Socialization, Enculturation and the Development of Personal Identity

The processes of socialization and enculturation, though interconnected, are analytically distinguishable in emphasis (cf. Herskovits 1948: 38, Mead 1963, Schwartz 1976). Mead (1963: 185) suggests that socialization has to do with 'the set of species-wide requirements and exactions made on human beings by human societies', whereas enculturation refers to 'the process of learning a culture in all its uniqueness and particularity'. From the perspective of thisarticle, however, my focus is on how, when, where, why, with whom, under what circumstances, and with what individual significance and psychological force, personal configurations of learning of the social and of the cultural occur, and on how social and cultural forms and forces are intertwined in the process of such learning. Thus, the distinction between socialization and enculturation is predicated, in part, upon a further analytic distinction, between society as consisting in pragmatically constituted, negotiated, coordinated, and replicated patterns of interaction, and culture as consisting in socially distributed and more or less shared knowledge (including knowledge of social interaction) manifested in those perceptions, understandings, feelings, evaluations, intentions, and other orientations that inform and shape the imagination and pragmatics of social life from the imperfectly shared perspectives of social actors. Somewhat controversially, this perspective instals the individual as the focal locus of culture and as the significant agent in social interaction, and thus calls for a 'person-centred enthnography' (LeVine 1982).