Enculturation
What is it, and why is it worth talking about?
Childhood in any society is a dynamic period of life. One aspect of childhood that is constant across cultures is that people emerge from this period with a wish to become competent, productive adults. Cultures differ, however, in exactly what they mean by “competent”and“productive.”Despite similarities in the overall goals of development, cultures exhibit a tremendous degree of variability in its content.
Each culture has some understanding of the adult competencies needed for adequate functioning (Kagitcibasi, 1996b; Ogbu, 1981), but these competencies differ by culture and environment. For example, children who need a formal education to succeed in their culture are likely to be exposed to these values early in childhood. These children are likely to receive books and instruction at a young age. Children in another culture may be required to do spinning and weaving as part of their adult livelihood. These children are likely to receive exposure to those crafts at an early age. By the time we are adults, we have learned many cultural rules of behavior and have practiced those rules so much that they are second nature to us. Much of our behavior as adults is influenced by these learned patterns and rules, and we are so well practiced at them that we engage in these behaviors automatically and unconsciously.1
The above process is called enculturation, crucial to the norms and boundaries of behavior by which individuals within that culture are expected to operate. The term enculturation is somewhat interchangeable with the term socialization. The bottom line is that this is the period of life when young humans learn what will get them rewarded by society and what will get them punished.
I am extremely progressive and consider myself a liberal, which is to say that I want my culture and society to be widely permissive and forward-thinking. However, that can go too far and become a self-defeating censorship loop similar to what the American higher education system is currently becoming. American higher education has become so tolerant that it is intolerant and can no longer allow individual value judgments. That is dangerous territory.
Societies and cultures that teach complete tolerance of any viewpoint, social identity, or aberrant behavior are likely to end up with extremes. See the photo below:
The pictured individual is a biologically male shop teacher who claims to be transgender but who also seems to have some attention-seeking behavioral issues.2 I am sure that something about this photo catches your attention. I repeat that this person teaches teenagers. Since local authorities have decided that Canadian laws prevent them from prohibiting the teacher’s interesting choice of personal presentation, these high school students will now be socialized (enculturated) so that the individual’s behavior is permissible and possibly normal. I am not judging, but I suspect many parents react emotionally to the idea of someone this far outside Canadian mainstream behavior presenting this way while teaching a class to what one presumes are mostly teenage males.
Gender dysphoria is well-studied, and I believe in it. Having said that, if I were a school administrator, I would have concerns. In some cultures, a person appearing similar to the one pictured above would be snatched off the streets by authorities and beaten severely or even disappeared. However, in such a society, the person pictured above would have been socialized to understand the ramifications of appearing on a public street or in a classroom attired in the way the above person is attired. Let’s move on since the prime focus of this essay is on child development and enculturation, not extreme public presentations.
Physical environments and local economies have a role to play in the type and nature of the enculturation the children in the area will receive. This can sometimes result in a different type of extreme enculturation from the appearance-based one I described in previous paragraphs.
“For example, the anthropologist Scheper-Huges (1992) describes an impoverished community in northeast Brazil, where, if the infant is weak, mothers show little responsiveness and affection, and sometimes even neglect to the point of death, to the infant. Some of these mothers think of their infants as temporary “visitors” to their home. Scheper-Huges writes that in this community, “mother love grows slowly, tentatively, fearfully.”These mothers are adapting to the harsh environment in which they must raise their children.”3 Poor mothers in remote Brazil aren’t the only unfortunates whose circumstances caused the enculturation of neglecting infants until they died.4
The point of discussing enculturation is that humans are not born with pre-embedded cultural values. Rather, we are born with a pre-defined template of basic biological needs that, if met, will allow us to thrive physically, emotionally, and mentally.
Research by Kitayama and Uskul (2011), along with others, has found evidence to support that windows for pathway wiring in the brain also occur for enculturation. In other words, cultural neuroscience investigates the way our brain is wired for cultural practices, values, and traditions through our early childhood experiences. These pathways form naturally in the brain and are then reinforced through feedback and repetition. Kitayama and Salvador (2017) write that, “culture is embrained.”
I had a reader recently become deeply offended when they felt I was attacking their enculturated values. The reader, who had appeared to be a rational being up until I critiqued that person’s enculture values, suddenly became extremely hostile and lost the capacity for critical thinking. This person likely had little to no chance of reacting differently. Once a person is fully enculturated, they generally defend those value judgments fiercely and sometimes aggressively.5
Enculturation is what causes our cognitive biases, which is a topic for the next essay.
Matsumoto, David; Juang, Linda. Culture and Psychology (p. 64). Cengage Textbook. Kindle Edition.
https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/chaudhri-halton-district-school-board-missed-the-point-on-dress-codes
Matsumoto, David; Juang, Linda. Culture and Psychology (p. 67). Cengage Textbook. Kindle Edition.
https://ebrary.net/89446/history/history_infanticide_cultures_time_periods
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.715152/full