Contents introduction chapter 1 the main purpose of etymology through task based language

1.2 Couse and impacts for language
The social Darwinists—notably Spencer and Walter Bagehot in England and William Graham Sumner in the United States—believed that the process of natural selection acting on variations in the population would result in the survival of the best competitors and in continuing improvement in the population. Societies were viewed as organisms that evolve in this manner.
The theory was used to support laissez-faire capitalism and political conservatism. Class stratification was justified on the basis of “natural” inequalities among individuals, for the control of property was said to be a correlate of superior and inherent moral attributes such as industriousness, temperance, and frugality. Attempts to reform society through state intervention or other means would, therefore, interfere with natural processes; unrestricted competition and defense of the status quo were in accord with biological selection. The poor were the “unfit” and should not be aided; in the struggle for existence, wealth was a sign of success. At the societal level, social Darwinism was used as a philosophical rationalization for imperialist, colonialist, and racist policies, sustaining belief in Anglo-Saxon or Aryan cultural and biological superiority.
Social Darwinism declined during the 20th century as an expanded knowledge of biological, social, and cultural phenomena undermined, rather than supported, its basic tenets.
Nikolay Bobrikov, in full Nikolay Ivanovich Bobrikov, (born January 27 [February 8, Old Style], 1839, Strelna, near St. Petersburg, Russia—died June 17 [June 4], 1904, Helsinki, Finland), ruthless ultranationalist Russian governor-general of Finland from 1898 until his assassination. Assimilation, in anthropology and sociology, the process whereby individuals or groups of differing ethnic heritage are absorbed into the dominant culture of a society. The process of assimilating involves taking on the traits of the dominant culture to such a degree that the assimilating group becomes socially indistinguishable from other members of the society. As such, assimilation is the most extreme form of acculturation. Although assimilation may be compelled through force or undertaken voluntarily, it is rare for a minority group to replace its previous cultural practices completely; religion, food preferences, proxemics (e.g., the physical distance between people in a given social situation), and aesthetics are among the characteristics that tend to be most resistant to change. Assimilation does not denote “racial” or biological fusion, though such fusion may occur.
Related Topics: social change Americanization acculturation Anglicization Russification
Attempts to compel minority groups to assimilate have occurred frequently in world history. The forced assimilation of indigenous peoples was particularly common in the European colonial empires of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. In North and South America, Australia, Africa, and Asia, colonial policies toward indigenous peoples frequently compelled their religious conversion, the removal of children from their families, the division of community property into salable, individually owned parcels of land, the undermining of local economies and gender roles by shifting responsibility for farming or other forms of production from women to men, and the elimination of access to indigenous foodstuffs. Forced assimilation is rarely successful, and it generally has enduring negative consequences for the recipient culture.
Voluntary assimilation, albeit usually effected under pressure from the dominant culture, has also been prevalent in the historical record. One such case dates to the Spanish Inquisition of the late 14th and 15th centuries, when many Muslims and Jews responded to religious persecution by voluntarily converting to Roman Catholicism. Known as Moriscos and Marranos, respectively, they secretly continued to practice their original religions.
Another example of voluntary assimilation occurred during the 18th and 19th centuries, when millions of Europeans moved to the United States. In this case, being able to “pass” as a member of the dominant Anglo-Protestant culture was an important hedge against violent nativist groups such as the Know-Nothing Party (see United States: The people). Although popular notions generally presume that complete assimilation occurred among immigrants of European descent, research in the late 20th and early 21st centuries advocated a more nuanced and pluralistic view of historical culture change among American ethnic groups.
Robert E. Park, in full Robert Ezra Park, (born February 14, 1864, Harveyville, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died February 7, 1944, Nashville, Tennessee), American sociologist noted for his work on ethnic minority groups, particularly African Americans, and on human ecology, a term he is credited with coining. One of the leading figures in what came to be known as the “Chicago school” of sociology, he initiated a great deal of fieldwork in Chicago that explored race relations, migration, ethnic relations, social movements, and social disorganization.
Park studied under the philosophers John Dewey (at the University of Michigan), William James, and Josiah Royce (the latter two at Harvard University) and the sociologist Georg Simmel (in Germany). All his graduate work was done after 11 years of experience as a newspaper reporter in various large cities, where his interest in social problems was stimulated. Park earned his A.B. at the University of Michigan (1887), his A.M. at Harvard (1899), and his Ph.D. at the University of Heidelberg (1904). He taught at Harvard (1904–05), the University of Chicago (1914–33), and Fisk University (1936–43).
In 1906 Park wrote two magazine articles about the oppression of the Congolese by Belgian colonial administrators. Turning to the study of the black population in his own country, he became secretary to Booker T. Washington and is said to have written most of Washington’s The Man Farthest Down (1912). Park believed that a caste system produced by sharp ethnic differences tends, because of the division of labour between the castes, to change into a structure of economic classes.
