Melting pot
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The melting pot is a monocultural metaphor for a heterogeneous society becoming more homogeneous, the different elements "melting together" with a common culture or vice versa, for a homogeneous society becoming more heterogeneous through the influx of foreign elements with different cultural backgrounds, possessing the potential to create disharmony within the previous culture. Historically, it is often used to describe the assimilation of immigrants to the United States. The melting-together metaphor was in use by the 1780s. The exact term "melting pot" came into general usage in the United States after it was used as a metaphor describing a fusion of nationalities, cultures and ethnicities in the 1908 play of the same name.
The desirability of assimilation and the melting pot model has been reconsidered by proponents of multiculturalism, who have suggested alternative metaphors to describe the current American society, such as a mosaic, salad bowl, or kaleidoscope, in which different cultures mix, but remain distinct in some aspects.
See also
- Assimilation (sociology)
- Cultural pluralism
- Ethnic origin
- Hyphenated American
- Interculturalism
- Lusotropicalism
- More Irish than the Irish themselves
- Multiculturalism in Canada
- Multicultural media in Canada
- Nation-building
- Racial integration
- The race of the future
- Transculturation
- Zhonghua Minzu