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Acculturation explains the process of cultural change and psychological change that results following meeting between cultures.〔 〕 The effects of acculturation can be seen at multiple levels in both interacting cultures. At the group level, acculturation often results in changes to culture, customs, and social institutions. Noticeable group level effects of acculturation often include changes in food, clothing, and language. At the individual level, differences in the way individuals acculturate have been shown to be associated not just with changes in daily behavior, but with numerous measures of psychological and physical well-being. As enculturation is used to describe the process of first-culture learning, acculturation can be thought of as second-culture learning. The concept of acculturation has been studied scientifically since 1918.〔 〕 As it has been approached at different times from the fields of psychology, anthropology, and sociology, numerous theories and definitions have emerged to describe elements of the acculturative process. Despite definitions and evidence that acculturation entails a two-way process of change, research and theory have primarily focused on the adjustments and adaptations made by minorities such as immigrants, refugees, and indigenous peoples in response to their contact with the dominant majority. Contemporary research has primarily focused on different strategies of acculturation and how variations in acculturation affect how well individuals adapt to their society. ==Historical approaches== The earliest recorded thoughts towards acculturation can be found in Sumerian inscriptions from 2370 B.C. These inscriptions laid out rules for commerce and interaction with foreigners designed to limit acculturation and protect traditional cultural practices. Plato also said that acculturation should be avoided, as he thought it would lead to social disorder. Accordingly, he proposed that no one should travel abroad until they are at least 40 years of age, and that travellers should be restricted to the ports of cities to minimize contact with native citizens.〔 Nevertheless, the history of Western civilization, and in particular the histories of Europe and the United States, are largely defined by patterns of acculturation. J.W. Powell is credited with coining the word "acculturation" in 1880, defining it as "the psychological changes induced by cross-cultural imitation". The first psychological theory of acculturation was proposed in W.I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki's 1918 study, "The Polish Peasant in Europe and America". From studying Polish immigrants in Chicago, they illustrated three forms of acculturation corresponding to three personality types: Bohemian (adopting the host culture and abandoning their culture of origin), Philistine (failing to adopt the host culture but preserving their culture of origin), and creative-type (able to adapt to the host culture while preserving their culture of origin). In 1936, Redfield, Linton, and Herskovits provided the first widely used definition of acculturation as: Before efforts at racial and cultural integration in the United States, the main thrust was assimilation. Borrowing extensively from Gordon and Park's work, especially Milton Gordon's 1954 book ''Assimilation in American Life'' where he outlines seven stages in the assimilative process, Young Yun Kim presents a reiteration of the 1950s era notion in her theory of cross-cultural adaptation as a multi-staged process. The theory focuses on the unitary nature of psychological and social processes and the reciprocal functional personal environment interdependence.〔Kim, Young Yun (2005). Adapting to a New Culture. In Gudykunst, W (Ed.), Theorizing about intercultural communication. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications.〕 This view takes into account micro-psychological and macro-social factors into a theoretical fusion "vertical integration" of theory. While cross-cultural adaptation theory itself is a fusion of previous ideas, it is not about racial or ethnic integration but instead assimilation. And as such it is unlike the works of Bateson, Ruesch and Bateson, Watzlawick Beavin, and Jackson, and Buss and Kenrick.〔 Kim's approach is unilinear. The sojourner must conform to the majority group culture in order to be "communicatively competent." Gudykunst and Kim (2003) 〔Gudykunst, W. & Kim, Y. Y.). Communicating with strangers: An approach to intercultural communication, 4th ed. New York: McGraw Hill.