Write short note : Acculturation. (1988)
Robert Redfield, Ralph Linton and Melville Herskovits, in their “Memorandum for the Study of Acculturation” (1936), gave the standard definition.
Acculturation comprehends those phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact, with subsequent changes in the original culture patterns of either or both groups. — Redfield, Linton and Herskovits (1936)
Three elements are load-bearing: contact between groups, continuous and first-hand, changing either or both — so it is in principle two-way.
Keeping the neighbouring concepts apart
- Enculturation is learning one’s own culture from birth; acculturation is later and contact-induced.
- Assimilation is the end point at which a group’s identity is absorbed — at most a phase of acculturation, never a synonym. Diffusion is the travel of traits without continuous group contact. Integration, keeping one’s identity while joining the wider culture, is an outcome, not the process.
Indian illustrations
- The tribe–caste continuum is the Indian laboratory: F. G. Bailey made access to land the mechanism of crossing it, and Surajit Sinha’s Bhumij study showed Kshatriyisation, a tribe claiming warrior rank on joining the caste order.
- Policy turned on it. G. S. Ghurye called tribals “backward Hindus” and urged assimilation; Verrier Elwin (The Loss of Nerve, 1941) urged insulation; Jawaharlal Nehru’s Panchsheel (1959, foreword to Elwin’s A Philosophy for NEFA) settled on integration.
- M. N. Srinivas (Social Change in Modern India, 1966) supplied the Indian variants: Sanskritisation, a lower group adopting the ritual, diet and idiom of a higher one, and Westernisation. Santhals observing high-caste festivals, and Bhil groups taking up Hindu deities while giving up meat and liquor, are standard cases.
Critique
- It carries colonial-anthropological baggage: built to describe what contact did to “native” peoples, it presumes a dominant and a subordinate culture and one-way change, though the 1936 definition said either or both.
- It underplays coercion: Indian tribal acculturation followed land alienation and colonial forest law, which the Forest Rights Act 2006 preamble calls a historical injustice.
- John Berry refined it into four strategies, set by whether the heritage culture is kept and wider ties sought: integration, assimilation, separation and marginalisation, restoring agency to the acculturating group.
Conclusion: read through kinship
Acculturation registers first in kinship and marriage: Sanskritising groups replace bride-price with dowry, curb widow remarriage and divorce, and harden loose clan exogamy into gotra-like prohibition — a loss of women’s customary freedoms. It names something real where Census 2011 counted over ten crore Scheduled Tribe members beside a dominant caste order, but explains only once stripped of its one-way assumption: contact produces choices, not destinies.