Biculturalism

Biculturalism as an Acculturation Strategy

When two or more intact cultures come into contact, as in cases of immigration and globalization, the involved individuals may experience change or conflict. How an individual deals with the contact and the subsequent changes and conflicts gives rise to the concept of psychological acculturation. Acculturation scholars have long debated which strategy for acculturating individuals results in optimal well-being and successful functioning. In this line of research, biculturalism has come to signify more than a state of being of two cultures. Within acculturation research, biculturalism connotes an optimal state of being able to function well in two cultural settings.

Early conceptualizations of acculturation have assumed that assimilation to the dominant society was the only psychologically healthy form of acculturation. This view contends that acculturating individuals need to shed their heritage cultures and completely adopt the new culture to eliminate acculturative stress and function well. Others, however, argued that preserving one's affiliation to one's heritage culture leads to better adaptation. Both of these views subscribe to the unidimensional model of acculturation, which holds that acculturating individuals can be placed on a continuum from being not at all assimilated to the second culture, to being highly assimilated to it. In this model, it is unclear how an individual who can be described as being at neither extreme of this continuum identifies or functions.

A more contemporary view of acculturation, however, has introduced the concept of biculturalism– an acculturation strategy in which an individual (or a group) identifies with and possesses the knowledge and skills to highly function within both cultural settings. This bidimensional model argues that processes of enculturation within one's heritage culture and acculturation to a second culture are independent of one another such that an individual may be highly functional in only one culture, in both cultures, or in neither culture. An example of this bidimensional model is John W. Berry's fourfold theory of acculturation strategies: assimilation (when an individual chooses not to value one's heritage culture and exclusively prefers the adopted culture instead), separation (when one seeks to operate within one's heritage culture almost exclusively and actively avoids interactions with the host culture), marginalization (isolation [Page 67]of an individual from both the heritage and host cultures), and integration (when one holds positive attitudes toward the host and heritage cultures).

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