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Immigrant Sociocultural Adaptation,
Identification, and Belonging
SARAH J. MAHLER
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.
Most social scientists now agree that humans create, impose, and also
alter our own social order. Relatively, few human behavioral and thought
patterns are genetically predetermined; people are less driven by instincts
than by learned information. However, few scholars of migration study
the advances in neuroscience and cognition that explain how infants can
be born near patternless yet in a few short years become extraordinarily
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
culturally competent. Might comprehending enculturation shed new light on
acculturation? There is robust scholarship to support this line of inquiry but,
given space constraints here, I must limit developing this approach to two
little-known and underutilized yet important analytical tools: Categorical
Thinking and Boundaries/Boundary Work. These bridge enculturation to
acculturation—and more.
CATEGORICAL THINKING
How do infants become socially integrated so quickly when they arrive into
the world knowing almost nothing about the world beyond the womb? They
enculturate largely through pattern recognition or what some refer to as categorical thinking (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000; Massey, 2007). Briefly, infants
detect social patterns through observation, store them in memory and then
parse new experiences against these stored models. Experience, then, builds
the brain’s neural circuits and these, in turn, while still flexible tend to drive
all future performances and interpretations of experiences (Ramachandran,
2011; Seung, 2012). Categorical thinking is the foundation for cultural learning but what infants learn varies. For example, all societies make gender
distinctions and thus babies learn gender matters, but there is huge variation not only in what different genders are expected to think and do, but also
even in the number of genders socially recognized.
Through enculturation infants and toddlers first experience adaptation,
identification and feelings of belonging. These become their baseline for
comparison, lifelong reference points for recognizing difference. Enculturation occurs across enlarging social scales; infants interact most strongly
with families but as they mature they engage broader social scales and
complexities such as adapting to institutions and identifying with nations.
No two people will grow up to be identical, yet each individual will integrate
into and feel belonging among groups of varying sizes and affinities. Across
all these social scales enculturation not only produces habituated behavior
and thinking, but “it” also produces habituated feelings of normality and
comfort (Mahler, 2013, see below).
Also noteworthy is that enculturation does not mean learning one culture
because that unified, holistic notion is less fact than assumption (DiMaggio, 1997; Mahler, 2013). Rather, young children can be exposed to multiple
languages and learn them perfectly; they can also learn multiple and even
seemingly conflicting ways to do similar “things” such as customs for eating
or dressing (e.g., learning to use chop sticks as well as fork/knife and “school
clothes” vs pajamas). As children learn how to think and behave this knowledge is contextualized in ways that become normal and normative—even if
these seem strange and/or contradictory to outsiders or scholars.
Immigrant Sociocultural Adaptation, Identification, and Belonging
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In sum, categorical thinking is how young children learn “their” culture.
As they have repeated experiences, their brains turn them into stored
neuronal circuits recording how their society’s ways are patterned not
random. So long as experiences conform to the old the brain operates on
autopilot. This is largely the experience of the native-born. What happens,
however, when newness is encountered? This is the lived daily reality for
immigrants and to understand its significance I now turn to additional
analytical tools—Boundaries and Boundary Work.
BOUNDARIES AND BOUNDARY WORK
As discussed above, culture involves imposing social categories onto the
world. By necessity this also creates the need for conceptual distinctions or
boundaries between social categories—something true both for domains
of knowledge and for types within domains. Social scientists since Fredrik
Barth have invoked the analytical usefulness of understanding boundaries
(e.g., Alba, 2005; Lamont & Mólnar, 2002; Massey, 2007; Wimmer, 2008;
Zolberg & Long, 1999) yet this approach has not become canonical. A main
impediment is academic disciplines—a particular form of boundary. Where
there are boundaries, there is boundary work (BW). In a valuable 1983 American Sociological Review piece, Thomas Gieryn explained how scientists in the
nineteenth century erected a boundary between their approach (science) and
all other ways to explain the world (nonscience). Later, powerful academics
would draw new boundaries between what became disciplines steering
scholars to devote themselves toward creating and applying analytical tools
most relevant to their own territories. Knowledge production became like
nation-states—bordered and bounded, always vigilant of border crossers.
Today academics are encouraged to do interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary
work yet when they do, they often incur the wrath of “discipline”-arians
given the discipline-oriented publication and reward system. This highlights
how a key variety of BW is defending those very boundaries that give a
domain identity and territory; transgressors keep the enforcers busy much
as border guards with immigrants. People rarely perceive that they do BW
whether by self-regulating or regulating others but people’s BW negotiates
social inclusion/exclusion. Principal BW vehicles are ridicule and gossip;
today social media extend the discursive reach of this BW.
BW should not be seen primarily as socially conservative for through it
people not only preserve cultural similarity, but also create and disseminate
difference. First people learn cultural similarity as infants. As explained
above, categorical thinking forges connections between infants’ neurons
inscribing a group’s cultural pattern into the newborn’s brain’s neuronal
networks (Ramachandran, 2011; Seung, 2012). Toddlers become experts
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in enforcing these patterns. A boy wearing a dress is ridiculed and so on.
Nonconformity is subjected to BW. As children enculturate they quickly
become ethnocentric, favoring their group(s) over all others. Generating
“us,” then, categorically and simultaneously generates “them.” Insiders
and outsiders. So long as contact is limited to insiders the brain processes
experiences on autopilot.
When children meet new people, however, their brains must quickly assess
them as insiders or outsiders, as people like “us” and thus trustworthy or
not. “Stranger anxiety” is the common term to describe this phenomenon.
Now switch to the immigrant experience. An adult immigrant is fully
enculturated; her neuronal networks are finely tuned to experiences with
“her people” in her homeland circumstances. In the new context however, there are many differences. Her brain immediately perceives these
differences—culture shock. She cannot turn this dissonance off for her
brain is busy comparing new data against her stored patterns. For some
time, immigration researchers have argued rightly that age of migration
matters. The younger the age, the greater the likelihood that the migrant
will fully acculturate. Neuroscience now explains this more profoundly than
social science. That is, to acculturate, the many neuronal networks of an
immigrant’s brain that do not conform to native patterns have to be rewired
and this becomes more and more difficult with age given physiological
changes in the brain.
