Acculturation/Assimilation

Whenever individuals or groups holding different cultural values come into sustained contact with each other there will inevitably be a degree of adaptation, conscious or unconscious, voluntary or enforced, to the cultural patterns of the other. Such adaptation is known as acculturation, of which assimilation is a subset, and is of increasingly vital importance to multicultural societies.

Acculturation in its broadest sense refers to the changes in beliefs, values, and behaviors that occur during the interaction of two or more disparate ethnocultural groups as a result of the reciprocal learning and incorporation of cultural features from each other. It can therefore be distinguished from enculturation, which is the gradual acquisition of the behaviors, values, and beliefs of an individual's own cultural tradition, and from transculturation, which is the ongoing creation of new cultural patterns initiated by intercultural contact. Nowadays, the most common focus for the study of acculturation phenomena is immigration, chosen or obligatory, on the part of both individuals and larger cultural groups. The degree to which immigrants adapt to the cultural values of the host society, and the expectations on the part of the dominant group regarding the beliefs and behaviors of immigrants, define to a large extent the context for acculturation studies.

The term acculturation was first proposed in 1880 by the explorer and ethnologist J. W. Powell, who defined it as psychological changes resulting from cross-cultural imitation. Imitation is the key term here, as Powell was specifically interested in the phenomenon of Native Americans who were adopting European clothing and learning English, aspects of a process he regarded as both desirable and inevitable as cultural groups progressed from savagery through barbarism to civilization—the anthropological paradigm prevailing at the time. The assumption that one cultural group in an encounter is superior and should therefore be emulated gives rise to an assimilative model of intercultural change, in which the dominant culture's patterns are gradually adopted by the other, replacing and eliminating the original. This unidirectional nature of cultural influence was axiomatic throughout the European-dominated world of the 19th century; colonial administrators in British India were so horrified by the thought of “going native,” even in the adoption of indigenous dress, however practical, that formal dress codes were rigidly enforced in the face of all climatic logic.

A more enlightened and enduringly influential formulation was offered in 1936 by anthropologists Robert Redfield, Ralph Linton, and Melville Herskovits, who redefined acculturation as the set of phenomena that results when groups of individuals with different cultures come into continuous firsthand contact, with subsequent changes in the original cultural patterns of either or both groups. The explicit acknowledgment in this definition that acculturation is, or can be, a two-way process enables it to be considered a more inclusive concept than that of assimilation, mentioned above, which implies the absorption of one culture into another.

Redfield and his colleagues considered assimilation to be a potential phase of acculturation, which was itself just one aspect of the ubiquitous phenomenon of culture change generally. Various modifications to this definition have been proposed, most notably that of the Social Science Research Council in 1954. Their attempted clarification broadened the scope of the concept to include cultural effects brought about by only indirectly cultural or noncultural factors, such as demographics and environmental change. They also introduced the notion of delay, referring to internal adjustments following upon the acceptance of culturally alien traits or patterns, and suggested that some acculturative change can be a reactive adaptation of traditional modes of life, a return to certain cultural patterns currently in abeyance. This notion of reactive adaptation seems particularly persuasive when applied to societies or groups faced with the uncertainty of rapid social or economic change. Developments as otherwise disparate as the 1980s U.K. debate over Victorian values, the growth of Radical Islam in the late 20th century, and the U.S. Tea Party movement of 2011 to 2012 all share a desire to return to the perceived simplicities of a cultural Golden Age.

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