Immigrant Sociocultural Adaptation, Identification, and Belonging
Title
Immigrant Sociocultural Adaptation, Identification, and Belonging
Author
Mahler, Sarah J.
Research Area
Social Processes
Topic
Immigration
Abstract
For over 150 years and motivated by mass rural‐to‐urban migrations precipitated by industrialization, social scientists have been studying the experiences of newcomers into established sociocultural contexts. They rightly hypothesized that people's identifications with their social groups, their feelings of belonging in particular, might be altered in societies where the scope and scale of social life rapidly expanded well beyond the face‐to‐face relations characteristic of smaller‐scale societies. In addition, new forms of social solidarities and polarizations were swiftly emerging and taking hold. Early theorists faced the daunting task of not only chronicling these changes but also of theorizing in an age of newly forged and not yet sharpened social science analytical tools. Today the opposite is true; multiple models and almost innumerable publications compete to shed just a little more light on this complex social reality. Yet there is still room for innovation. Toward that goal I identify an approach meriting twenty‐first century focus: bridging heretofore separate approaches to understanding the experiences of immigrant versus native newcomers, that is, acculturation versus enculturation. Scholars of immigration have studied acculturation intensively—the processes of adapting to new cultural contexts by people who come to these contexts firmly established culturally from their homelands. Meanwhile, the same scholars almost completely ignore enculturation—the processes involved in learning culture and belonging that occupy infants and young children. Drawing upon advances in understanding the brain‐culture nexus, this essay argues that knowing more about enculturation can inform and improve understanding of acculturation. These concepts should form an analytical continuum examining how people come to identify and belong socially and how and why these shift in the course of life—particularly with migration.