Socio-economic adaptation and ethnicity evolution of the Chinese in the Washington, D.C. area: A contextualist perspective

Human societies in the modern world, with the rare exception of some homogeneous societies, are plagued with internal multiethnic tensions and conflicts, the political aspects every society has to cope with effectively. A multicultural society turns out to be a mosaic in reality, due to the reasons that cultural pluralism does not facilitate cultural integration but leads to hierarchical social segments characterized by different access to political, economic, and jural resources. Probably out of reaction to the failure of multiculturism, current American society has been galloping away from its ideal of melting-pot and toward a "purification" campaign. Far from intending to engage in a herculean effort to counteract the trend of this campaign, this study aims at providing a piece of solid research relevant to the issue concerning the validity and reliability of this campaign. With this aim, this study combines historical scope and anthropological depth to investigate five contextualizations of ethnicity, which emerge from the Toisanese-Chinese's creation of adaptive actions throughout the historical time of their presence in the Metropolitan Washington area. The impacts from larger American society, Toisanese culture, and social situations were produced and reproduced to entail the unique contextualization of societal formation, social personality, ethnic enclave development, dramatization of social role performance and community framing process among the Toisanese-Chinese. As noted, these five contextualizations show that actors in different levels hold different ethnic consciousness, reflecting their different adaptations to the life contexts they are exposed to. This study, by marshalling a multitude of sources of data, offers an apparently unlikely connection among microcosm, macrocosm, synchronicity, and diachronicity to those who study culture for the sake of culture. All these five contextualizations, epitomized by the interplay between the microcosm and the macrocosm in the multidimensional processes, have led straight into one of the most important aspects concerning ethnicity change; that is, ethnicity evolution is understandable only by linking microanalysis with macrothemes. All in all, this study confirms the applicability of the emerging culture model and the impact-integration model as evidenced by the fact that Toisanese-Chinese ethnicity has acquired a shifting profile and characteristics that set it apart from those previous ones.