This chapter examines segmental mutations and processes in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM), including assimilation, dissimilation, gemination, syllabic reduction, contraction, and vernacular-literary phonological differences.

Assimilation occurs in place (e.g., homorganic nasal assimilation, optional palatalization) and manner (e.g., nasal harmony). Dissimilation prevents adjacent identical [back] features in diphthongs and avoids co-occurrence of [labial] and [dorsal] features in onset glides and coda consonants.

Gemination lengthens glides, nasals, and stops. Stop codas of checked syllables are voiced and undergo gemination when followed by a vowel-initial function word; otherwise, they undergo final devoicing. Gemination is constrained to the prosodic word domain, and the chapter suggests a gradient interpretation of geminate inalterability in some systems.

Syllable reduction leads to contraction, with nuclear segments potentially undergoing transformations like devocalization, merger, or nasalization. Contraction follows an edge-in paradigm, with sonority-based priority.

Vernacular-literary differences include onset consonants in the literary register undergoing pharyngealization and velarization, and vowels alternating through rounding and derounding, reflecting a trend toward unmarked phonological structures.

This chapter surveys the empirical evidence on the effect of terror on social cohesion. We report on attitudinal changes towards the minority group to which terrorists are perceived to belong and by that group towards integration. We also discuss evidence of increased discrimination in labor and housing markets and reduced assimilation efforts in the wake of major terror attacks.

This chapter explores omniculturalism, a new approach to managing diversity. The first goal of omniculturalism is to manage human relationships within a generally accepted understanding derived from science that all human beings share foundational and important similarities. We humans are very similar to one another, and the contention is that our similarities are – and should be given – far more importance than our differences. The second goal is to acknowledge that in some respects all humans belong to groups that to some degree differ from one another, such as in terms of the languages they speak, the religions they practice, and the colors of their skins. However, these intergroup differences are of minor importance, compared to the foundational similarities all humans share. Omniculturalism involves the active celebration of human similarities (rather than differences). However, attention is given to group distinctiveness at a secondary level.

This chapter examines the psychological foundations of assimilation and multiculturalism. Assimilation is rooted in intergroup contact and similarity-attraction theories, which suggest that increased interaction and perceived commonality between immigrants and host societies foster trust, reduce prejudice, and facilitate integration. However, assimilation faces challenges such as societal resistance, biases, and the tension between maintaining cultural identity and adapting to the dominant society. In contrast, multiculturalism emphasizes the value of cultural diversity. It is grounded in the psychology of cultural identity, intellectual humility, and the belief that embracing one’s culture can promote acceptance of others. Despite its benefits, multiculturalism also faces challenges in balancing diversity with social cohesion and overcoming resistance from dominant groups. This chapter explores how these psychological principles inform both assimilation and multiculturalism, their impact on intergroup relations, and the complexities of integrating immigrants into diverse societies.

Taking its cue from passages in the Mendelssohn family’s correspondence concerning aspects of Jewish tradition and Christian conversion, and drawing on the work of modern scholars, the chapter considers from a variety of angles the sense of Jewishness with which Fanny Hensel’s and Felix Mendelssohn’s lives were imbued. With reference to a range of literature on Jewish history, the question of the siblings’ Jewish identity is explored in the wider context of German Jewish social and religious life at the time, as well as its implications within the Mendelssohn family’s private circle, for example, inter-generational tensions. Attention is given to the reception history of the family’s Jewish identity in the context of anti-Jewish attitudes, reflected in a range of sources including the remarks of the siblings’ composition tutor, Carl Friedrich Zelter to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and the writings of Richard Wagner, while also identifying echoes in modern Mendelssohn scholarship.

This chapter considers Christian converts from Islam who were converted forcibly in the early sixteenth century and known as moriscos. Once Catholic, the moriscos came under the jurisdiction of the Spanish Inquisition. For more than a century, Spanish authorities worried about Moriscos adhering to their former religion and being Christian in name only; Spanish inquisitors investigated and prosecuted them for practicing Islam. The number of trials reached a high point in the second half of the sixteenth century, and only dropped when the monarchy expelled the Moriscos from the Spanish kingdoms between 1609 and 1614. This essay examines how the Spanish Inquisition constructed a model of Islamic heresy that encompassed Morisco cultural traditions. It surveys the rise in inquisitorial prosecution of this population across multiple Spanish regions. It also considers Morisco responses to the Inquisition, including strategies of petitioning and financial negotiation. This chapter assesses what Inquisition records can reveal about Morisco histories, as well as methods for reading beyond inquisitorial perspectives.

The argument of this chapter is that it was a combination of emulation and assimilation that shaped the logic of Valencian peasants as consumers of food-related objects. In making this case, this chapter provides evidence on emulative attitudes through contemporary moral criticisms and sumptuary laws. It also explores the meanings of food-related objects and how peasants used such notions in their dwellings. The chapter concludes that peasant consumer behaviour was not solely and passively guided by a will to imitate others but by an interest in absorbing what was relevant from others into their lifestyles, and for their own aims. This deliberate, conscious assimilation led peasants to incorporate new objects into their own familial and social needs.

