Learning to Romance: Cultural Acquisition in College

This article addresses the topic of cultural acquisition in terms of the question: What is the process by which individuals “take meaning” (Heath) from culture and make it a part of who they are? Relying on the work of Dreyfus, Holland, and materials from an ethnographic and interview study of a small group of college women, cultural acquisition is described as stages of increasing individual expertise and identification with a given cultural system—stages in which access to the more advanced levels is limited by an individual's social relationships, a process with both positive and negative implications for individuals, and with a developmental trajectory that can be discontinuous. The social parameters of the cultural acquisition process are stressed.