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A salad bowl or tossed salad is a metaphor for the way an intercultural society can integrate different cultures while maintaining their separate identities, contrasting with a melting pot, which emphasizes the combination of the parts into a single whole.
The United States has often been thought of as a melting pot, but recent developments tend towards cultural diversity, pluralism, and the image of a salad bowl rather than a melting pot. [2] [3] Due to the extent of American culture there are many integrated but unique social subcultures within the United States.
The desirability of assimilation and the melting pot model has been rejected by proponents of multiculturalism, [5] [6] who have suggested alternative metaphors to describe the current American society, such as a salad bowl, or kaleidoscope, in which different cultures mix, but remain distinct in some aspects.
The melting pot theory implied that each individual immigrant, and each group of immigrants, assimilated into American society at their own pace. This is different from multiculturalism as it is defined above, which does not include complete assimilation and integration. [ 106 ]
I remember reading the term "salad bowl" in the 1970s as a synonym of multiculturalism, as "melting pot" associates with assimilation. However, it never caught on. Well to some extend it did, if you look in just about any sociological or anthroloplogical reference book, it is mention how the new goal of American society is the Salad bowl, how ...
Immigration from Africa, Asia, and Latin America has also had impact. A cultural melting pot, or pluralistic salad bowl, describes the way in which generations of Americans have celebrated and exchanged distinctive cultural characteristics. [32]
Henry Pratt Fairchild associates American assimilation with Americanization or the "melting pot" theory. Some scholars also believed that assimilation and acculturation were synonymous. According to a common point of view, assimilation is a "process of interpretation and fusion" from another group or person.
As a melting pot of cultures and ethnicities, the U.S. has been shaped by the world's largest immigrant population. The country is home to a wide variety of ethnic groups, traditions, and values, [25] [26] and exerts major cultural influence on a global scale, with the phenomenon being termed Americanization. [27] [28] [14] [15]