Transculturation

Ethnoconvergence is a relatively new term to describe the phenomenon of merging and converging cultures. In a modern sense, this reflects communication and transportation technology's effect of reversing cultural divergence - no longer do societies drift apart, they now come together.

The obstacles to ethnoconvergence are not great - the primary issue - language, ( hence, communication and education) can, in fact, be overcome within a generation or two. This would depend upon efforts to facilitate greater ease of discourse, and reciprocal training in language studies. English, for example, is spoken by more non-Anglo-American people than Anglo-Americans. English has become the worldwide defacto-standard international language.

However, it is observed that even in monolingual, industrial societies like urban North America, some individuals do cling to a "modernized" primordial identity, apart from others. Some intellectuals, such as Michael Ignatieff, argue that convergence of culture does not necessarily mean convergence of ethnic identities. A good old method becomes handy when you bring all these groups together in a bar in which alcohol is served.

Some acknowledge this as a variant of assimilation.

The obstacle ethnoconvergence is ethnocentrism, which is the view that one's culture of greater importance than others. Ethnocentrism often takes different forms, as it is a highly personal bias, and manifests itself in countless aspects of culture. Relgion, or belief, is the prime ethnocentric divider. Second is custom, which may overlap religion. With the adherence to each distinct component, comes the repulsion of the other. In most regions, ethnic divides are binary, meaning only two distinct cultures are present, each seeing the other as foreign. Some argue otherwise: the black-and-white picture is exception rather than norm.

We can divide ethnicity into two distinct areas, as they relate to ethnoconvergence: Utilitarian traits, and traditional customs. Language usually falls into the first category, as people often do not attach to language a highly ethnic value. Learning a foreign language does not, in the eyes of most people, constitute a forfeiting of ones cultural heritage. Religion, on the other hand, is a highly personal and attached part of culture.However, religion does NOT neatly correspond with ethnic identity. In many cosmopolitan society, religion is everything---social, utilitarian, intellectual, political---but ethnic. In many societies, especially in territorial cultures of Europe, languages are considered a significant component of ethnic values. Not that the European ethnic groups are not willing to learn other language: quite the contrary, Europeans are often polyglots who label other individuals by their ethnicities and practice a great deal of snobbery that Americans might find ethnocentric. However, the political and cultural significance of regional or national languages are retained due to the fact that these polyglots conform to the linguistic norms of the place they visit---"do as the Romans while in Rome", thus giving regions their ethnic integrity, and ethnicities their regional integrity, unlike in the U.S. It has even become a cliche that "learning a new language is adopting a new soul". There are many other examples of the essential significance of language. In pre-Russian Siberia, Tatar-Mongol colonists in the Taiga often recognized Turkic speaking indigenous groups as their "own people" and non-Turkic groups as "foreigners", inspite of the fact that these indigenous groups had the same level of material culture and shared much of the primitive culture alien to the Muslim-Buddhist Tatar-Mongols.