Abstract
In this essay, I argue that in addition to the acknowledged modes of immigrants' integration into receiver societies, such as straight-line or segmented assimilation, 'bumpy' incorporation, and ethnicization as the mixing and blending of home and host country ways of life, we should recognize the possibility of multicultural paths of newcomers' adaptation to the sociocultural environments of the host-country. I begin by defining what I mean by a multicultural trajectory of immigrants' integration as a pluri-dimensional process founded on the base-line orientation, which Lyn Lofland called 'civility towards diversity', emphasizing its inherently variegated forms and 'contents'. Next, I present some empirical illustrations of local settings where multicultural modes of immigrants' incorporation are likely to evolve. Finally, drawing from studies of inter-cultural encounters, I identify the main features of the surrounding society and the individuals involved, which contribute to the emergence of these modes of integration.
Highlights
Such multiple identities and involvements indicate developments, which elude the standard social-science conceptualization of immigrants’ integration into their host societies such as straight-line or segmented assimilation, ‘bumpy’ and path-dependent incorporation trajectories, and ethnicization as the mixing and blending of the ways of life of the home and host countries
Sociology and Anthropology 6(10): 764-774, 2018 internalization and practice of extrinsic and intrinsic components of the cultures of different national/ethnicreligious groups resident in the host society; (iii) regular social engagement with members of different national/ethnic/religious groups resident in the host society in formal, semi-formal, and/or informal settings including neighborhood public places, workplaces, kindergartens and schools, homes and gardens; and (iv) civic commitment to/responsibility for the wellbeing of the body politic of several national/ethnic/religious communities resident in the host society
I have assembled features conducive to multicultural modes of assimilation on the micro-level, the level of the immediate environment and the participating groups and individuals, from various studies of locally embedded ‘prosaic interactions’ between members of different ethnic, racial, and religious groups in various localities conducted by urbanists, urban geographers and sociologists examining the sharing of space in global neighbourhoods [51,8,52,53]; by social psychologists studying “multicultural persons” [54]; by anthropologists and ethnographers who analyse the everyday functioning of “conviviality” inurban settings [55,56,39,37,57]; and by sociolinguists, especially those investigating “heteroglossia” or polylingualism—which, as opposed multilingualism, i.e., the knowledge of several separate languages, mixes and fuses components such as words, pronunciations, or styles of speech taken from different languages [58]—in ethnically plural neighbourhoods [5862]
Summary
“Across the globe, more people—from more varied cultural and linguistic backgrounds, subject to more varied conditions of mobility and legal status—come into regular contact with one another in today’s growing cities” [1]. 1] of the growing diversification of the forms and ‘contents’ of human interactions across the world to which increased transnational migratory flows significantly contribute has been reflected in a rapidly expanding social-science literature on ‘super-diversity’ and ‘global neighbourhoods’ [2,3,4,5,6], ‘multiethnicity’ [7], and ‘multiculture’ [8]. In reports on present-day (im) migrants’ self-representations and pursuits one increasingly encounters individuals presenting
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