Natives often criticize immigrants for not being “willing” to integrate
yet they do this BW without having an appreciation for how truly difficult
acculturation is given our brains’ culturally specific networking. Yes, there
is neuroplasticity but rewiring neuronal networks is both difficult and
dependent on age and other factors. If societies allow children at least
18 years to become full-fledged members—to complete their processes of
cultural acquisition and social belonging, why, then, expect immigrants
to take much less time when, indeed, the acculturation processes are as
complex—and arguably more complex—as those of enculturation? Understanding enculturation should add to theorizing acculturation but to date
this has not happened sufficiently.
IMMIGRATION AND THE BOUNDARY WORK APPROACH EVEN BEYOND ACCULTURATION
A nation-state has a boundary (border) and also establishes categories of
social belonging to that polity. Immigrants do not originate within that
territorial domain but transgress its boundary, sometimes individually and
often as groups (e.g., refugees). People typically defend their social terrain
against transgressors. In the immigration case this involves policing the
ingress and egress of people across borders. When people obey established
Immigrant Sociocultural Adaptation, Identification, and Belonging
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mobility rules, they are provided an acceptable category of belonging within
the polity (tourist or visitor, international student, immigrant, refugee, etc.).
Some migrants, however, transgress ex-officially (illegally) and in so doing
become objects of intense BW. Even immigrants who do play by the rules,
however, are problematic because their belonging is liminal. They are neither
natives (a group who categorically belongs) nor are they fully foreigners (a
group who categorically does not belong). They are in between. Cognitive
science now helps us explain why indeterminate categories are so disturbing
and invite such antipathy as has become evident in many recipient countries.
A useful social-cognitive science approach drawing upon the work of Mary
Douglas in Purity and Danger, Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror, David
Sibley in Geographies of Exclusion and others, illustrates that people who are
socially located in between acknowledged categories are often perceived
as dangerous to that social order. They may not be dangerous physically
but they are dangerous psychologically and emotionally. The human
brain seeks categorical order and therefore finds the disorderly, the dirty,
the out-of-place, the border blurring, and so on problematic, disturbing.
Moreover, with immigrants the misfit runs both ways.
Immigrants typically do not feel that they fully belong in their new society.
Their minds readily identify differences while they, themselves, are often perceived as different (them) by the broader society. If they keep a low profile
they might be ignored until they either leave or adapt to fit within the new
society’s acceptable boundaries. If, however, they remain liminal and particularly if they are also visible to natives their presence can and often does
disturb the social order. This disorder produces anxieties and mobilizes some
natives to eliminate the cause of the disturbance. In the case of immigration,
mild forms of BW would include calls to halt the influx or to improve upon
integration efforts; heightened feelings of fear typically produce discrimination, protests, even violence. Of course, over time and given changes in circumstances, the BW done can shift focus and/or attenuate even to the point
where people no longer distinguish ethnic boundaries they once worked
hard to maintain (Alba, 2005). Indeed, the absence of previously occurring
ethnic BW typically indicates achieved assimilation.
Although boundaries evoke an image of straight, strong physical barriers
such as walls, the reality is much less concrete. As the saying goes, good
fences make good neighbors but fences were meant to be broken. Scholars
theorizing social boundaries such as Zolberg and Long (1999) and Alba
(2005) identify different types of boundaries and their cognitive significance. A bright boundary is one people readily “see” and typically do
not cross—with some individual exceptions. Boundaries regularly crossed
become “blurry” and thus the cognitive categories the boundary used to
separate may disappear. A contemporary example of blurring boundaries is
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
the gradual social acceptance of gays in many societies (yet other societies
are erecting brighter boundaries toward them). Meanwhile, categorical
distinctions between immigrants and natives are brightening. What social
criteria, then, generate bright versus blurry boundaries and under what
conditions? This is a fruitful area for future immigration research. Some
useful work has been done on the blurry boundaries of cultural borderlands.
In the beginning of 1980s, borderlands scholarship began describing and
theorizing such interstitial places. Spaces where hybridity and mixture
reign whether celebrated or not, tend to attract very creative, vibrant people
who thrive on the margins and often seek to disturb them further. They
are discomforted not by borderlands but by the opposite—stifling order. In
sum, people vary by how much order they need and desire. The more order
the greater the BW and vice versa.
FUTURE BOUNDARY WORK RESEARCH NEEDED
Through BW people negotiate social status both within and between groups.
To what degree are the social tools and characteristics used for inter-group
BW also used for intragroup BW? What additional tools and criteria are
used, if any? In addition, while much BW examines majority-minority
relations is there any qualitative difference for people migrating from
where they are majorities into minority situations versus migrant minorities
moving to where they are again minorities, or even minorities moving to
become part of a majority? Are there differences in the BW that occurs
given these different circumstances? When the boundary is religion, there
is a process (conversion) which helps people cross boundaries in multiple
directions; the same is true for nationality (naturalization—a very odd term
indeed). Yet with race and certain other embodied axes of differentiation,
the directionality of crossing is much less flexible, though some people still
cross. There is a need to research more the conditions of border permeability
and even eradication.
Another, smaller yet related task is examining how immigrants do BW that
reproduces the very borders of exclusion against them. For example, I have
encountered immigrants applying certain dominant group BW criteria quite
readily such as precluding African–Americans, Latinos and Asians from
membership in the “true American” category while admitting Whites. What
is their motivation? Are they just duped by the new system or are they more
strategic, for example, maneuvering away from the bottom (see below)?
A third application is to analyze immigration BW among nations. A common refrain is to hear European leaders (and even some scholars) contrast
their countries against the United States: “The United States is a nation of
Immigrant Sociocultural Adaptation, Identification, and Belonging
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immigrants. We are not,” they insist. To know who you are requires knowing who you are not. Bringing in such cognitive factors without returning
back to simple structuralist dualities is certainly a meaningful pursuit.
FROM SOCIAL CATEGORIES TO CATEGORICALLY UNEQUAL
Although all people learn and apply social categories, people do not enjoy
equal power over these processes. Categorical BW inequality begins early.
