Cultural dissimilation

Cultural dissimilation is the process in which a minority group or culture comes to unresemble a society's majority group or fully rejects the values, behaviors, and beliefs of another group. The melting pot model is fundamentally opposed to this concept. A related term is "cultural segregation", which describes the process of becoming economically and socially segregated from another society while retaining elements of one's former culture. Cultural dissimilation is opposed to multiculturalism (or a "cultural mosaic"), as dissimilation involves a minority group rejecting the dominant culture, while multiculturalism promotes the coexistence and preservation of multiple cultures. Other closely related concepts are dissociation from American scholar Eric Mark Kramer's theory of Dimensional Accrual and Dissociation (DAD) and separation from the fourfold model of acculturation. Though anthropologists have more often used antonym of dissimilation, assimilation, in literature regarding minorities, several others have made the term the crux of their research.