Our articulation
(Which we use for our Canvas)
The lifelong process through which people learn, embody, enact, make sense of, and participate in remaking their culture’s norms, values, ways of being and deep dispositions.
It happens in many ways: through explicit teaching in families, schools and religions; through implicit socialisation as we observe and imitate others; through embodied and material enactment through habits, rituals, and built environments; and through symbolic and mediated expressions such as stories, art and media.
Over time, individuals may also engage in reflexive enculturation, critically examining or reshaping the beliefs and patterns they have inherited. (The phrase is our gloss; the idea is Herskovits’ — see below.) Enculturation is a feedback loop: a process of both shaping culture and being shaped by it in return.
Where the term comes from
The term was coined by the American anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits in Man and His Works: The Science of Cultural Anthropology (Knopf, 1948), naming the process by which an individual acquires the culture of their society. Herskovits’ original formulation already distinguished an early, largely unconscious phase from a later conscious one in which individuals can examine and innovate on what they have inherited — which is where our “reflexive enculturation” comes from. That idea is his, not ours.
A standard reference treatment is Fitz John Porter Poole, ‘Socialization, Enculturation and the Development of Personal Identity’, in Tim Ingold (ed.), Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology (Routledge, 1994), pp. 831–860.
The living form
The concept is not a mid-century relic. It anchors active research programmes in music cognition (Marcus Pearce, ‘Statistical learning and probabilistic prediction in music cognition: mechanisms of stylistic enculturation’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2018), cultural neuroscience, and language socialisation — and, most usefully for us, in 4E philosophy of mind as Enculturated Cognition: Richard Menary’s programme holding that culture doesn’t just supply mental content but transforms how we think, through learning-driven plasticity and the practices, tools and environments we are bound up with (‘The Tools of Enculturation’, Topics in Cognitive Science, 2022; ‘Mathematical Cognition: A Case of Enculturation’, Open MIND, 2015). This is the sense our Canvas leans on: the load-bearing citations are 2015–2022, not 1948.
Worth holding alongside it: Tim Ingold — editor of the very encyclopedia cited above — argues that generations grow “through a process of enskilment, not enculturation”, the intergenerational gift being “not an accumulated stock of representations but an Education of Attention” (The Perception of the Environment, 2000). We take that critique on board rather than around: it supplies the change mechanism the transmission picture lacks.
One disambiguation: in cross-cultural psychology ‘enculturation’ has a narrower technical meaning — retention of one’s heritage culture, measured against ‘acculturation’. We use the broader anthropological and cognitive sense, which is also Menary’s.
A caution we should carry
Enculturation belongs to mid-century culture-and-personality anthropology, and its strong form — bounded cultures transmitting coherent norms into individuals — is close to what the discipline turned against from the 1980s onward (James Clifford and George Marcus, Writing Culture, 1986; Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘Writing Against Culture’, 1991). We use it as a process concept with a contested history, not as settled anthropology. Its live descendants are cultural learning and cultural evolution (Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 2016) and language socialisation (Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin).
Related but distinct: acculturation, which concerns contact between cultures rather than transmission within one.