Change of culture

From the anthropology class I have taken before I learned that culture is a dynamic concept, and it always changes. While reading this week’s chapter, I realized that culture’s dynamic characteristic is illustrated not only on a collective, but also individual level. The culture of a group as a whole can change, but the person’s cultural identity also inevitably changes.

Whether the person accepts the new culture and integrates/assimilates depends mostly on the person’s desire to follow the majority’s norms and whether the majority group approves the integration process. However, as we have seen from the chapter, acculturation is not always explicit, which is intentional learning and adaptation. Acculturation can also be implicit, which is unconscious and automatic. As it was mentioned during the lecture, implicit is a deeper type of acculturation. I think that one becomes a member of the community when they truly share their meaning of the world, express emotions, and think in the same way as the majority group’s members.

As the author mentioned, one does not follow another, and there is no such a condition that first explicit acculturation should occur for an implicit acculturation to happen. I wonder what affects the order of these processes, do they occur simultaneously, and how it varies across different cultures? It would be a great topic for further research. Depending on the profile of participants, governments and authorities could create strategies for better integration of immigrants.

Another interesting point is that the minority’s acculturation strategy is influenced by the majority’s context. The author described it as a feedback loop – minorities are eager to participate in the majority’s culture when the majority is perceived to be welcoming; in turn, the majority is more accepting of those who have the motivation to engage in the host country’s culture. However, it is not always the case that the host country encourages integration – in those cases, when there is discrimination and low acceptance, it is much more beneficial to utilize other strategies, like separation.

The link between acculturation strategy and mental health is of great importance as well. It is not surprising that in most cases, marginalization was associated with worse mental health. Not belonging to any culture removes that buffer effect – support the community provides. It made me think about transactional analysis theory, where every person needs “strokes” – units of interaction, when one person recognizes another, by affirming their existence. I believe that becoming marginalized and not belonging to any culture, people minimize the number of “strokes” – interactions, so they suffer from mental health issues and loneliness.

Different forms of biculturalism is a point, which was also surprising to me. Bicultural people can be different in how they integrate two cultures – they can identify with the intersection of multiple social groups (Kazakh students living in Turkey), identify mainly with only one group (Kazakhs or Turkish people), compartmentalize (Turkish culture at university and with friends, Kazakh culture at home), or merge the identities. I think that the the occurence of a particular biculturalism form might be influenced by the degree of difference in cultures and the context of exposure to the second culture (work, study, marriage).

Of course, there are limitations to the existing research. Most of the research was held in the United States, so derived from context, where multicultural interactions are encouraged. Much research should be implemented in countries with different levels of immigrants’ acceptance. Regarding John W. Berry’s categorization of acculturation strategies, it seems rather constrained, because the interaction of cultures is a very complex phenomenon, which is affected by countless factors.