Infants have no choice but to learn the social categories and behavioral
and cognitive norms from those around them. They gain greater agency as
they age, but childhood is primarily a time of learning and doing BW quite
rigidly. Elites enjoy greater influence and sometimes achieve near perfect
“social closure” or exclusion of others (Massey, 2007), but it is critical to note
that everyone participates at least in part to promote positive associations
with ourselves and our group(s). In recent years I have researched social
hierarchies among Hispanics living in South Florida. My students and I find
that while Hispanic leaders as well as the broader non-Hispanic population
often promote the idea that Hispanics are one group, Hispanics are busy
doing BW amongst each other. The main criterion, as one research subject
put it, is “Nobody wants to be at the bottom.” What causes a group to
occupy the bottom rung?
Different social categories are ranked (the importance of gender vs class
or ethnicity) and these rankings have weights. Moreover these rankings
and weights are contextual. When immigrants arrive into a new society
the social categories they had learned as children and within which they
had come to find belonging are either not present or they are negotiated
differently in the new setting. Immigrants must learn the salient social
categories in the new context(s), both those operative within their group(s)
as well as those operative across groups. What they learn and apply as well
as how quickly this occurs are both cognitive as well as contextual issues.
Immigration scholars have overwhelmingly focused on the context side—for
example, examining the receiving society’s economy and its immigration
laws—while largely overlooking the importance of cognition. It is time for
a corrective, particularly now that enculturation is better understood. In
terms of acculturation, psychologists have been busy trying to create valid
scales at the individual level; social scientists and novelists also chronicle
immigrants’ experiences and how they feel about them. Most work among
social scientists, however, addresses more objective measures such as
educational achievement and employment. Why not bring the enormous
advances from enculturation work into conversation with all of us studying
acculturation? Here are a few ideas for how this might work.
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A first step would involve comparing enculturation processes in early
life against adaptation to new cultural contexts later in life—acculturation.
The pivot point here is the fact that once social patterns are stored in the
brain, people pay attention to the new and largely ignore the known. This
is done to preserve energy as the brain is an energy sink (Massey, 2007;
Ramachandran, 2011). Thus, once learned, social categories and patterns
largely drop from people’s conscious awareness only to be brought to the
surface when encountering people whose categories and patterns differ.
Previous theorists have characterized these surfacings as “culture shock,”
“acculturative stress,” “dual frame of reference,” and so on. Being able
to recognize difference is also central to theorizing why it makes sense to
distinguish the perspectives of 1.0 versus 1.5 and 2.0 generations as many
second-generation scholars do. In his 2007 article “Did Manufacturing Matter?” Waldinger argues that immigration researchers should pay attention
more to country of childhood than of birth. What is really needed is to understand enculturation of identifications and apply that understanding to how
people who migrate across any cultural border handle cultural differences.
Social scientists arguing against “methodological nationalism” and for a
broader paradigm on mobilities (Sheller & Urry, 2006) not just international
migration recognize that the nation-state does not hold a monopoly on
cultural differences. The approach proposed here is useful wherever we find
cultural borders.
If theorized together, enculturation and acculturation may be effectively
mapped onto the two primary yet integrated memory processes, one that
is learned, long-term, highly subconscious and resistant to change (the neocortical system or what can be termed the outcome of enculturation’s learning processes) and one that is more flexible, responsive to new stimuli and
more conscious (the hippocampal system or what might be termed processes
of acculturation) (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000). People are cultural creatures of habit for whom the known is comforting and the new produces
discomfort. Similarity and difference matter on both social and cognitive levels, but immigration scholars focus on the former level and could attend more
to the latter. Studying immigrants’ children—and not just teens and young
adults—is a good area to develop.
Immigration scholars excel in chronicling peoples in contact and how
they negotiate belonging and social standing at the social level. Yet there is
room for improvement by examining how encountering difference produces
varying responses: from conscious awareness to active interest or fascination; from desire and motivation to emulate to discomfort, dislike, and even
disgust. These can and should be researched using traditional data collection
tools as well as newer (and often more objective albeit also invasive) cognitive
tools such as fMRI. Here the work of Susan T. Fiske and collaborators (2010,
Immigrant Sociocultural Adaptation, Identification, and Belonging
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2011) is exceptionally helpful and has been connected to immigrants and
minority studies more generally in exceedingly important ways by Massey
(2007). Fiske contends that there are just two basic criteria behind how
people socially judge each other: warmth and competence. People judged
to be both cold and incompetent are treated cognitively apart—and often
dehumanized—from those occupying the other quadrants. This approach
may explain why genocide and other atrocious acts can be perpetrated by
otherwise “normal” people. It also underscores why understanding who
is socially located at the bottom of a hierarchy is so important. That is, a
fundamental task of BW is to stay off the bottom. To achieve this requires
ensuring that one’s group stays above at least one other group. Anthropologists have long noted that even food foragers will name themselves with
terms equivalent to “the people” while naming another group the equivalent
of “nonhuman”—the despised group in Fiske’s scheme. In short, there is
strong evidence that BW is universal, tied to being a cultural species in
which enculturation minimally produces a category “us” and at least another
“them.”
Social newcomers are at risk for dropping to the lowest social status in the
new context for at least two reasons: their presence promotes natives’ awareness of differences and natives, particularly if constituting a majority group,
typically sit on top of asymmetrical power relations. Infant (nonimmigrant
newcomers) are lucky for people innately feel warm toward them even
though they are the most incompetent members of society. For immigrant
newcomers, however, competence and warmth must be negotiated. Competence is the easier axis to score highly on, particularly when immigrants’
human capital matches local needs. Warmth is a much trickier criterion
and merits most research. Surely measures of social distance due to race,
religion, and so on, will affect natives’ perceptions of newcomers’ warmth
as does condition of arrival (“illegal” vs refugee, etc.). I suggest plotting a
series of typical terms applied to immigrants using Fiske’s two-criterion
model with warmth plotted on the Y-axis and competence on the X-axis.
Use the grid to socially locate these categories: citizen, illegal, immigrant,
refugee, asylum seeker, legal resident, denizen, wetback, and so on. The
same should be done for different immigrant populations to a country (e.g.,
in the US context plotting Mexicans, Cubans, Koreans, Chinese, Asians,
Middle Easterners, Indians). Plotting different categories of immigrants helps
identify how societies view these outsiders. It also may explain why certain,
but not all, immigrants become abjected. Plotting different nationalities
and ethnicities help develop hypotheses about additional factors beyond
immigrant status that inflect groups’ social locations such as their racial or
religious distinctiveness, educational levels, occupations, and so on. Plotting
the same nationality across different historical periods (such as Chinese
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
in the US in the 1850s, 1910s, and 2000s) can also detect these factors and
how groups’ positioning shifts across history. This would open up studies
mapping the key historical events and actors whose work changes the social
locations of a group.
