Lecture 1

Question 1

What did the older studies on acculturation and assimilation focus on?

Answer 1

Focused on contact as a stimulus to culture change.

Question 2

What is acculturation?

Answer 2

Change in formerly autonomous cultures that come in to contact.

Question 3

What is assimilation?

Answer 3

Structural and organizational absorption of formerly autonomous institutions or members of one society by another.

Question 4

What are the contemporary ideas about acculturation and assimilation?

Answer 4

• Unilinear ideas dropped
• More dynamic and flexible ideas about contact
• Focus on “creative reworkings of new concepts and practices by both groups”

Question 5

What is ethnogenesis?

Answer 5

Idea of creating new cultures. Emergence of a new form and identity. Usually a result of profound historical and cultural change.

Question 6

What is ethnicity?

Answer 6

Recognize common language, cultural practice and origins.

Question 7

What is primordialism?

Answer 7

Ethnic identity based on deep primordial attachment to group (innate feeling that you have always belonged). Ethnicity fixed at birth.

Question 8

What is instrumentalism?

Answer 8

Created and used by leaders in pursuit of their own interests. Typically competitive situations. Use of symbols and practice used to advance interests. Ethnicity a means to an end.

Question 9

Ethnicity reconsidered today?

Answer 9

Not fixed and permanent. Social constructions. Something people do rather than what people are.

Question 10

What are constructivist theories?

Answer 10

Ethnic identities constructed in specific social and historical contexts to further their own interests. Modernization is important in forming new group consciousness.

Question 11

What is creolization?

Answer 11

How inter-ethnic interactions stimulated cultural transformations involving creative combinations of groups (indigenous, European, african). Also can be known as melting pot or hybridization.

Question 12

Creole or creole? (note capitalization)

Answer 12

Creole: French, spanish and/or african
creole: country born of spanish parents

Question 13

Who is Kathleen Deagan?

Answer 13

Discovered the St. Augustine Pattern of native women and spanish men. It was a new look on diversity.

Question 14

What is the linguistic model of creolization?

Answer 14

Things from one culture adapted and used according to the rules of another culture (“cultural grammar”)

Question 15

What are the processes of ethnogenesis?

Answer 15

• Emergence of well-defined practices
• Transformations of ethnic identity
• Fusion and aggregation
• Fission and disaggregation
• Migration and displacement
• Transformation of non-ethnic identities into ethnic identities
• New ethnic identity from shared experience of oppression
• New ethnic identity - legitimize unequal access to power

Question 16

Who were the Brothertown Indians? (case of ethnogenesis)

Answer 16

New England tribes go through multiple relocations and status changes. Because of these relocations, this has caused multiple transformations of ethnic identity practice.