Abstract
It has become apparent that we live and function within a fourth major environment—the symbolic. This environment is composed of the symbolic modes, media, codes, and structures within which we communicate, create cultures, and become socialized. The most pervasive of these modes, and the least understood, is the visual-pictorial.1
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Sol Worth, “Toward an Anthropological Politics of Symbolic Forms,” in Reinventing Anthropology, ed. Dell Hymes (New York: Pantheon, 1969), 335–364.
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This definition of Americanization includes both the government-sponsored, coercive programs of forced assimilation aimed at immigrants at the turn of the century through the early 1920s as well as a “particular variant of assimilation by which newcomers or their descendants come to identify themselves as American.” Russell A. Kazal, “Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall, and Reappraisal of a Concept in American Ethnic History,” American Historical Review 100, 2 (1995): 440.
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© 2011 Alexander Freund and Alistair Thomson
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Thompson, M. (2011). Family Photographs as Traces of Americanization. In: Freund, A., Thomson, A. (eds) Oral History and Photography. Palgarve Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230120099_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230120099_9
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