Finally, the utility of the categorical thinking/BW approach to understanding sociocultural belonging can be appreciated in simple daily interactions
over language and dress. As people speak their native tongue with other
native speakers they do not view this activity as erecting or reinforcing a
social boundary. Yet if natives are in the company of people who are speaking a language that they do not understand, they perceive a boundary; they
often feel excluded and uncomfortable. Immigrants speaking a language
unfamiliar to natives are perceived as exclusionary (doing BW) but not vice
versa given the asymmetries of majority-minority relations. Another classic
case of BW is head coverings; they are culturally prescribed among certain
religious groups and thus are key to both being accepted by and to feeling
belonging to one’s religious group. To not wear a covering not only invites
group BW but is likely to also generate personal discomfort. What engenders
this group’s comfort, however, often produces discomfort to those for whom
head coverings are not normative and, as in highly secular societies, where
religious symbols are deemed acceptable only if subtle (e.g., ring, necklace).
More obvious embodied symbols such as head coverings can, and often are,
interpreted not just as individual or group expressions of belonging and
identification, but as statements to the greater society about nonconformity to
its boundaries.
Given that learning to belong to groups occurs so early in life, people act “normally” and do not perceive that the ways they think and
behave send messages to others, messages of inclusion and exclusion.
Consequently, social scientists need to raise these processes to greater
public awareness much as has been done for people’s multiple “identities”
(Brubaker & Cooper, 2000). Such an approach would be more praxis than
structure-oriented; it could also aid in pinpointing the mechanisms behind
often-cited but rarely documented situational and intersectional identifications. Imagine, for example, detailing how an immigrant child engages
the majority society’s sociocultural categories flawlessly at school only to
perform a different set equally competently at home. Imagine that this
child does not make to feel culturally incompetent because he is neither a
full member of the parents’ society nor of the new society. Rather, visualize
this child being celebrated as demonstrating the very cultural flexibility all
people can and should perform in the twenty-first century. What a paradigm
shift that would be for scholar and subject alike.
Immigrant Sociocultural Adaptation, Identification, and Belonging
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CONCLUSION
Theorizing immigrant sociocultural adaptation, identification, and belonging arose in a world carving nation-states out of old empires and attaching
national cultures to those territories. Whether intentional or not, the outcome for early social scientists examining immigration was to posit adaptation processes that end in perpetuated national cultures—in assimilation.
Most scholars of migration question or eschew this trajectory, while many,
if not most natives in countries receiving immigrants still desire this outcome. Currently, it is a lose-lose and highly politicized proposition, but one
for which I see a solution by bringing enculturation into constructive analytical engagement with acculturation. Explaining that all people enculturate,
how this occurs, how it affects the brain and how this inevitably leads to
favoring one’s own people over others sets the stage for encountering others. In addition, everyone’s life is full of acculturations regardless of whether
one migrates across international borders or not. Focusing on natives’ adaptations (acculturations) to new and often discomforting circumstances (such
as moving to a new town or school) can bridge their gap in understanding
the immigrants’ experiences and vice versa. This approach humanizes adaptation and opens up compassion for people whose acculturation processes
are both more complex and undertaken at stages in life when the brain is
more resistant to change.
REFERENCES
Alba, R. (2005). Bright vs. blurred boundaries: Second-generation assimilation and
exclusion in France, Germany, and the United States. Journal of Racial and Ethnic
Studies, 28(1), 20–49.
Brubaker, R., & Cooper, F. (2000). Beyond “identity”. Theory and Society, 29(1), 1–47.
DiMaggio, P. (1997). Culture and cognition. Annual Review of Sociology, 23(1), 263–287.
Fiske, S. T. (2010). Envy up, scorn down: How comparison divides us. American Psychologist, 65(8), 698–706.
Lamont, M., & Mólnar, V. (2002). The study of boundaries in the social sciences.
Annual Review of Sociology, 28, 167–195.
Macrae, C., & Bodenhausen, G. (2000). Social cognition: Thinking categorically about
others. Annual Review of Psychology, 51, 93–120.
Mahler, S. J. (2013). Culture as comfort: Many things you already know about culture (but
might not realize). New York, NY: Pearson Education, Inc.
Massey, D. S. (2007). Categorically unequal: The American stratification system. New
York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.
Ramachandran, V. S. (2011). The tell-tale brain: A neuroscientist’s quest for what makes us
human. New York, NY: Norton.
Seung, S. (2012). Connectome: How the brain’s wiring makes us who we are. Boston, MA:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning
A, 38, 207–226.
Todorov, A. B., Fiske, S. T., & Prentice, D. A. (Eds.) (2011). Social neuroscience: Toward
understanding the underpinnings of the social mind. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Wimmer, A. (2008). The making and unmaking of ethnic boundaries: a multilevel
process theory. American Journal of Sociology, 113(4), 970–1022.
Zolberg, A., & Long, L. W. (1999). Why Islam is like Spanish: Cultural incorporation
in Europe and the United States. Politics and Society, 27(1), 5–38.
FURTHER READING
Alba, R., & Nee, V. (2003). Remaking the American mainstream: Assimilation and the new
immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wimmer, A. (2013). Ethnic boundary making: institutions, power, networks. New York:
Oxford University Press.
SARAH J. MAHLER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Sarah J. Mahler is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and former
Director of the Center for Transnational and Comparative Studies at Florida
International University in Miami. She teaches in FIU’s interdisciplinary
social science department—Global and Sociocultural Studies. For most of
her career, her research and publications have focused on Latin American
and Caribbean migration to the United States and the development of
transnational ties between migrants and their home communities. She and
colleagues pioneered bringing gender into this transnational perspective. In
recent years, she has returned to an early inquietude about enculturation,
addressing the “nature” of culture by emphasizing how young children
acquire culture and how this understanding can and should dramatically
impact how we study and also do culture. This perspective and many of its
implications appear in her newest book Culture as Comfort (2013) and on
her website: cultureascomfort.com. She has also embarked on translating
the book’s ideas into virtual and augmented reality applications—to aid
people to overcome cultural inhibitions by practicing cultural discomforts
in cyberspace.
