Culture, Multiculturalism, and Transculturation: Essay Sample

Introduction

Culture comprises of religious, cultural, or racial groups and is manifested in habitual behaviors, cultural beliefs, values, patterns of thinking, and communicative styles. Multiculturalism is the existence, promotion, and acceptance of several cultural traditions in the boundaries of a single jurisdiction (Clayton 211-219). Transculturation happens when a community changes due to the influence of new cultural practices and beliefs. These beliefs can either displace or slightly modify the existing cultural practices of a particular group. Transculturation opens up as a result of multiculturalism. This paper explains the contributions of globalization and immigration to multiculturalism and transculturation.

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Throughout history, globalization and immigration have led to multiculturalism in education, and especially music education. For several years, the US school policy has sponsored multicultural ideals in a bid to include its diverse growing demographic population (Schmidt, and Colwell 211-230). From a historical perspective, multicultural education is directed towards increasing a student's comprehension of various gender, ethnic, racial, and religious understandings with such understanding leading to enhanced human relationships in a diverse community. Over the past half-century, the music education curriculum has been hugely shaped by multicultural mandates as available in the musical and pedagogical resources available to music educators today. Through the years, the publication of song collections that represents the growing immigrant population in the US has grown in number. Music educators have focused on aspects of multiculturalism and ethnomusicology in a quest to understand how to profile a pedagogy that is music and culture inclusive. The educators have gone far to grow their cultural awareness by plunging themselves into musical cultures that are beyond their native cultures and pieces of training and sharing their experiences with their trainees in return. As a result, music education students in the US are continuing to graduate with mostly western European music training and more adventures with the world's music cultures.

Throughout human history, transculturation has always occurred in varying degrees. In the past few decades, cultures have been so much intertwined with each other both economically and politically. Transculturation has led to the loss of cultural material, acquisition of new cultural materials from different cultures as well as the creation of modified or new cultural traditions as a result of combining diverse cultural elements (Le Brun-Ricalens 193-206). Colonialism is one of the well-known instances of transculturation. When the Europeans colonized North America, South America, and other regions, they took with them European traditions and values. Today, many countries in South America speak Spanish as a result of the Spanish colonial invasion.

Similarly, Christianity is dominant in this region because of the Spanish impact. To date, American cultural values such as the dressing and language elements are prevalent across other parts of the world. Notably, transculturation is not just a simple replacement of a cultural component over another. For instance, many groups speak a creole or a pidgin language. Pidgins and creoles are mixes of more than one language, which were usually expressed in the colonial period and are still regularly seen through the world of today.

Conclusion

By looking closely at the music education multiculturalism and transculturation at its varying degrees, it is observed that immigration and globalization are huge agents of cultural flows across cultures.

Works Cited

Clayton, John. "Multiculturalism". International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2019, pp. 211-219. Elsevier, doi:10.1016/b978-0-08-102295-5.10296-3. Accessed 28 Feb 2020.

Le Brun-Ricalens, Foni. "Transculturation Versus Acculturation: A Clarification". Replacement of Neanderthals by Modern Humans Series, 2019, pp. 193-206. Springer Singapore, doi:10.1007/978-981-13-8980-1_13. Accessed 28 Feb 2020.

Schmidt, Patrick K, and Richard Colwell. Policy and The Political Life of Music Education. 1st ed., Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 211-230.