Strategies of cultural assimilation and the politics
of naming
David D. Laitin, Identity in Formation. (Cornell University Press, 1998). pp. 243-299.
Assimilation and political culture
Laitin focuses on the circumstances in which people will opt for a shift in their identity
Identity choices are heavily conditioned by the perception of what choices are others making
Assimilation cascade
• Economic opportunities are greater for those who are fluent in the language of the state
•The minority community is itself divided and exert little social pressure on individuals to remain part of the group
Assimilation cascade
•Members of the dominant group are willing to welcome such changes in newcomers' identity
Assimilation and culture
Economic factors - material interests -not account for the behaviour of minority/immigrant identity choices
Rational choices model have to be supplemented status variables and the theory of cultural construction of reality
Rational calculation
1. Material benefits
2. In-group status B. Out-group
acceptance
and culture
OHTA CCCP-19Ö1
Collective memory
What people of different ages and social backgrounds know as they discuss, debate and negotiate the past and through this process define the future.
Memories of events
Two primary sources of knowledge of past public events: •cohort experience - directly
experienced •education - learned about from others
Lai ti n: possible strategies
• Loyalty: passive integration
• Exit: returning to a putative Homeland
•Voice: political organization
• Fight: violent confrontation
• Redefinition: inventing a new identity
Laitin: identity crisis
•The basic identity categories that guided nontitular persons in the past become eroded.
„Soviet" is no longer a socially acceptable category - even if many still think that this is what they really are.
Laitin: Russian as conglomerate identity
•„My mother is Tatar, my father is Greek, and I am Russian."
;»„What sort of Russians are they? They are not pure Russians!"
•In Ukraine where many Ukrainians fe\y on Russian language for {communication, ethnic difference is conceived as primarily religious.