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Perrow
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Immigrant Sociocultural Adaptation,
Identification, and Belonging
SARAH J. MAHLER
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.
Most social scientists now agree that humans create, impose, and also
alter our own social order. Relatively, few human behavioral and thought
patterns are genetically predetermined; people are less driven by instincts
than by learned information. However, few scholars of migration study
the advances in neuroscience and cognition that explain how infants can
be born near patternless yet in a few short years become extraordinarily
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
culturally competent. Might comprehending enculturation shed new light on
acculturation? There is robust scholarship to support this line of inquiry but,
given space constraints here, I must limit developing this approach to two
little-known and underutilized yet important analytical tools: Categorical
Thinking and Boundaries/Boundary Work. These bridge enculturation to
acculturation—and more.
CATEGORICAL THINKING
How do infants become socially integrated so quickly when they arrive into
the world knowing almost nothing about the world beyond the womb? They
enculturate largely through pattern recognition or what some refer to as categorical thinking (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000; Massey, 2007). Briefly, infants
detect social patterns through observation, store them in memory and then
parse new experiences against these stored models. Experience, then, builds
the brain’s neural circuits and these, in turn, while still flexible tend to drive
all future performances and interpretations of experiences (Ramachandran,
2011; Seung, 2012). Categorical thinking is the foundation for cultural learning but what infants learn varies. For example, all societies make gender
distinctions and thus babies learn gender matters, but there is huge variation not only in what different genders are expected to think and do, but also
even in the number of genders socially recognized.
Through enculturation infants and toddlers first experience adaptation,
identification and feelings of belonging. These become their baseline for
comparison, lifelong reference points for recognizing difference. Enculturation occurs across enlarging social scales; infants interact most strongly
with families but as they mature they engage broader social scales and
complexities such as adapting to institutions and identifying with nations.
No two people will grow up to be identical, yet each individual will integrate
into and feel belonging among groups of varying sizes and affinities. Across
all these social scales enculturation not only produces habituated behavior
and thinking, but “it” also produces habituated feelings of normality and
comfort (Mahler, 2013, see below).
Also noteworthy is that enculturation does not mean learning one culture
because that unified, holistic notion is less fact than assumption (DiMaggio, 1997; Mahler, 2013). Rather, young children can be exposed to multiple
languages and learn them perfectly; they can also learn multiple and even
seemingly conflicting ways to do similar “things” such as customs for eating
or dressing (e.g., learning to use chop sticks as well as fork/knife and “school
clothes” vs pajamas). As children learn how to think and behave this knowledge is contextualized in ways that become normal and normative—even if
these seem strange and/or contradictory to outsiders or scholars.
Immigrant Sociocultural Adaptation, Identification, and Belonging
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In sum, categorical thinking is how young children learn “their” culture.
As they have repeated experiences, their brains turn them into stored
neuronal circuits recording how their society’s ways are patterned not
random. So long as experiences conform to the old the brain operates on
autopilot. This is largely the experience of the native-born. What happens,
however, when newness is encountered? This is the lived daily reality for
immigrants and to understand its significance I now turn to additional
analytical tools—Boundaries and Boundary Work.
BOUNDARIES AND BOUNDARY WORK
As discussed above, culture involves imposing social categories onto the
world. By necessity this also creates the need for conceptual distinctions or
boundaries between social categories—something true both for domains
of knowledge and for types within domains. Social scientists since Fredrik
Barth have invoked the analytical usefulness of understanding boundaries
(e.g., Alba, 2005; Lamont & Mólnar, 2002; Massey, 2007; Wimmer, 2008;
Zolberg & Long, 1999) yet this approach has not become canonical. A main
impediment is academic disciplines—a particular form of boundary. Where
there are boundaries, there is boundary work (BW). In a valuable 1983 American Sociological Review piece, Thomas Gieryn explained how scientists in the
nineteenth century erected a boundary between their approach (science) and
all other ways to explain the world (nonscience). Later, powerful academics
would draw new boundaries between what became disciplines steering
scholars to devote themselves toward creating and applying analytical tools
most relevant to their own territories. Knowledge production became like
nation-states—bordered and bounded, always vigilant of border crossers.
Today academics are encouraged to do interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary
work yet when they do, they often incur the wrath of “discipline”-arians
given the discipline-oriented publication and reward system. This highlights
how a key variety of BW is defending those very boundaries that give a
domain identity and territory; transgressors keep the enforcers busy much
as border guards with immigrants. People rarely perceive that they do BW
whether by self-regulating or regulating others but people’s BW negotiates
social inclusion/exclusion. Principal BW vehicles are ridicule and gossip;
today social media extend the discursive reach of this BW.
BW should not be seen primarily as socially conservative for through it
people not only preserve cultural similarity, but also create and disseminate
difference. First people learn cultural similarity as infants. As explained
above, categorical thinking forges connections between infants’ neurons
inscribing a group’s cultural pattern into the newborn’s brain’s neuronal
networks (Ramachandran, 2011; Seung, 2012). Toddlers become experts
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
in enforcing these patterns. A boy wearing a dress is ridiculed and so on.
Nonconformity is subjected to BW. As children enculturate they quickly
become ethnocentric, favoring their group(s) over all others. Generating
“us,” then, categorically and simultaneously generates “them.” Insiders
and outsiders. So long as contact is limited to insiders the brain processes
experiences on autopilot.
When children meet new people, however, their brains must quickly assess
them as insiders or outsiders, as people like “us” and thus trustworthy or
not. “Stranger anxiety” is the common term to describe this phenomenon.
Now switch to the immigrant experience. An adult immigrant is fully
enculturated; her neuronal networks are finely tuned to experiences with
“her people” in her homeland circumstances. In the new context however, there are many differences. Her brain immediately perceives these
differences—culture shock. She cannot turn this dissonance off for her
brain is busy comparing new data against her stored patterns. For some
time, immigration researchers have argued rightly that age of migration
matters. The younger the age, the greater the likelihood that the migrant
will fully acculturate. Neuroscience now explains this more profoundly than
social science. That is, to acculturate, the many neuronal networks of an
immigrant’s brain that do not conform to native patterns have to be rewired
and this becomes more and more difficult with age given physiological
changes in the brain.
