Formal research on acculturation originated within the Anglo-Saxon tradition of anthropology, and was further developed within sociology. In fact, Powell in 1883 was the first person to have used the term acculturation. For him, acculturation was concerned to psychological changes induced by cross-cultural imitation. On the other hand, Simons, in 1901 and from the sociological point of view, regarded acculturation as a two-way process of reciprocal accommodation. The classical concept of acculturation was also developed within the same anthropological tradition and refers to the processes of cultural contact, through which societies, or social groups, receive and assimilate elements from other cultures. This definition was coined by Robert Redfield, Ralph Linton and Melville Herskovits in 1936: “Acculturation comprehends those phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact, with subsequent changes in the original cultural patterns of either or both groups” (Redfield et al., 1936, p. 149). In 1967, Graves proposed the term psychological acculturation, which refers to the changes an individual experiences as a result of being in contact with other cultures, or participating in the acculturation that one’s cultural or ethnic group is undergoing. Unlike Redfield et al.‘s definition, proposed as a group-level phenomenon, psychological research recognized acculturation as an individual-level phenomenon. Another example of what is meant by acculturation is given by Marcel Danesi (2000):
A process by which continuous contact between two or more distinct societies causes cultural change” […] “It unfolds in one or two ways: 1. The beliefs, conventions, customs and codes of the societies in contact may merge, producing a single culture; 2. One society may completely absorb the cultural patterns of another, transforming them radically. (p. 4)
A more actual definition was provided in 2004 by the International Organization for Migration (IOM): “Acculturation is the progressive adoption of elements of a foreign culture (ideas, words, values, norms, behavior, institutions) by persons, groups or classes of a given culture” (IOM, 2007, 23). For the purposes of this paper I will use the understanding of acculturation provided by John W. Berry within the interdisciplinary field of cross-cultural psychology where acculturation is seen as “the process of cultural and psychological change that results following meeting between cultures” (Berry, 2006; Berry & Sam, 2010). From this point of view, groups and individuals experience different degrees of acculturation, and their conceptualization, identification and definition are completely distinct in spite of having the same cultural background and having lived in the same environment.
Explosive migration
Immigrants abandon their native semiosphere (Lotman, 1996) — The space of possibility for all semiotic codes; without a plurality of codes, there can be no new information and no language with which to communicate, due to several motifs, ranging from concrete socio-economical reasons up to aspirations for having intercultural exchanges with other societies, for instance: a) the simplest desire to improve their living conditions; b) the urge to obtain a residence permit, get a job in order to earn money and send it back to their relatives in their home country; c) political factors; d) the absence of opportunities for human development: the lack of jobs, the low incomes people perceive, the poor quality of education centers and so on; d) the ambition to pursue a dream and fulfill it in other culture. All these motifs are translated into the immanent need of searching for self-definition and identity-construction. However, they are also merged with the natural trend of cultures to open up opportunities for semiotic-crossing boundaries and the generation of new meanings. Whichever the reason people have to leave their home culture, migration portrays personal quests for meaning and belonging.
I recall the notion of cultural hero (Lotman, 2001), to re-establishing an analogy with the individuals who overlap their own cultural codes with the other codes that belong to the host culture. In spite of the romanticism that this notion might imply, I agree with both Lotman and Portis-Winner (2002) when I also consider immigrants as a type of cultural heroes who dare to go outside of their native cultures, crossing boundaries with a view to establish themselves in alien cultures, full of new texts, languages and sign systems that must master to survive. In such a way, I would like to stress one of the most powerful reasons that people have for leaving their home culture. They migrate pursuing an idea that most of the time is not real, going to other countries in order to fulfill their dreams. In other words, people leave behind their culture due to the urgent need to make their lives meaningful by means of satisfying certain material, or symbolic, expectations. Dream is considered by Lotman as “the father of semiotic process” (Lotman, 2009, p. 145) due to its capacity to host uncertainty and provoke subsequent changes. The dreams are personal and they can neither be penetrated by other people, nor interfere in someone else’s dream, therefore they are seen as a personal language (Lotman, 2009). Every immigrant has his/her own reasons to depart, to get out of the home culture. It’s a process that hosts semiotic expectations and prepares people for cultural shock, for the uncertainty of entering another culture, discover it and discover themselves.