ABSTRACT
There was a tendency to view the cultures of ethnic minority groups as static. Much of the literature on minority groups from the 1960s onwards represented minority cultures in simplified ways, construing them as changeless wholes nestling within the larger framework of the dominant culture. The literature has freely made use of such stereotypical views and labels like ‘Asian’ and ‘West Indian’ which effectively obscure the diversity of backgrounds covered by these terms. The traditional cultural backgrounds tended to be emphasized, ignoring the dynamics of what is happening today in Britain, and studying minorities as if they were living in isolation. By stressing the gulf between minority and majority cultures, we have ignored the important, complex and changing interactions taking place in those situations that provide for routine contact between peoples of different cultural milieux. The assumption that sets of cultural values are fixed with no possibility of adaptation now has generally given way to a view which sees ethnic identity as a fluid product of social interaction. Certainly the more interesting and illuminative recent research bears this view out, for example, the work on Asian adolescents (Weinrich, 1979) and
the changes between first and second generation immigrants (Ballard, 1979; Saifullah-Khan, 1979). The idea that second-generation immigrants are undergoing ‘culture conflict’ is somewhat crass-implying a straightforward tug-of-war between East and West, traditional and modern. On the contrary, it is not a situation that can be so neatly disposed of. Ethnic minorities have difficult ‘dilemmas’ to resolve in those myriad situations where different sets of values appear to apply. In resolving them they work towards new syntheses of British and other cultures.