Natives often criticize immigrants for not being “willing” to integrate
yet they do this BW without having an appreciation for how truly difficult
acculturation is given our brains’ culturally specific networking. Yes, there
is neuroplasticity but rewiring neuronal networks is both difficult and
dependent on age and other factors. If societies allow children at least
18 years to become full-fledged members—to complete their processes of
cultural acquisition and social belonging, why, then, expect immigrants
to take much less time when, indeed, the acculturation processes are as
complex—and arguably more complex—as those of enculturation? Understanding enculturation should add to theorizing acculturation but to date
this has not happened sufficiently.
IMMIGRATION AND THE BOUNDARY WORK APPROACH EVEN BEYOND ACCULTURATION
A nation-state has a boundary (border) and also establishes categories of
social belonging to that polity. Immigrants do not originate within that
territorial domain but transgress its boundary, sometimes individually and
often as groups (e.g., refugees). People typically defend their social terrain
against transgressors. In the immigration case this involves policing the
ingress and egress of people across borders. When people obey established
Immigrant Sociocultural Adaptation, Identification, and Belonging
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mobility rules, they are provided an acceptable category of belonging within
the polity (tourist or visitor, international student, immigrant, refugee, etc.).
Some migrants, however, transgress ex-officially (illegally) and in so doing
become objects of intense BW. Even immigrants who do play by the rules,
however, are problematic because their belonging is liminal. They are neither
natives (a group who categorically belongs) nor are they fully foreigners (a
group who categorically does not belong). They are in between. Cognitive
science now helps us explain why indeterminate categories are so disturbing
and invite such antipathy as has become evident in many recipient countries.
A useful social-cognitive science approach drawing upon the work of Mary
Douglas in Purity and Danger, Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror, David
Sibley in Geographies of Exclusion and others, illustrates that people who are
socially located in between acknowledged categories are often perceived
as dangerous to that social order. They may not be dangerous physically
but they are dangerous psychologically and emotionally. The human
brain seeks categorical order and therefore finds the disorderly, the dirty,
the out-of-place, the border blurring, and so on problematic, disturbing.
Moreover, with immigrants the misfit runs both ways.
Immigrants typically do not feel that they fully belong in their new society.
Their minds readily identify differences while they, themselves, are often perceived as different (them) by the broader society. If they keep a low profile
they might be ignored until they either leave or adapt to fit within the new
society’s acceptable boundaries. If, however, they remain liminal and particularly if they are also visible to natives their presence can and often does
disturb the social order. This disorder produces anxieties and mobilizes some
natives to eliminate the cause of the disturbance. In the case of immigration,
mild forms of BW would include calls to halt the influx or to improve upon
integration efforts; heightened feelings of fear typically produce discrimination, protests, even violence. Of course, over time and given changes in circumstances, the BW done can shift focus and/or attenuate even to the point
where people no longer distinguish ethnic boundaries they once worked
hard to maintain (Alba, 2005). Indeed, the absence of previously occurring
ethnic BW typically indicates achieved assimilation.
Although boundaries evoke an image of straight, strong physical barriers
such as walls, the reality is much less concrete. As the saying goes, good
fences make good neighbors but fences were meant to be broken. Scholars
theorizing social boundaries such as Zolberg and Long (1999) and Alba
(2005) identify different types of boundaries and their cognitive significance. A bright boundary is one people readily “see” and typically do
not cross—with some individual exceptions. Boundaries regularly crossed
become “blurry” and thus the cognitive categories the boundary used to
separate may disappear. A contemporary example of blurring boundaries is
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
the gradual social acceptance of gays in many societies (yet other societies
are erecting brighter boundaries toward them). Meanwhile, categorical
distinctions between immigrants and natives are brightening. What social
criteria, then, generate bright versus blurry boundaries and under what
conditions? This is a fruitful area for future immigration research. Some
useful work has been done on the blurry boundaries of cultural borderlands.
In the beginning of 1980s, borderlands scholarship began describing and
theorizing such interstitial places. Spaces where hybridity and mixture
reign whether celebrated or not, tend to attract very creative, vibrant people
who thrive on the margins and often seek to disturb them further. They
are discomforted not by borderlands but by the opposite—stifling order. In
sum, people vary by how much order they need and desire. The more order
the greater the BW and vice versa.
FUTURE BOUNDARY WORK RESEARCH NEEDED
Through BW people negotiate social status both within and between groups.
To what degree are the social tools and characteristics used for inter-group
BW also used for intragroup BW? What additional tools and criteria are
used, if any? In addition, while much BW examines majority-minority
relations is there any qualitative difference for people migrating from
where they are majorities into minority situations versus migrant minorities
moving to where they are again minorities, or even minorities moving to
become part of a majority? Are there differences in the BW that occurs
given these different circumstances? When the boundary is religion, there
is a process (conversion) which helps people cross boundaries in multiple
directions; the same is true for nationality (naturalization—a very odd term
indeed). Yet with race and certain other embodied axes of differentiation,
the directionality of crossing is much less flexible, though some people still
cross. There is a need to research more the conditions of border permeability
and even eradication.
Another, smaller yet related task is examining how immigrants do BW that
reproduces the very borders of exclusion against them. For example, I have
encountered immigrants applying certain dominant group BW criteria quite
readily such as precluding African–Americans, Latinos and Asians from
membership in the “true American” category while admitting Whites. What
is their motivation? Are they just duped by the new system or are they more
strategic, for example, maneuvering away from the bottom (see below)?
A third application is to analyze immigration BW among nations. A common refrain is to hear European leaders (and even some scholars) contrast
their countries against the United States: “The United States is a nation of
Immigrant Sociocultural Adaptation, Identification, and Belonging
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immigrants. We are not,” they insist. To know who you are requires knowing who you are not. Bringing in such cognitive factors without returning
back to simple structuralist dualities is certainly a meaningful pursuit.
FROM SOCIAL CATEGORIES TO CATEGORICALLY UNEQUAL
Although all people learn and apply social categories, people do not enjoy
equal power over these processes. Categorical BW inequality begins early.
