Culture is such an ethereal thing. It seems like there are three cultural scenarios: immigrants assimilate, cultures mix, and immigrant culture takes over. This is obviously a spectrum and not rigidly defined categories, but I wonder what the major factors are determining how cultures interact. You have to assume the population proportion is a main contributor. I assume language must be also.
If you make completely porous borders does that encourage new cultures to grow through mixing, or does it allow a single culture to dominate?
It would allow new cultures to emerge, same as happen now, although maybe faster because of the mixing of ideas. Culture is never static and any attempts by borders to keep it so will always fail.
All three have historical examples. Almost too many times to count groups that invaded China assimilated to the Han culture. When’s the slavs moved into the baltics their culture remained mostly unaffected. Then there are all the fun cultural mixing examples that provide definitely the best cuisines and music in my opinion. The Americas are ripe with them.
I don’t think you can definitely say mixing would be the dominant outcome, but it’s the one I would hope for.
Culture is such an ethereal thing. It seems like there are three cultural scenarios: immigrants assimilate, cultures mix, and immigrant culture takes over. This is obviously a spectrum and not rigidly defined categories, but I wonder what the major factors are determining how cultures interact. You have to assume the population proportion is a main contributor. I assume language must be also.
If you make completely porous borders does that encourage new cultures to grow through mixing, or does it allow a single culture to dominate?
Just some musings barely related to the topic.
It would allow new cultures to emerge, same as happen now, although maybe faster because of the mixing of ideas. Culture is never static and any attempts by borders to keep it so will always fail.
All three have historical examples. Almost too many times to count groups that invaded China assimilated to the Han culture. When’s the slavs moved into the baltics their culture remained mostly unaffected. Then there are all the fun cultural mixing examples that provide definitely the best cuisines and music in my opinion. The Americas are ripe with them.
I don’t think you can definitely say mixing would be the dominant outcome, but it’s the one I would hope for.