Culture is a marker of identity. Every society has its own distinct culture or certain identifiers that makes it different from others.
In this dispensation of globalization, where no country leaves in isolation and there is constant interactions and exposure to other cultures, there will sure be some form of culture integration. In order for a society survive in the fast changing world; it must borrow certain elements from other cultures and shape them to suit their needs. For instance, if society A’s culture employs the use of cutlasses and hoes in farming, but realizes these tools are no longer efficient to feed the increasing population, the society can adapt other people’s farming culture or tools such the use of fertilizers , combine harvesters and so on to increase their agricultural yield. Thus they adapted a foreign technological culture only to solve the problem of low yield and not the kind of crops they produce.
Currently, there is a common practice where people absolutely dump their own culture and wholly embrace other people’s culture. This phenomenon keeps increasing to the extent that you can’t differentiate an African urban lifestyle from that of an American. Societies have sacrificed the characteristics of its own culture in exchange for a foreign. This can be seen in our dress style, accent, food choice, music, religion, clothes, naming and marriage systems, all influence by foreign culture.
The idea of dumping one’s own culture for another is destructive to the society. The society losses its unique identity and core values. This is because of perception and promotion of western culture seen as superior or having more worth than our own cultural values.
To clamp down on loss of identity and core values, the society must integrate other cultures and retain its unique markers of language, food and language, rather than assimilation where it adopts fully the ways of another culture and becoming an entirely different society.
SOURCE; EFIE NK)MM) MAGAZINE. VOL. 4