Infants have no choice but to learn the social categories and behavioral
and cognitive norms from those around them. They gain greater agency as
they age, but childhood is primarily a time of learning and doing BW quite
rigidly. Elites enjoy greater influence and sometimes achieve near perfect
“social closure” or exclusion of others (Massey, 2007), but it is critical to note
that everyone participates at least in part to promote positive associations
with ourselves and our group(s). In recent years I have researched social
hierarchies among Hispanics living in South Florida. My students and I find
that while Hispanic leaders as well as the broader non-Hispanic population
often promote the idea that Hispanics are one group, Hispanics are busy
doing BW amongst each other. The main criterion, as one research subject
put it, is “Nobody wants to be at the bottom.” What causes a group to
occupy the bottom rung?
Different social categories are ranked (the importance of gender vs class
or ethnicity) and these rankings have weights. Moreover these rankings
and weights are contextual. When immigrants arrive into a new society
the social categories they had learned as children and within which they
had come to find belonging are either not present or they are negotiated
differently in the new setting. Immigrants must learn the salient social
categories in the new context(s), both those operative within their group(s)
as well as those operative across groups. What they learn and apply as well
as how quickly this occurs are both cognitive as well as contextual issues.
Immigration scholars have overwhelmingly focused on the context side—for
example, examining the receiving society’s economy and its immigration
laws—while largely overlooking the importance of cognition. It is time for
a corrective, particularly now that enculturation is better understood. In
terms of acculturation, psychologists have been busy trying to create valid
scales at the individual level; social scientists and novelists also chronicle
immigrants’ experiences and how they feel about them. Most work among
social scientists, however, addresses more objective measures such as
educational achievement and employment. Why not bring the enormous
advances from enculturation work into conversation with all of us studying
acculturation? Here are a few ideas for how this might work.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
A first step would involve comparing enculturation processes in early
life against adaptation to new cultural contexts later in life—acculturation.
The pivot point here is the fact that once social patterns are stored in the
brain, people pay attention to the new and largely ignore the known. This
is done to preserve energy as the brain is an energy sink (Massey, 2007;
Ramachandran, 2011). Thus, once learned, social categories and patterns
largely drop from people’s conscious awareness only to be brought to the
surface when encountering people whose categories and patterns differ.
Previous theorists have characterized these surfacings as “culture shock,”
“acculturative stress,” “dual frame of reference,” and so on. Being able
to recognize difference is also central to theorizing why it makes sense to
distinguish the perspectives of 1.0 versus 1.5 and 2.0 generations as many
second-generation scholars do. In his 2007 article “Did Manufacturing Matter?” Waldinger argues that immigration researchers should pay attention
more to country of childhood than of birth. What is really needed is to understand enculturation of identifications and apply that understanding to how
people who migrate across any cultural border handle cultural differences.
Social scientists arguing against “methodological nationalism” and for a
broader paradigm on mobilities (Sheller & Urry, 2006) not just international
migration recognize that the nation-state does not hold a monopoly on
cultural differences. The approach proposed here is useful wherever we find
cultural borders.
If theorized together, enculturation and acculturation may be effectively
mapped onto the two primary yet integrated memory processes, one that
is learned, long-term, highly subconscious and resistant to change (the neocortical system or what can be termed the outcome of enculturation’s learning processes) and one that is more flexible, responsive to new stimuli and
more conscious (the hippocampal system or what might be termed processes
of acculturation) (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000). People are cultural creatures of habit for whom the known is comforting and the new produces
discomfort. Similarity and difference matter on both social and cognitive levels, but immigration scholars focus on the former level and could attend more
to the latter. Studying immigrants’ children—and not just teens and young
adults—is a good area to develop.
Immigration scholars excel in chronicling peoples in contact and how
they negotiate belonging and social standing at the social level. Yet there is
room for improvement by examining how encountering difference produces
varying responses: from conscious awareness to active interest or fascination; from desire and motivation to emulate to discomfort, dislike, and even
disgust. These can and should be researched using traditional data collection
tools as well as newer (and often more objective albeit also invasive) cognitive
tools such as fMRI. Here the work of Susan T. Fiske and collaborators (2010,
Immigrant Sociocultural Adaptation, Identification, and Belonging
9
2011) is exceptionally helpful and has been connected to immigrants and
minority studies more generally in exceedingly important ways by Massey
(2007). Fiske contends that there are just two basic criteria behind how
people socially judge each other: warmth and competence. People judged
to be both cold and incompetent are treated cognitively apart—and often
dehumanized—from those occupying the other quadrants. This approach
may explain why genocide and other atrocious acts can be perpetrated by
otherwise “normal” people. It also underscores why understanding who
is socially located at the bottom of a hierarchy is so important. That is, a
fundamental task of BW is to stay off the bottom. To achieve this requires
ensuring that one’s group stays above at least one other group. Anthropologists have long noted that even food foragers will name themselves with
terms equivalent to “the people” while naming another group the equivalent
of “nonhuman”—the despised group in Fiske’s scheme. In short, there is
strong evidence that BW is universal, tied to being a cultural species in
which enculturation minimally produces a category “us” and at least another
“them.”
Social newcomers are at risk for dropping to the lowest social status in the
new context for at least two reasons: their presence promotes natives’ awareness of differences and natives, particularly if constituting a majority group,
typically sit on top of asymmetrical power relations. Infant (nonimmigrant
newcomers) are lucky for people innately feel warm toward them even
though they are the most incompetent members of society. For immigrant
newcomers, however, competence and warmth must be negotiated. Competence is the easier axis to score highly on, particularly when immigrants’
human capital matches local needs. Warmth is a much trickier criterion
and merits most research. Surely measures of social distance due to race,
religion, and so on, will affect natives’ perceptions of newcomers’ warmth
as does condition of arrival (“illegal” vs refugee, etc.). I suggest plotting a
series of typical terms applied to immigrants using Fiske’s two-criterion
model with warmth plotted on the Y-axis and competence on the X-axis.
Use the grid to socially locate these categories: citizen, illegal, immigrant,
refugee, asylum seeker, legal resident, denizen, wetback, and so on. The
same should be done for different immigrant populations to a country (e.g.,
in the US context plotting Mexicans, Cubans, Koreans, Chinese, Asians,
Middle Easterners, Indians). Plotting different categories of immigrants helps
identify how societies view these outsiders. It also may explain why certain,
but not all, immigrants become abjected. Plotting different nationalities
and ethnicities help develop hypotheses about additional factors beyond
immigrant status that inflect groups’ social locations such as their racial or
religious distinctiveness, educational levels, occupations, and so on. Plotting
the same nationality across different historical periods (such as Chinese
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
in the US in the 1850s, 1910s, and 2000s) can also detect these factors and
how groups’ positioning shifts across history. This would open up studies
mapping the key historical events and actors whose work changes the social
locations of a group.
