ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on racial and ethnic—to be still more precise, international or multi-geographic or translocal—groups and identities, although the lessons gleaned from the investigation of these two major but hardly exhaustive groups are generally applicable to other sorts of groups as well. Categorization is absolutely intrinsic to human life; it simplifies social existence by organizing differences into “large classes and clusters to guide daily adjustments,” assimilating “as much as possible to the cluster”. This simplification and generalization “enables quickly to identify related objects,” binding them into a category that “saturates all that it contains with the same ideational and emotional flavor”. Pluralism is the coexistence in the same country or society of groups with distinct cultural or other characteristics, in relative peace and without extensive loss or blending of characteristics. Assimilation can be analyzed into its cultural, structural, and sometimes physical/racial aspects.
