Cognitive and Social Factors in Psychological Adaptation to Acculturation Among the James Bay Cree

Abstract

How an individual adapts to culture change is a topic of increasing importance in the contemporary world. The process of urbanisation, the export of technology, the wide availability of telemedia, and the ubiquity of formal educational programmes all mean that most individuals will not live out their lives in the same cultural circumstances as those in which they were initially raised. Given that most of these influences come from outside one’s culture, we can identify the process as one of acculturation, and the problem as one of potential conflict between the changes of acculturation and the continuity of enculturation. In this statement we assume that individuals who have been raised on one culture will have developed a set of behaviours which is consistent with the cultural norms of that society (see Triandis et al., 1980, for evidence of such cultural-behavioural relationships); we further assume that breaking these relationships, by introducing new cultural norms to people with an established set of behaviour, will produce some degree of difficulty, and require some psychological adaptation.