Anthropology Terms

Gabriel Avritscher

Mr. Roddy

IHSS

8 September 2019

Anthropology Terms

Enculturation- Enculturation is how a person beings to understand, learn, and then integrate into a certain culture or society. It's how a person slowly learn the ins and outs and the do and do nots. People can come into contact with this process at multiple times throughout their lives, from the beginning of their lives as they look at the world around them from their crib to being a foreigner immigrating to a new land, looking a the world around them now through the window of an airplane. Those are two contrasting examples, however. That's because when you're still a baby or a young child, the world directly around you is the only world you know. The only culture. You haven't had the time to learn or even go to different parts of the World as to where you actually understand or get fascinated by their culture. At that age, you may take notice of the food and of the clothes the locals are wearing, but it ends there. The only beliefs and values you learn at that point in your life are instilled by the people around you, not the rest of the World. However, if you're immigrating to a new land, you already have a World. You already have a culture. It's now your duty to learn and conform to a brand new culture if you wish to succeed at that new place. This can be a different continent, country, or even city. One thing I've learned from Texas is that the town or city you're in can be very different from the town or city just a few miles away. Just today, I had a soccer game at a place just 20 minutes away from my house, and it felt like an entirely different region. As to immigrating to a new land, you can also immigrate with a large group of people from your own culture and immigrate not yourself but your culture to a new land, but that's a different story. 



Ethnocentrism- Ethnocentrism is when it's a societal and cultural norm and expectation to have the utmost inner belief that your culture is in all ways better than any other culture. You shrug off other cultures as being weird and strange, leading you to believe that due to that, they are inferior. Although I personally don't see this as a terrible thing, as you shouldn't be forced to understand other cultures if you don't have the interest to, it leads to a certain ignorance of international culture as well as leading you to in some ways shut yourself off completely from all people that have different cultures, which doesn't help anyone. To expand on what I mean by ignorance is that by shrugging off and dismissing other cultures as inferior, you inadvertently (or not) immediately stereotype them by assuming that they have to be weird and strange because they have a singular, specific custom that you may have trouble understanding. When I said above that this generally isn't a terrible thing, well, it certainly can be, as although most of the time it's just ignorance, it can lead to violence in extreme case. I think the most obvious case is in World War 2, when the Nazis believed that not only their culture, but their race as well as their religion (the latter of which is very much interconnected with culture) were superior to that of all other humans. They went so far as to slaughter millions of people over their unfounded belief. But again, the majority of the time, ethnocentrism will not go that far. 

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