Do I keep my own culture? Do I join the new one? A Canadian psychologist showed that the answers aren't opposites — and the grid explains a lot of modern arguments.
← Tuckman's Team Stages · All the tools · The Five Whys →
Ten items. Say your answer out loud before you reveal it.
Read the sentence, guess the meaning of the word in bold, then reveal.
The three words are: mainstream · homesick · adapt. Read each meaning, say the word, then reveal.
One missing word fits every phrase in the group. Say it, then reveal.
Read each part. After it, answer the quick check from memory, then discuss one question.
For most of the twentieth century, people talked about migration as if it were a dial with two ends. At one end you keep your old culture; at the other you become like everyone else in your new country. Move towards one and you must, by definition, move away from the other.
John Berry, a psychologist who spent his career in Canada, thought this was the wrong picture. Canada in the 1970s was a good place to notice it: a country of many origins, arguing publicly about what newcomers owed to the society they had joined.
Berry's insight was that there is not one question here but two. Do I want to keep my own culture and identity? And, separately, do I want contact with, and a place in, the wider society? A person can answer yes to both. Or no to both. The dial was hiding something.
1. What was the old picture of migration?
2. Why was Canada a good place to notice the problem?
3. What two questions did Berry separate?
1. A dial with two ends: keep your old culture, or become like everyone else.
2. It had people from many origins and was publicly arguing about what newcomers owed society.
3. Do I keep my own culture? Do I want contact and a place in the wider society?
Cross the two questions and you get four ways of living between cultures.
Integration: yes and yes. You keep your language, food and festivals, and you also build a life in the wider society — work, neighbours, friends. Across many studies, this group tends to report the best wellbeing.
Assimilation: no and yes. You let the old culture go and join the mainstream fully. Some people choose this; others feel pushed into it.
Separation: yes and no. You keep your culture strongly and have little contact outside it. Sometimes that is a choice, and sometimes it is what prejudice leaves you.
Marginalisation: no and no. Connected to neither — usually not a choice at all, and the hardest place to be.
The crucial point is that these are not four types of person. They are positions people move between, differently at work and at home, differently in the first year and the tenth.
1. What are the four positions?
2. Which one tends to be linked with the best wellbeing?
3. Why is it wrong to call them four types of person?
1. Integration, assimilation, separation, marginalisation.
2. Integration.
3. Because people move between them — and can be in different positions at work and at home, or in different years.
The most-quoted part of Berry's work is the four boxes. The part people forget is his condition: integration is only possible if the receiving society allows it. If a country demands that newcomers drop everything, then integration is not on the menu, however much a family wants it.
That is why Berry also studied the attitudes of the people already there — the other half of the equation. Migration is not a test that one side takes alone.
The model has critics. Real lives are messier than four boxes; a teenager may be in three of them before dinner. Some researchers argue the categories are too neat and too Western. But for millions of people the grid does something valuable: it puts a name on a daily experience and says, clearly, that keeping who you are and joining where you live were never opposites.
1. What condition does integration depend on?
2. Why did Berry also study the attitudes of people already in the country?
3. Give one criticism of the model.
1. The receiving society must allow it.
2. Because migration involves both sides — it isn't a test one side takes alone.
3. Any one: real lives are messier than four boxes; the categories may be too neat or too Western.
Two questions, four positions. Across the bottom: do I keep my own culture? Up the side: do I take part in the wider society? Remember that people move between the boxes.
Which position does each situation describe? Choose, then check.
1. Separation — keeps his own culture; little contact with the wider society.
2. Integration — yes to both questions.
3. Assimilation — lets the old culture go and joins the mainstream.
4. Integration — both cultures, side by side.
5. Marginalisation — no to both — the hardest position.
6. Assimilation — the organisation is demanding one culture only — which is exactly the pressure Berry described.
Four boxes, one life. People move between positions daily, and differently in each part of their life.
It can sound like a choice. Prejudice, money and the law decide a great deal of it.
It was built in one place. Some researchers say the categories fit Western, multicultural countries better than others.
Talking about identity means describing people and places precisely: the country where I grew up, a friend whose parents moved twice. Relative clauses do that work.
Write who, which, that, where or whose. Sometimes more than one is possible.
1. The village my grandparents grew up no longer exists.
2. A neighbour son plays in my daughter's team taught me the local dialect.
3. The documents you need are on the council website.
4. My colleague, has lived here for thirty years, still calls Lisbon home.
5. This is the café we all meet on Sundays.
1. where
2. whose
3. which / that
4. who (non-defining — never that)
5. where
Make one sentence with a relative clause. Use commas where the information is extra.
1. My cousin arrived last spring. She has already found work. →
2. I still cook a dish. My mother taught it to me. →
3. That is the school. My children learned the language there. →
4. Berry was a Canadian psychologist. His grid describes life between cultures. →
1. My cousin, who arrived last spring, has already found work.
2. I still cook a dish (that) my mother taught me.
3. That is the school where my children learned the language.
4. Berry was a Canadian psychologist whose grid describes life between cultures.
Now describe three people you know with relative clauses: one with who, one with whose, one with where.
Use the grid on real life — yours, or a community you know. Choose a task, start the timer, and talk.
Think of a time you were the newcomer — a country, a city, a school, a job. Where were you on the grid, and did it change?
Describe someone you know who lives between two cultures. What do they keep, and what have they taken on?
What does your town do well, and badly, for people who arrive? Name one thing you would change.