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Book No. – 17 (Sociology)
Book Name – Sociology (Yogesh Atal)
What’s Inside the Chapter? (After Subscription)
1. SOCIETY AND ENVIRONMENT
1.1. HEREDITY AND MAN-MADE ENVIRONMENT
1.2. HEREDITY AND PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT
2. SOCIALIZATION
2.1. STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT
2.2. AGENTS AND CONTENT OF SOCIALIZATION
3. FINAL WORD
4. A NOTE ON POLITICAL SOCIALIZATION
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LANGUAGE
Socialization and Enculturation
Chapter – 12
Table of Contents
- The major source of recruitment in a society is via birth, with children born out of wedlock being natural members of the society of their parents.
- A newborn is a biological brute, possessing the same basic attributes as all members of the species Homo sapiens, which distinguish it from other infra-human species.
- Differences in behavior and way of living occur as the infant grows, but these are learnt and acquired from social surroundings, not biologically inherited.
- People from the same race may represent different cultures. For example, a child born in China but reared in an African country will speak the language of that country and adopt its lifestyle.
- Similarly, a child of African parentage raised in China will become Chinese in behavior, despite retaining racial features.
- The process of growing up and becoming a social being is studied by psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists, and is called socialization and enculturation.
- What distinguishes humans from other animals is a relatively small amount of instinctive behavior and a large capacity to learn, unlearn, and relearn.
- Learning is a life-long process for humans, and they also exhibit forgetfulness. Through learning, a child transforms from a biological brute to a social animal, and from being merely social to a culture-bearing person.
- A human being is social, bearing the stamp of the culture in which they are reared, while also maintaining individuality. No other animal possesses all three attributes.
- Society and culture play crucial roles in the development of an individual personality.
- The analysis of socialization in social science literature is relatively recent. Sociologists use socialization, while anthropologists use enculturation, though the terms are often intertwined.
- For a child, it is important to first become social and then be inducted into culture. When a person moves to a new culture, they undergo a process of enculturation to learn the norms of the new host culture, which adds to their cultural capital.
- The original cultural orientation may become subdued as the individual adopts the norms of the new culture.
- In MacIver and Page’s book on Society (1950), the term socialization is not mentioned, but society and environmentare discussed in multiple chapters.
- In Ogburn and Nimkoff’s sociology book (1940), socialization is briefly mentioned in the context of social deviation, which they define as the failure in socialization.
- Socialization is described as the process by which an individual learns to conform to the norms of the group and involves the assimilation of newcomers, whether they are newborns or immigrants.
- A survey of sociological literature reveals that the term socialization first appeared in writings in the 1930s and 1940s, with interest growing in sociology, social anthropology, and psychology.
- Robert Park and John Dollard wrote about socialization in 1939, and in the same year, A. Kardiner (psychologist) and Ralph Linton (anthropologist) published The Individual and His Society.
- Gardner Murphy’s Experimental Psychology (preceding these works) discussed the socialization of the individual.