According to Terry G. Jordan, Mona Domosh, and Lester Rowntree, “ethnic immigrants never successfully introduce their culture in totality” when they move to a different country. “A profound simplification occurs” (331).* Makes some sense, doesn’t it? Carrying a culture abroad leaves behind the place in which that culture originated and developed (evolved?).
The geographers go on to explain that the home culture of immigrants meets both barriers to some traits and filters of those traits. The former block; the latter select. So, the next time you go to an “ethnic neighborhood” or “ethnic festival,” think hybrid. Among the variety of consequences of relocation are a weakening and upsetting of “an age-old balance, causing a rapid discarding of traditional traits and accelerated borrowing, invention, and modification—in short, acculturation” (332).**
Of course, there are those who want somehow to recapture what they believe to be a cultural heritage, not realizing that those barriers and filters have altered the culture. “Ethnic” is partly myth, particularly for second- and third-generation descendants. Language is lost or modified. Customs vary. Even foods take on flavors unknown in the land of origin. Climate can be radically different from origin to new settlement, and with a change in climate comes a change in vegetation. Groups migrating from places with little change in seasons experience seasonal changes in the new homeland. How can any grandfather explain the sights, smells, tastes, textures, and sounds of a land unfamiliar to a grandchild? So, in new lands, cultures preserve simplified versions of their former character.
Now a story. I began my role as a college professor during the civil unrest of the late 1960s. It was a tumultuous time, but then all times, if in different places, can be tumultuous. During a discussion in class one day, an African-American student said, “It’s not like this in Africa. People get along there.” Of course, my initial question was, “Have you been to Africa?”
Before I continue, I’ll make a personal observation. Many young people—and a frightful number of older ones—don’t know that “Africa” is not a country, but a continent of many countries. It is also a land of diverse climate, vegetation, and geology. To an uninformed college student, “Africa” might mean a land whose people have dark skin. The differences in human appearance among residents from Algiers to Mogadishu, from N’Djamena to Kampala, and from Accra to Cairo would probably shock those running with stereotypes in their still rather empty heads. And as for “getting along,” think first borders. Why have them if everyone is of the same culture and makeup? Think second of Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi, where about one million people died during the genocides of 1993 and 1994. Think third that on the continent there is more genetic diversity than there is throughout the rest of the derived populations of other continents.
Back to my brief anecdote. I simply asked a follow-up question to my student. “Are you aware of the many wars fought on the continent, some between tribes and peoples who have lived next to one another for thousands of years?” A website called ThoughtCo*** reports that a group commander of the Hutu in the Congo told the Daily Telegraph in 2008, “We are fighting every day because we are Hutu and they are Tutsis. We cannot mix; we are always in conflict. We will stay enemies forever.” And there they are, Hutu living in another country, a translocated segment of an original population, carrying their supposed perfect ethnicity with them. And now I wish I had done one other thing for my student. I wish I had thought to show him a picture of a Hutu and another of a Tutsi and asked him to identify which was which.
Why tell this tale? Seems that we are still stuck on the concept of “ethnicity.” Seems that we don’t see ourselves or others beyond those “simplifications.” Is it just inexperience? Is it just mental laziness? Or, is it insecurity? After all, belonging to a “group,” an “ethnic group,” seems to give people a sense of identity, something to grab hold of in the winds of variation.
I don’t know when I heard the following story, so I don’t have the details, but it seems relevant here. In the American Deep South before the Civil Rights movement, a woman who was classified as an African-American was, by ancestry, just 17% of some African heritage. But what about the other 83%? How is it, also, that we called President Obama a “Black President”? Weren’t his parents genetically equal in their transmission of genes? Why do we keep insisting on these stereotypes? How insecure are we?
Every translocated culture has gone through filters. You are, most likely, a product of cultural filtering. We don’t all live in the Afar Triangle, still attached by roots of our ancient Australopithecine ancestor Lucy. Translocation—migration—and its subsequent filtering have been the lot of Homo sapiens sapiens for more than 200,000 years.
Ethnic neighborhoods and festivals?
*Jordan, Terry G., Mona Domosh, and Lester Rowntree. The Human Mosaic: A Thematic Introduction to Cultural Geography. New York. Addison Wesley Educational Publishers Inc., 1997.
