8/12/2019 Acculturation and Identity1

1/1

Acculturation and identity

The domain of cultural studies can be understood as an interdisciplinary or post-

disciplinary field of inquiry that explores the production and inculcation of culture ormaps of meaning. Cultural studies can be also be grasped as a discursive formation;

that is, a group of ideas, images and practices, that provide ways of talking about, and

conduct associated with, a particular topic, social activity or institutional site. That is,

cultural studies is constituted by a regulated way of speaking about objects (which

cultural studies brings into view) and coheres around key concepts, ideas and

concerns that include different issues related essentially to culture. Central among the

concerns of cultural studies is acculturation and identity.

The concept of acculturation denotes the social processes by which we learn the

knowledge and skills that enable us to be members of a culture in a given society.

These processes implies the ability to go on in a culture which in turn requires thelearning and acquisition of language, values and norms through imitation, practice

and experimentation. Key elements of acculturation would include the family, peer

groups, schools, work organizations and the media. The processes of acculturation

represent the nurture side of the so called Nature vsNurture debate, and are looked

to by cultural theorists as forming the basis on which actors acquire a way of life and

a way of seeing.

The primary argument of cultural studies is that being a person requires the

processes of acculturation. Here personhood is understood to be a culturally specific

production whereby what it means to be a person is social and cultural as well. The

study of acculturation, in this respect ,can be best viewd in connection to identity asboth of them became central categories of cultural studies during the 1990s.

Identity pertains to cultural descriptions of persons with which we emotionally

identify and which concern sameness and difference, the personal and the social. For

cultural studies, identity is a cultural construction because the discursive resources

that form the material for identity formation are cultural in character.

To conclude both of Identity and acculturation are consistent themes within cultural

studies. In particular, we are constituted as individuals in a social process that is

commonly understood as acculturation without which we would not be persons.

Indeed, the very notion of what it is to be a person is a cultural question (for example,

individualism is a marker of specifically modern societies) and without language the

very concept of identity would be unintelligible to us.