Towards A Sociology of Assimilation: Concept, Theory, Debate and Practice in Cultural Anthropology

The concept of assimilation has been debated extensively in the social science of migration since the early 20th Century, but it is now broadly accepted as a way to describe the ways that immigrants and their off spring change as they come in contact with their host society. In its current usage the concept of assimilation does not imply any superiority in the host society's views or a particular value to the changes in attitudes and behavior among immigrants across generation. Rather, assimilation is now most useful as a means for describing a social dynamic. Assimilation may be distinguished from accommodation, a process of compromise characterized by toleration, and from acculturation, or cultural change that is initiated by the conjunction of two or more cultural systems or the transference of individuals from their original societies and cultural settings to new socio-cultural environments. Assimilation is to be distinguished also from amalgamation, or biological fusion. The meaning of the terms like diffusion also varies a lot from that of assimilation. The present research is an attempt to interrogate, differentiate, debate and deliberate the pros and cons of the grand narrative of assimilation in social anthropology.