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Ethnic Identity and Acculturation: Immigrant Youth in Croatia

This research is focused on acculturation processes of the adolescents in Croatia with the experience of refugees, a very sensitive population faced with double challenge: the integration of past experiences and the definition of its own identity inside and between two cultures. By their origin the immigrants belong mostly to the Croatian ethnic corpus, and a smaller number are Bosniacs or Muslims by religion ; the structure, content and degree of their ethnic identification necessarily are different, as is the degree of their identification with the host culture. Both immigrant groups compared to those of the host population in Croatia originate from different cultural traditions and are marked by a number of specificities in the way of living, customs, and especially in language (dialect), characterized mostly by dialectal differences. Depending on how these small cultural differences are perceived by the majority community members, the issue of ethnical identity of the immigrants may be problematic as their ethnic identification, in whole or in part, with the host community culture does not have to coincide with the majority community views. The theoretical framework of this work is the Barth’ s anthropological model of ethnicity as a form of social organization that finds its confirmation in the interaction of the socially differentiated signs, while the interactive model of acculturation as the adaptation to the dominant culture will be used, in which four acculturation strategies including assimilation, integration, separation or marginalization are possible outcomes. The results show that ethnic identification increases in the cultural communication that makes the formation of the borders between individual groups possible. Precisely these borders and not the cultural contents define an ethnic group and enable its persistence. In that context, language (dialect) becomes the most significant marker in ethnic identification and its role in the acculturation process is dichotomous. It is both the very common cause of ethnic discrimination, and the most important element in the formation of multi-structured ethnic identity of immigrant adolescents.

anthropology; acculturation; ethnic identity; immigrants; Croatia

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