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Cultural assimilation

Assimilation is a very complex issue regarding the importance of culture, its continuation, and stability. Since assimilation helps a culture grow and become better day by day by bringing in more people, it can also be termed to dilute the culture. After all, there is the concept of a person being unable to be assimilated totally. Therefore this still gives a chance to people who have been assimilated to practice their former culture within the new culture they are assimilated into. This comes up as one of the biggest challenges of assimilation, and therefore it is not the best way to sustain and stabilize a people’s culture. Therefore even though it might be considered an option whereby the population of a certain society is diminishing, and there is an urgent need to retain this culture, it remains a notion that is not the best way to deal with the issue of a society’s desire to retain its culture and spread it over a large area. Therefore with this stand, I will discuss the meaning of cultural stability and sustenance, the causes of cultural death, what assimilation is and why it is not the best way, and the results of using assimilation to sustain and retain a society’s culture.

Different societies have existed differently, and they are always evolving in the face of the current changes which take place within them. Societies experience different and varied nature of challenges in everyday life, and these challenges are the ones that determine if the society remains stable or unstable in its course of existence. These challenges also determine if a certain culture dies or remains of great importance to the world and the immediate neighbors. Some of these challenges include the likability of a certain culture due to its appealing nature, the likability of a certain culture’s practices, the forced acceptance of a certain culture like the case with slavery, and some extent colonization, among other factors. Therefore these factors make it possible for a culture to be liked by certain people or disliked. They are also the factors that determine if a certain person will be willing to learn a particular culture freely. Therefore, these play a great role in determining a certain culture’s future (Angelini, 819).

At times cultural death happens when a certain group of people is no longer concerned about their culture, and they go on being assimilated into other cultures which they hold dear. Therefore, assimilation acts as a replacement of the culture even though replacement never happens totally unless over a very long period. In most times, there is always a merge between two cultures and their practices. The causes of cultural death may be the lack of proper channels of transfer of this culture. Therefore, people tend to go towards a more detailed and better way of transferring the culture and where there is a better organization of the culture of a certain people.

Assimilation is defined as a process through which individuals or groups different in ethnic backgrounds are absorbed into a certain society’s dominant culture. Therefore this is the situation whereby the people of a certain group learn about a different culture, and they stick to it. Assimilation has happened before in different societies and continues to happen even today though unconsciously. It is this assimilation that happens which leads to people behaving in a more resembling way to another group of people. Therefore assimilation can be good and can be bad. However, the negative side of it weighs more. This means that assimilation cannot make a society more stable and sustain the life of a certain society. This is because assimilation never makes a person change who they were before; it just makes them embrace the new order of living and the kind of people they are becoming. Therefore, they learn that it is possible to change their lives but never forget who they were.

No one ever forgets who they were yesterday makes it very difficult for assimilation to happens effectively since a person will always remember what they were used to doing in their former life and tend to practice it in the new life they have embraced. This, therefore, makes life difficult to identify and realize what complications come with the assimilation fully. Cultural assimilation in the past was forced most of the time; however, it is voluntary in recent times. Most people tend to take on cultural assimilation due to them getting an education in other parts of the world or their work (Abramitzky, 17).

Therefore it is still difficult for assimilation to be used to retain a society’s culture because even those who used it forcefully, especially during the colonization period, never worked perfectly. This is because people are volatile, culture is very wide, and it is never constant, and it is always changing, people have different tastes, among other factors. Therefore, when a society tries to make others get to their culture, it may be difficult because even though the desire to retain the culture is very much, it may never be retained. Rather it will change into a different culture which will be a combination of a person’s former or original culture and the current culture being forced onto them.

In conclusion, we can say that culture is beautiful, and assimilation is also a good concept. However, its use has been associated with different negative issues, making it impossible to assimilate a person. Therefore that is what proves assimilation a difficult practice that does not always bear the fruits of retaining a society’s culture.

Works cited

“Cultural Assimilation: Meaning and Examples for Better Clarity.” Historyplex, 2 Mar. 2015, historyplex.com/cultural-assimilation-meaning. Accessed 7 Mar. 2021.

‌Abramitzky, Ran, Leah Platt Boustan, and Katherine Eriksson. Cultural assimilation during the age of mass migration. No. w22381. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2016.

Angelini, Viola, Laura Casi, and Luca Corazzini. “Life satisfaction of immigrants: does cultural assimilation matter?.” Journal of Population Economics 28.3 (2015): 817-844.