acculturation

(especially in CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY) a process in which contacts between different cultural groups lead to the acquisition of new cultural patterns by one, or perhaps both groups, with the adoption of all or parts of the other's culture.
any transmission of culture between groups, including transfer between generations (although in this instance the terms ENCULTURATION and SOCIALIZATION are more usual).

Collins Dictionary of Sociology, 3rd ed. © HarperCollins Publishers 2000

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Acculturation

the process of mutual influence of cultures; the total or partial acceptance by one people of the culture of another, usually more developed, people.

The term acculturation first received scholarly usage in the USA in the 1930’s in connection with a study of the contemporary culture of the American Indians. Later, American ethnographers also studied the acculturation of the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Oceania, using the term to conceal the enforced assimilation of oppressed peoples.

After the war the problem of acculturation occupied a prominent position in the works of scholars in India and Latin America—that is, in countries where national consolidation involved a population made up of groups with diverse origins and various levels of cultural and historical development.

The study of the processes of acculturation demands a historical approach to the culture of the peoples being studied. In Soviet literature the term acculturation has not been given an independent meaning, but the processes it designates have been successfully studied by Soviet ethnographers as processes of assimilation and rapprochement of peoples.

REFERENCE

Bakhta, V. M. “Problema akkul’turatsii v sovremennoi etnograficheskoi literature SShA.” In the anthology Sovremennaia amerikanskaia etnografiia. Moscow, 1963. (With bibliography.)

V. M. BAKHTA

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References in periodicals archive

This is a wonderful story, but as Daneilla Cheslow wrote for us back in 2011, the 120,000 Ethiopian Jews who live in Israel now have not managed to fully acculturate.

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The study's authors said discrimination may be an important predictor of poor mental health status and that previous findings of decreasing mental health status as immigrants acculturate might partly be related to experiences with racial discrimination.

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Expectations that newcomers must adapt and acculturate to dominant discourses and conventions of social practice, ate common (Farrell, 2000) and may be necessary when students' learning is at stake.

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The political emphasis on symbolic gestures that leave traditional linguistic hierarchies untouched, and on the use of Indigenous languages to uncritically acculturate students into non-Indigenous regimes of knowledge, fail to address most of the real barriers to Indigenous people's political empowerment.

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Adherence to traditional sex roles may decrease as Hispanic women acculturate to a society with more permissive sexual attitudes and less rigid sex roles.

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