Finally, the utility of the categorical thinking/BW approach to understanding sociocultural belonging can be appreciated in simple daily interactions
over language and dress. As people speak their native tongue with other
native speakers they do not view this activity as erecting or reinforcing a
social boundary. Yet if natives are in the company of people who are speaking a language that they do not understand, they perceive a boundary; they
often feel excluded and uncomfortable. Immigrants speaking a language
unfamiliar to natives are perceived as exclusionary (doing BW) but not vice
versa given the asymmetries of majority-minority relations. Another classic
case of BW is head coverings; they are culturally prescribed among certain
religious groups and thus are key to both being accepted by and to feeling
belonging to one’s religious group. To not wear a covering not only invites
group BW but is likely to also generate personal discomfort. What engenders
this group’s comfort, however, often produces discomfort to those for whom
head coverings are not normative and, as in highly secular societies, where
religious symbols are deemed acceptable only if subtle (e.g., ring, necklace).
More obvious embodied symbols such as head coverings can, and often are,
interpreted not just as individual or group expressions of belonging and
identification, but as statements to the greater society about nonconformity to
its boundaries.
Given that learning to belong to groups occurs so early in life, people act “normally” and do not perceive that the ways they think and
behave send messages to others, messages of inclusion and exclusion.
Consequently, social scientists need to raise these processes to greater
public awareness much as has been done for people’s multiple “identities”
(Brubaker & Cooper, 2000). Such an approach would be more praxis than
structure-oriented; it could also aid in pinpointing the mechanisms behind
often-cited but rarely documented situational and intersectional identifications. Imagine, for example, detailing how an immigrant child engages
the majority society’s sociocultural categories flawlessly at school only to
perform a different set equally competently at home. Imagine that this
child does not make to feel culturally incompetent because he is neither a
full member of the parents’ society nor of the new society. Rather, visualize
this child being celebrated as demonstrating the very cultural flexibility all
people can and should perform in the twenty-first century. What a paradigm
shift that would be for scholar and subject alike.
Immigrant Sociocultural Adaptation, Identification, and Belonging
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CONCLUSION
Theorizing immigrant sociocultural adaptation, identification, and belonging arose in a world carving nation-states out of old empires and attaching
national cultures to those territories. Whether intentional or not, the outcome for early social scientists examining immigration was to posit adaptation processes that end in perpetuated national cultures—in assimilation.
Most scholars of migration question or eschew this trajectory, while many,
if not most natives in countries receiving immigrants still desire this outcome. Currently, it is a lose-lose and highly politicized proposition, but one
for which I see a solution by bringing enculturation into constructive analytical engagement with acculturation. Explaining that all people enculturate,
how this occurs, how it affects the brain and how this inevitably leads to
favoring one’s own people over others sets the stage for encountering others. In addition, everyone’s life is full of acculturations regardless of whether
one migrates across international borders or not. Focusing on natives’ adaptations (acculturations) to new and often discomforting circumstances (such
as moving to a new town or school) can bridge their gap in understanding
the immigrants’ experiences and vice versa. This approach humanizes adaptation and opens up compassion for people whose acculturation processes
are both more complex and undertaken at stages in life when the brain is
more resistant to change.
REFERENCES
Alba, R. (2005). Bright vs. blurred boundaries: Second-generation assimilation and
exclusion in France, Germany, and the United States. Journal of Racial and Ethnic
Studies, 28(1), 20–49.
Brubaker, R., & Cooper, F. (2000). Beyond “identity”. Theory and Society, 29(1), 1–47.
DiMaggio, P. (1997). Culture and cognition. Annual Review of Sociology, 23(1), 263–287.
Fiske, S. T. (2010). Envy up, scorn down: How comparison divides us. American Psychologist, 65(8), 698–706.
Lamont, M., & Mólnar, V. (2002). The study of boundaries in the social sciences.
Annual Review of Sociology, 28, 167–195.
Macrae, C., & Bodenhausen, G. (2000). Social cognition: Thinking categorically about
others. Annual Review of Psychology, 51, 93–120.
Mahler, S. J. (2013). Culture as comfort: Many things you already know about culture (but
might not realize). New York, NY: Pearson Education, Inc.
Massey, D. S. (2007). Categorically unequal: The American stratification system. New
York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.
Ramachandran, V. S. (2011). The tell-tale brain: A neuroscientist’s quest for what makes us
human. New York, NY: Norton.
Seung, S. (2012). Connectome: How the brain’s wiring makes us who we are. Boston, MA:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning
A, 38, 207–226.
Todorov, A. B., Fiske, S. T., & Prentice, D. A. (Eds.) (2011). Social neuroscience: Toward
understanding the underpinnings of the social mind. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Wimmer, A. (2008). The making and unmaking of ethnic boundaries: a multilevel
process theory. American Journal of Sociology, 113(4), 970–1022.
Zolberg, A., & Long, L. W. (1999). Why Islam is like Spanish: Cultural incorporation
in Europe and the United States. Politics and Society, 27(1), 5–38.
FURTHER READING
Alba, R., & Nee, V. (2003). Remaking the American mainstream: Assimilation and the new
immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wimmer, A. (2013). Ethnic boundary making: institutions, power, networks. New York:
Oxford University Press.
SARAH J. MAHLER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Sarah J. Mahler is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and former
Director of the Center for Transnational and Comparative Studies at Florida
International University in Miami. She teaches in FIU’s interdisciplinary
social science department—Global and Sociocultural Studies. For most of
her career, her research and publications have focused on Latin American
and Caribbean migration to the United States and the development of
transnational ties between migrants and their home communities. She and
colleagues pioneered bringing gender into this transnational perspective. In
recent years, she has returned to an early inquietude about enculturation,
addressing the “nature” of culture by emphasizing how young children
acquire culture and how this understanding can and should dramatically
impact how we study and also do culture. This perspective and many of its
implications appear in her newest book Culture as Comfort (2013) and on
her website: cultureascomfort.com. She has also embarked on translating
the book’s ideas into virtual and augmented reality applications—to aid
people to overcome cultural inhibitions by practicing cultural discomforts
in cyberspace.
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