as synonymous; sociology gives them slightly different definitions, and contrasts them such that you are either assimilated into the existing culture (a social process) or acculturated to the point where you can work within it (a mental process).

The article definitely needs major cleanup. I agree with most of what you just wrote here. If you look back in the revision history, you will notice the introduction of a strong POV with the edits and rewrite of anonymous users 129.119.68.34.

My original article, I believe, gave room to expansion on cases where, for example, we are talking about the harmless assimilation of an individual immigrant who personally chose to integrate a larger ethnic/national community and (I guess to the other extreme) cases where a state planned the systematic assimilation of all members of one or more ethnic groups. Obviously, we have to distinguish those.

I don't believe a redirect to Acculturation would be a good idea however precisely because of the distinction that exists between the two notions. The Assimilation article is likely to evolve to include valuable historical references and possibly deal with the politics of assimilation in various countries. However, as you pointed out, the process of acculturation has often been studied from the perpective of an individual psychological experience. -- Mathieugp 18:36, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

I believe we shouldn't confuse assimilation with integration. Integration "includes goals such as leveling barriers to association, creating equal opportunity regardless of race, and the development of a culture that draws on diverse traditions, rather than merely bringing a racial minority into the majority culture" as does assimilation. -- LucVerhelst 20:06, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Needs cleanup, marked accordingly. Dmaftei 20:44, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

To sociologists (and others, I think) "cultural assimilation" is the same as acculturation, but cultural assimilation is just one type of assimilation. Among the many posisble dimensions of assimilation are social, cultural, economic, and spatial assimilation. I would like to see this entry become just plain "assimilation," and parts of it that are specifically cultural merged with the acculturation entry. Somewhat Agree 05:31, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

I said that before looking at the acculturation entry, which, on inspection, is kind of a mess. I still think it's a good idea to change this entry to just plain "assimilation". Somewhat Agree 05:40, 7 March 2006 (UTC)