Assimilation

Assimilation is the process by which a subordinate people is absorbed into a dominant culture, losing its distinct language, customs, social organization, and political identity. It can be voluntary (immigrants adopting the language and norms of a new country), coerced (state policies requiring cultural conformity as a condition of citizenship), or violent (boarding schools, language bans, forced resettlement designed to destroy a people’s capacity to reproduce their culture).

The analytical problem with assimilation is that it constitutes one pole of a binary — traditional or assimilated, authentic or modern — that eliminates the temporal middle. Under this binary, a person who maintains some elements of their inherited culture while engaging with the dominant culture is classified as either inadequately assimilated (and therefore a problem to be solved) or inauthentic (and therefore not really a member of their people). There is no category for the person who is doing what every living person does: inheriting, continuing, transforming.

Forced assimilation is the state policy that operationalizes this binary. Captain Richard Henry Pratt’s formula — “Kill the Indian, save the man” — states the logic directly: the Indian and the man cannot coexist in one body. You are either Indian (to be destroyed) or man (to be saved through assimilation into white American life). The Pahlavi regime’s Persianization policies operated identically: Kurdish language, dress, and custom were prohibited, and Kurds were expected to become Persian-speaking Iranian citizens. Turkey’s “Mountain Turks” policy denied Kurdish existence entirely — assimilation so total that the group being assimilated was declared never to have existed.

Glen Coulthard (2014) analyzes the liberal version: the politics of recognition offers inclusion in the dominant society in exchange for legibility — performing the genre the state recognizes (the authentic traditional subject or the assimilated modern subject). Audra Simpson’s counter-concept is refusal: declining the assimilation/tradition binary altogether, occupying the temporal middle by refusing to be classified.