With Ernest W. Burgess, Park wrote a standard text, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921). In The Immigrant Press and Its Control (1922), Park argued that foreign-language newspapers would, in the long run, promote assimilation of immigrants. Three volumes of his Collected Papers, edited by Everett C. Hughes and others, were published between 1950 and 1955. The second volume deals with the city and with human ecology, which was the title of a course taught by Park at the University of Chicago in 1926
social Darwinism, the theory that human groups and races are subject to the same laws of natural selection as Charles Darwin perceived in plants and animals in nature. According to the theory, which was popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the weak were diminished and their cultures delimited while the strong grew in power and cultural influence over the weak. Social Darwinists held that the life of humans in society was a struggle for existence ruled by “survival of the fittest,” a phrase proposed by the British philosopher and scientist Herbert Spencer.
The social Darwinists—notably Spencer and Walter Bagehot in England and William Graham Sumner in the United States—believed that the process of natural selection acting on variations in the population would result in the survival of the best competitors and in continuing improvement in the population. Societies were viewed as organisms that evolve in this manner.
The theory was used to support laissez-faire capitalism and political conservatism. Class stratification was justified on the basis of “natural” inequalities among individuals, for the control of property was said to be a correlate of superior and inherent moral attributes such as industriousness, temperance, and frugality. Attempts to reform society through state intervention or other means would, therefore, interfere with natural processes; unrestricted competition and defense of the status quo were in accord with biological selection. The poor were the “unfit” and should not be aided; in the struggle for existence, wealth was a sign of success.
At the societal level, social Darwinism was used as a philosophical rationalization for imperialist, colonialist, and racist policies, sustaining belief in Anglo-Saxon or Aryan cultural and biological superiority.
Social Darwinism declined during the 20th century as an expanded knowledge of biological, social, and cultural phenomena undermined, rather than supported, its basic tenets.
Nikolay Bobrikov, in full Nikolay Ivanovich Bobrikov, (born January 27 [February 8, Old Style], 1839, Strelna, near St. Petersburg, Russia—died June 17 [June 4], 1904, Helsinki, Finland), ruthless ultranationalist Russian governor-general of Finland from 1898 until his assassination.
Born: January 27, 1839 Strelna Russia
Died: June 17, 1904 (aged 65) Helsinki Finland
Title / Office: governor-general (1898-1904), Finland
Role In: Russification
After a career in the Russian Army, which he left with the rank of general, Bobrikov was named governor-general of the grand duchy of Finland in 1898. Under his regime Finland experienced its first intense wave of Russification, including the forced introduction of Russian practices into many different areas of Finnish life, the abrogation of Finnish constitutional rights, and the abolition of the Finnish Army. Supported by Tsar Nicholas II, who granted him dictatorial powers in 1903, Bobrikov met the large-scale Finnish passive resistance campaign with arrests, banishments, press censorship, dismissal of officeholders, and personal close control of the Finnish government. He was assassinated by the son of a Finnish senator who also killed himself
rural society, society in which there is a low ratio of inhabitants to open land and in which the most important economic activities are the production of foodstuffs, fibres, and raw materials. Such areas are difficult to define with greater precision, for, although in nonindustrialized nations the transition from city to countryside is usually abrupt, it is gradual in industrialized societies, making it difficult to pinpoint the boundaries of rural places. A second, related problem is that governments do not use the same statistical criteria for rural and urban populations; in Japan, for instance, any cluster of fewer than 30,000 people is considered rural, whereas in Albania a group of more than 400 inhabitants is regarded as an urban population.
In the past, rural societies were typified by their adherence to farming as a way of life. Such cultures were not goal- or achievement-oriented; their members sought subsistence, not surplus. Marked by a high regard for intimacy and traditional values, farming communities were often regulated by kinship customs and ritual, and, in particular, the ownership and care of productive land was strictly guarded by tradition. Collectively, these characteristics are often designated by the term gemeinschaft, an expression introduced by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies. Tönnies described the contrasting nature of urban life with the term gesellschaft, a state characterized by impersonal bureaucracy, rationalized specialization, and mechanization. Gesellschaft is typically associated with modern industry, where people are employees who perform specific, goal-oriented functions in a rational and efficient, as opposed to a traditional and organic, manner. The two terms are sometimes translated as “community” and “society.” Rural inhabitants work with people they know well and are accustomed to relationships of great intimacy and small scale, whereas urban dwellers know each other in narrow, segmented ways that have little to do with family or friendship. According to Tönnies and subsequent sociologists, all societies are characterized by mixtures of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft; the United States, where even agriculture is almost completely mechanized, is closer to the gesellschaft end of the spectrum, whereas rural India, which is still heavily guided by tradition, is an example of gemeinschaft.
Historically, farming societies have had higher birthrates than urban societies; their populations have also tended to be younger, to live in larger families, and to include slightly greater percentages of males. These phenomena were related: it was to a farmer’s advantage to have many offspring, especially males, who could work in the fields as children and then would support their parents as they grew older. Generally, however, as the children became older, there was not enough productive land for all of them to support their own families, and some would migrate to the cities. In this way, cities have historically absorbed the excess population of the countryside, thus tending to become filled with comparatively older people living in smaller families. With the advent of improved health care in this century, infant mortality rates fell, and the increased number of surviving offspring has swelled the number of migrants to the cities.