Page 229 - Contribution To Phenomenology

222 STANFORD M, LYMAN & LESTER EMBREE

There are, hence, two acculturative challenges—^viz., an assimilation
challenge that, as a poUtical policy and a social and cultural process, will
foster national unity within a Capitalist-industrial society, and the Marxist
variant of assimilation that is going to facilitate the onset of a conflict-
ridden class structured society. Park defined assimilation as a "co-
ordination of sentiments." I have interpreted this to mean, among other
things, the coming into existence of a people claiming a common
historical heritage, a process described in the motto found on the
American dollar bill, "E pluribus unum." In plain language, this process
of assimilation is indicated when, for example, the "founding fathers"
recognized by, say, a Chinese American, are George Washington, Thomas
Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, just as they are for a W. A S. P. They
share founding fathers; that shows both are assimilated.
/ think that genetic explanations are extremely popular in common-sense
as well as scientific understanding. You explain what something is by telling
why and how it grows, where it came from or sprouted, etc. I don't know
if all societies do it. It may come from agricultural life. Nevertheless, in
our common-sense we often proceed this way. And what strikes me as
related to this is how when we have, at least in the academic context, a
group of insurgents, the first thing they want to do is discover or recover
their history, e.g.. Women's History, Black History. History is part of making
and building group identity, establishing that we are who we are because
we came from some particular source. This source provides the root of the
group's heritage. Sometimes, this is done through confecting an origin myth.
Perhaps this is a good place to introduce a conceptual distinction that
"the Durkheim School" introduced. Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) and
Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), his nephew and colleague, differentiated
between "civilization" and "culture." Civilizations are cultural expressions
that transcend geo-political boundaries. Christianity, for example, is a
civilizational phenomenon, as is Buddhism. I would argue, and I suspect
that Durkheim would agree, that the cultures that grew up from the
European seaborne empires, the Spanish, Dutch, French, English, etc.,
are civilizational, institutional ways of thinking, believing, and behaving
that moved beyond their original "national" boundaries. For Durkheim
and Mauss, "culture" was a term that referred to those ways of life and
thought that were bounded geo-politically.
From this point of view, the dilemma of culture and civilization
provides the basis for one problem of ethnicity in America. Thus, for
example, in America, Mexican-Americans, Puerto Rican-Americans,