AP Human Geography 3.8: Effects of Diffusion

Both of these effects are about one group meeting another culture, often a group of migrants meeting the culture of the place they move to. The question that separates them is what the group keeps.

In acculturation, a group adopts traits of another culture while keeping its own. Picture a hypothetical family that moves from Country N to Country M. The parents learn Country M's language for work, and the children celebrate Country M's national holidays at school. At home the family still speaks N's language, cooks N's food and holds N's new-year festival. They have added traits. They have not given up their own.

In assimilation, a group gives up its own culture and is absorbed into the other one. Suppose that, three generations later, the family's great-grandchildren speak only Country M's language, keep only its holidays and no longer think of themselves as from Country N. Nothing distinct is left. That is assimilation.

Acculturation often comes first, and assimilation can follow over generations, but it does not have to. Many groups stay acculturated for a long time. And acculturation runs both ways: the people of Country M can take up N's foods while keeping their own.

Sometimes traits from two cultures do not simply sit side by side. They blend into a new form that neither culture had before. That blending is syncretism.

In hypothetical Town Pell, newcomers brought a tradition of steamed dumplings, and the townspeople had a tradition of spiced meat pies. A Pell bakery now sells a steamed dumpling filled with the town's spiced pie filling. It is not the newcomers' dumpling, and it is not the town's pie. It is a third thing made from both.

Syncretism shows up in food, music, festivals, religion and buildings. A religious practice can join beliefs or rituals from two traditions. A building can join one culture's floor plan with another's decoration. A song can set one culture's melodies to another's rhythms.

The test that separates syncretism from acculturation is whether something new was made. If Pell's newcomers buy the town's meat pies and eat them just as the town makes them, while still making their own dumplings, they have adopted a trait as it is. That is acculturation. Syncretism needs the blend: a new form built from traits of both cultures.

Acculturation, assimilation and syncretism describe what happens to a group or to a trait. Multiculturalism describes a whole society or place: several cultures coexist side by side, and each keeps its own identity.

Take hypothetical City Arlo. Migrants from four countries have settled there over 80 years. Each group runs its own newspapers and places of worship, children can study in their family's language, and the city calendar lists every group's festivals. The groups share streets, jobs and a city government, but none has dissolved into the others or into one shared culture.

Multiculturalism is the opposite of a society where every group is expected to assimilate. Some governments push one language and one set of customs on everyone. Others make room for several, for example by printing official notices in several languages or funding schools that teach in them.

Multiculturalism is about the place, so it describes a city or a country, not one family. Groups in a multicultural place often acculturate too: a family in Arlo may speak the city's main language at work. That does not stop Arlo being multicultural, as long as the groups keep their own identities.

The cultural landscape is the visible mark people leave on a place: buildings, signs, places of worship, shops, street names. Each effect of diffusion changes it in its own way, so you can read the effects from what you see.

• Acculturation puts two cultures' traits next to each other. A shop sign appears in the group's language and the majority's language. A family keeps its own style of garden behind a house built the local way.
• Assimilation makes a group's marks fade. Signs in the group's language disappear, a place of worship it built closes or is put to another use, and in the end a street name may be the only trace.
• Syncretism adds new forms. A building joins one culture's plan to another's decoration, or a market sells a dish found nowhere else.
• Multiculturalism gives a place several distinct cultural landscapes at once: districts where different groups' signs, shops and places of worship stand side by side, each kept up by its group.

The landscape also changes over time. One district can show a group's arrival, then its acculturation, then its assimilation, generation by generation, as its signs, shops and buildings change.