Do you know what the difference between a ‘melting pot’ and a ‘salad bowl’ in cultural terms is?!
Answers: PLEASE help me with this question!
A melting pot blends everything together, whereas, I'm guessing, a salad bowl mixes it up but retains the identity (culturally speaking) of the parts that are mixed in it.
Think of it this way, you MIX a bunch of foods together to create a new food in a mixing pot, but in a salad the things don't melt, they retain their original structure. Make sense?
A salad bowl is when different races and cultures live in harmony, but don't really "mix" cultures.
A melting pot is simply all the cultures 'melting' into one.
A melting pot implies that people who come into the society assimilate and adopt the standard of their new adopted society, contributing something along the way. A salad bowl implies that you hold onto your culture even after you arrive, and don't take on the characteristics of the new society, so that you have a mixture of a lot of different things, but you can still tell them apart like in a salad. Cheese fondue is made up of lots of different ingredients but you can't point and say "there's the white wine" the way you can say "there's the onions and crutons" in a salad.
in a melting pot, people bring their customs & cultures and blend them with new customs and cultures that they adopt from their new homes. In a Salad Bowl, they keep their customs without adopting those of their new home, but there are many pockets of these cultures. Think of the difference between an ethnic neighborhood, like a Chinatown for example, where all the people who live there came from the same country or culture & you see a lot of signs in that language, food from that place, people's social customs are the same as the place they came from, vs someone who happens to have come from another country & maintains some of that culture, but also adopts new customs, doesn't segregate themselves with others of their culture but intermingles with their neighbors of different views.
A "Melting Pot" is a metaphor for the way societies develop. It's a mesh of different cultures, races, religion and ethnic groups combining to form a multi-ethnic society.
A "Salad Bowl" society is essentially the same thing ! For an example, in a bowl of freshly tossed salad, all the ingredients are mixed together while maintaining their shape, form or identity.
Together, the ingredients make up a unity ! In a sense, all the ingredients of a salad contribute to form a finished product. They may be covered with dressing but each invidual tomato, lettuce, egg, and can all be seen for what they are.
A "Salad Bowl" culture is much the same in that individual ethnic groups blend together, yet maintain their cultural uniqueness.