By: josé luis calvo buezas  (Page 3/7)

Any immigrant, in a short time of living in a different society, is not the same person as they were, nor behaves in the same way, as in their country. The ways in which society interprets “the diverse” also depend on factors such as: adaptation, insertion, absorption, assimilation, integration, multiculturalism, acculturation, transculturation, enriched identity, cultural pluralism, interculturality, intermarriage, etc. The differences that entail the passing of a culture to another one also mark levels of uprooting, ghetto, discrimination, rejection, greater or smaller difficulties of participation, and the models of intercultural coexistence that provide the perception of the surroundings. The pro-social attitudes and prejudices, according to V. Volpe, last and can only be erased with great difficulty due to the fact that they form an integral part of one’s personality.

Cultural elements also work as valuation criteria, concepts for understanding, operative instruments and values, and symbols that, being related to each other, construct social cohesion. The acculturation of the immigrant is a plural process, open and continuous. It is nourished with cultural diversity and goes through generational phases according to the permanence of the immigrant in the new society and of the consolidation of a life project. Coexistence requires the immigrant to pass through a stage of social learning in which conflicts appear and personal and group friendships are practiced. It is also the point at which the assimilation of culturally diverse personalities takes place, creating and fortifying phobias and likings.

According to Malinoski, cultural elements are distributed in two great categories: the instrumental and the ideological. The instrumental creates technical products, such the result of human work, as well as natural objects; like earth, landscape, rivers; and other creations like houses, clothes, adornments and decorations, etc. All of these are important root elements of personal configuration that coexist and prevail throughout generations, serving as nostalgia for their native country. Ideological elements are the different systems of symbols, ethical principles and norms of conduct, which manifest themselves in a person’s attitudes, ideology and beliefs, traditions, and customs, as well as prejudices, likings, collective phobias, fondness and feelings etc. The most persistent are language and culinary because they are conserved in one’s home and always function as signs of one’s identity.

Language has a special operative relevance. It serves as the principle means of conscience, comprehension, expression and communication. Dominance or non-dominance of the society’s language is one of the great dividing lines of social adjustment; possibilities of integration and of labor insertion depend upon it.

Language as a comprehensive structure of reality

Human speech makes the ability to comprehend language key to understanding, and adjusting to the world. It is possible to manipulate the language, to distort it, or to attribute it a meaning different from that habitually well-known; in other words, to pervert it. Aristotle warned us that words, more than meanings, have “uses,” something that has been recently confirmed by analytical philosophy. A speaker’s intentionality and underlying interests can confer strange meanings to terms. Language does not have one single constructive function of thought. It is descriptive, but also touching, and admirable. Some behaviorist psychologists, like J.B. Watson, identify it with the same capacity as thinking. The ambiguously univocal, analogical, and sometimes equivocal character of words creates multiple possibilities, turning language into a channel of the closest affectivity and of sinister hatreds. The comprehension of the world that is created in the midst of language and through each different language is a determining factor of each individual’s personality.