〕 equate integration, adaptation and assimilation writing, "cross-cultural adaptation process involves a continuous interplay of deculturation and acculturation that brings about change in strangers in the direction of assimilation, the highest degree of adaptation theoretically conceivable" (p. 360). In biological science adaptation means the random mutation of new forms of life, not convergence on a single form or monoculture (Kramer, 2003). The term adaptation is used by Gudykunst and Kim to mean simple conformity to the coercive power (pp. 360, 371) of what they call a single form of "mainstream culture" with its "objective" "external" reality (p. 378) -- "what is real, what is true, what is right, what is beautiful, and what is good" (p. 376). As they define reality, the newcomer's perspective is false, a delusion or "self-deception" (p. 380) and any attempt to maintain one's original false values, beliefs, ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving constitute the mental illness of "maladaptation" (p. 372). According to Gudykunst and Kim (2003) the way of "upward-forward" evolution toward functional fitness and psychological health is for the newcomer to willfully "unlearn" and "deculturize" (p. 380) herself. They propose psychotherapy as well as the abandonment of all ethnic relations and associations with ethnic ties as well as avoidance of "ethnic media" use (pp. 365–368) to help immigrants (p. 382) achieve "integrative" conformity. This is not ecological integration but simple disintegration of the newcomer until their identity is erased. According to Gudykunst and Kim (2003) the more the newcomer is disintegrated the better, even if it leads to extreme distress for the immigrant. As Gudykunst and Kim (2003) put it, "Even extreme mental illness (by "conformity pressure" p. 371 ) can be viewed as a process of a potentially positive disintegration that will be reintegrated with new material at a higher level" (p. 381). No matter how unjust or cruel, Gudykunst and Kim (2003) argue that the host way of thinking, feeling, and behaving constitutes the "higher level" of psychic evolution and any resistance to pressure to conform, to disintegration on the part of a minority person indicates that the immigrant is communicatively incompetent, immature (p. 381), mentally ill (pp. 365, 372-373, 376), weak (p. 369), irrationally aggressive or hostile (pp. 371, 376), lacking in self-control (p. 369), cynical (p. 380), pessimistic (p. 369), closed-minded (p. 369), simple minded (pp. 382–383) and "ethnocentric" (pp. 376, 382). Evolutionary progress for the individual requires the individual to "abandon identification with the cultural patterns that have constituted who one is and what one is" (p. 377). These patterns are not just behavioral but "appropriate" ways of thinking as defined by the majority mainstream reality. In contradistinction from Gudykunst and Kim's version of adaptive evolution, Eric M. Kramer, in his theory of Cultural Fusion (2011,〔Kramer, E. M. (2011). Preface. In Croucher, S. M. & Cronn-Mills, D., ''(Religious misperceptions: The case of Muslims and Christians in France and Britain )''. (pp. v-xxxi). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.〕 2010,〔 2000a,〔 1997a,〔Kramer, E. M. (2010). Immigration. In R. L. Jackson, II (Ed.), ''(Encyclopedia of identity )''. (pp. 384-389). Thousand Oaks: Sage.〕〔Kramer, E. M. (1997). ''(Modern/Postmodern: Off the Beaten Path of Antimodernism )''. Westport, CT: Praeger.〕 2000a,〔Kramer, E. M. (2000). Cultural fusion and the defense of difference. In M. K. Asante & J. E. Min (Eds.), ''(Socio-cultural Conflict between African and Korean Americans )'' (pp. 182-223). New York: University Press of America.〕〔Kramer, E. M. (Contributing Editor). (2003). ''(The Emerging Monoculture: Assimilation and the "Model Minority" )''. Westport, CT: Praeger.〕 2011,〔Kramer, E. M. (2011). Preface. In Croucher, S. M. & Cronn-Mills, D., ''(Religious Misperceptions: The case of Muslims and Christians in France and Britain )'' (pp. vii-xxxii). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.〕 2012〔Kramer, E. M. (in press). Dimensional accrual and dissociation: An introduction. I In J. Grace (Ed.), ''Comparative Cultures and Civilizations (Vol. 3)''. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton.〕) maintains clear conceptual separation between assimilation, adaptation, and integration. Only assimilation involves conformity to a pre-existing form. Kramer's (2000a, 2000b, 2000c, 2003, 2009, 2011) theory of Cultural Fusion, which is based on systems theory and hermeneutics, argues that first it is impossible for a person to unlearn themselves and second that "growth" is, by definition, not a zero sum process that requires the disillusion of one form for another to come into being but rather a process of learning new languages and cultural repertoires (ways of thinking, cooking, playing, working worshiping, and so forth). One need not unlearn a language in order to learn a new one. Nor does one have to unlearn who one is in order to learn new ways of dancing, cooking, talking and so forth. Cognitive complexity involves the ability to code switch between repertoires, not a zero growth, zero-sum process as Gudykunst and Kim claim (2003, p, 383). Learning is growth, not unlearning. *Adaptation as a communication-based phenomenon Scholars in different disciplines have developed more than 100 different theories of acculturation.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「acculturation」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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