In 2007, the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples recognized their particular historical losses and protected their future as collective entities, including their distinctive claims to land. In a multi-sited genealogy, Miranda Johnson explores how long-term historical identities were reforged – in stages after World War II, and against the prevalence of assimilative ideologies – through the elaboration of common Indigenous claim-making of far-flung groups, coming to regard a parallel historic dispossession and current disempowerment.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce the concepts of American culture and anti-Indianism. It begins with a discussion of Thanksgiving, Americans’ favorite holiday, from the perspective of Wamsutta Frank James, an American Indian, activist, and leader of the Wampanoag Tribe. For Wamsutta Frank James, Thanksgiving is not a day of celebration but a day of mourning. The use of celebrations such as Thanksgiving to promote myths about US history shows the importance of American culture for Whiteness. The chapter reviews some characteristics and popular myths about American Indians and Alaska Natives, the challenges of defining culture, and culture as a system of people, places, practices, power, and purpose. It examines incorporation, appropriation, assimilation, and segregation as strategies to enforce White cultural hegemony. The chapter includes a Food for Thought section on “cancel culture” and the freedom of speech defense. It ends with a discussion of Wamsutta Frank James and reimagining US culture.

Chapter 6 applies the preceding insights to the problem of inter-cultural and inter-group relations in contemporary societies struggling with multiculturalism. It considers policy implications associated with the integration or assimilation of migrants, that burden migrants with the prospect of learning the ways of life of their host societies. This is known as acculturation. The chapter proceeds to consider the debate between assimilationist or multicultural policy in terms of social capital theory. It makes a case for integration based on social capital terms, whilst noting the challenge this poses to locals concerned about the erosion of their ways of life as a result of accommodating diversity.

This chapter focuses on how sounds can shift when they occur in particular environments. It introduces key concepts from the field of phonology, such as phonemes and allophones, and demonstrates how sounds commonly change during speech production. The major types of sound shifts discussed in this chapter include assimilation, deletion, insertion, and dissimilation. By the end of the chapter, you will be asked to apply phonological rules to a small data set and create a set of potential phonological shifts you can incorporate into your language.

This chapter examines Aimé Césaire’s engagement with Marxism from his neglected 1930s writings through his later talks and speeches from the 1950s and 1960s, where he articulates his notion of a “tropical Marxism.” It argues that Césaire takes up and transforms the Marxist concept of alienation to theorize the paralyzing impact of colonialism through assimilation and underdevelopment. This analysis of alienation undergirds the idea of a tropical Marxism, which emphasized the necessity for colonized peoples to integrate Marxism creatively to the particular conditions of their societies. By tracing the theoretical underpinnings of this idea of tropical Marxism through Césaire’s intellectual and political journey first as a student in Paris and then as a representative of Martinique in the French National Assembly, we glean the myriad of ways in which Marxism spoke to the problem of colonialism and therefore constitutes a seminal part of the canon of anticolonial social theory.

Chapter 3 addresses British and French involvement in the decolonisation of the case study territories. It assesses the differing approaches of colonial representatives towards the political status of the territories. This includes measures taken to repress anticolonial protests and activists, the Gallicisation of Guadeloupe and Martinique after departmentalisation and the impact of years of chronic underfunding. This chapter places these territories within the wider context of the decolonisation of the British and French Empires. It argues that colonial pressures prevented a fair and open debate on the question of independence in these territories.

The chapter provides a novel account of perceptual discrimination (krinein) in Aristotle. Against the widespread view that the most basic perceptual acts consist in noticing differences between two or more perceived qualities, I argue that discrimination is for Aristotle more like sifting, winnowing on a sieve: it consists in identifying – with an ultimate authority – the quality of an external object as distinct from any other quality of the given range that the object could have. The chapter further explores how the notion of discrimination is embedded by Aristotle within his causal assimilation model of perception. I argue that the central notion of a discriminative mean (mesotēs), introduced in An. 2.11, is intended to capture the role of the perceptive soul as the controlling factor of a homeostatic mechanism underlying perception. As such the notion lays the groundwork for resolving the apparent conflict between the passivity of perception and the impassivity of the soul (as analysed in Chapter 5). The prospect is further explored in Chapter 7. The present chapter concludes by arguing that Aristotle conceives perceptual discrimination as a holistic assessment of the external object acting on the perceiver, including those of its features which are not causally efficacious.

Americans remained hungry for tribal land, and Congress’s newly discovered plenary power enabled Congress to enact the General Allotment Act of 1887 (GAA). The GAA was designed to open tribal lands to white settlement and convert Indians into farmers. To do this, Indian head of households were given 160-acre parcels of land. The land was placed in trust for twenty-five years. At the period’s conclusion, Indians were supposed to become American citizens. Lands remaining after Indians received their 160-acre parcels were opened to white settlement. Tribes resisted allotment; however, the Supreme Court ruled Congress possessed “paramount power over the property of Indians.” The federal government’s efforts to assimilate Indians included removing Indian children from their parents and sending them to distant boarding schools. Boarding schools were intended to “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

This chapter offers an in-depth reflection on the significance of time and temporality to the practice of toleration. Time-shaped Christian imagining of the other as “becoming” and growing into its own image. Constitutions, too, exist within certain temporal rhythms: they bind people within a specific space and in a specific time to a set of fundamental rules and arrangements. The binding of time by constitutions is an assertion of power in the saeculum, but also an expression of a need to better live with diversity. It is vital to the “emancipation” of modern constitutionalism from toleration that the constitution does not require a dominant or exclusive set of temporalities to establish order. Rather, constitutions need to allow for citizens to keep time differently, for example through the protection of rights and freedoms.