**Ibid.
*** https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-hutu-tutsi-conflict-3554917
The geographers go on to explain that the home culture of immigrants meets both barriers to some traits and filters of those traits. The former block; the latter select. So, the next time you go to an “ethnic neighborhood” or “ethnic festival,” think hybrid. Among the variety of consequences of relocation are a weakening and upsetting of “an age-old balance, causing a rapid discarding of traditional traits and accelerated borrowing, invention, and modification—in short, acculturation” (332).**
Of course, there are those who want somehow to recapture what they believe to be a cultural heritage, not realizing that those barriers and filters have altered the culture. “Ethnic” is partly myth, particularly for second- and third-generation descendants. Language is lost or modified. Customs vary. Even foods take on flavors unknown in the land of origin. Climate can be radically different from origin to new settlement, and with a change in climate comes a change in vegetation. Groups migrating from places with little change in seasons experience seasonal changes in the new homeland. How can any grandfather explain the sights, smells, tastes, textures, and sounds of a land unfamiliar to a grandchild? So, in new lands, cultures preserve simplified versions of their former character.
Now a story. I began my role as a college professor during the civil unrest of the late 1960s. It was a tumultuous time, but then all times, if in different places, can be tumultuous. During a discussion in class one day, an African-American student said, “It’s not like this in Africa. People get along there.” Of course, my initial question was, “Have you been to Africa?”
Before I continue, I’ll make a personal observation. Many young people—and a frightful number of older ones—don’t know that “Africa” is not a country, but a continent of many countries. It is also a land of diverse climate, vegetation, and geology. To an uninformed college student, “Africa” might mean a land whose people have dark skin. The differences in human appearance among residents from Algiers to Mogadishu, from N’Djamena to Kampala, and from Accra to Cairo would probably shock those running with stereotypes in their still rather empty heads. And as for “getting along,” think first borders. Why have them if everyone is of the same culture and makeup? Think second of Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi, where about one million people died during the genocides of 1993 and 1994. Think third that on the continent there is more genetic diversity than there is throughout the rest of the derived populations of other continents.
Back to my brief anecdote. I simply asked a follow-up question to my student. “Are you aware of the many wars fought on the continent, some between tribes and peoples who have lived next to one another for thousands of years?” A website called ThoughtCo*** reports that a group commander of the Hutu in the Congo told the Daily Telegraph in 2008, “We are fighting every day because we are Hutu and they are Tutsis. We cannot mix; we are always in conflict. We will stay enemies forever.” And there they are, Hutu living in another country, a translocated segment of an original population, carrying their supposed perfect ethnicity with them. And now I wish I had done one other thing for my student. I wish I had thought to show him a picture of a Hutu and another of a Tutsi and asked him to identify which was which.
Why tell this tale? Seems that we are still stuck on the concept of “ethnicity.” Seems that we don’t see ourselves or others beyond those “simplifications.” Is it just inexperience? Is it just mental laziness? Or, is it insecurity? After all, belonging to a “group,” an “ethnic group,” seems to give people a sense of identity, something to grab hold of in the winds of variation.
I don’t know when I heard the following story, so I don’t have the details, but it seems relevant here. In the American Deep South before the Civil Rights movement, a woman who was classified as an African-American was, by ancestry, just 17% of some African heritage. But what about the other 83%? How is it, also, that we called President Obama a “Black President”? Weren’t his parents genetically equal in their transmission of genes? Why do we keep insisting on these stereotypes? How insecure are we?
Every translocated culture has gone through filters. You are, most likely, a product of cultural filtering. We don’t all live in the Afar Triangle, still attached by roots of our ancient Australopithecine ancestor Lucy. Translocation—migration—and its subsequent filtering have been the lot of Homo sapiens sapiens for more than 200,000 years.
Ethnic neighborhoods and festivals?
*Jordan, Terry G., Mona Domosh, and Lester Rowntree. The Human Mosaic: A Thematic Introduction to Cultural Geography. New York. Addison Wesley Educational Publishers Inc., 1997.
**Ibid.
*** https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-hutu-tutsi-conflict-3554917
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