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It provides the continuation of that community and its values.

by ericd 8y ago

derefr 8y ago
No, that’s what you get when a young, productive adult joins a community and enculturates to it. It’s why universities are happy to “adopt” new human beings into their communities: they can charge you for your net-negative production years at the university (undergrad), turning them into net-zero years; and then they will begin getting net-positive returns from you (either through TAing during graduate studies; or researching for your Ph.D and then having your IP confiscated and profited off of; or just going into industry and then making large alumni donations.) Your community will only get net-negative returns when a human is raised through their teenage years in your community, and then leaves, gets enculturated by some other community, and never comes back. This usually breeds resentment—think lower-class urban youth who go on to university and enculturate to the upper-middle-class culture there. If they come back to visit their old family and friends, they will see them as “acting as if they’re too good for us.” The resentment is usually for a good reason: once you’ve enculturated away from your home culture, you don’t tend to care much about it any more! So, unlike people who retain their home culture in another community, you won’t do things like sending money home to family, or coming back to help build or lead the community, once you have acquired the resources to do so.
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  Please do not invent new meanings for words like enculturate. The right word is assimilate. Enculturation is an active process as opposed to a passive one which is not what actually happens. The migration is mostly for economic reasons, and those are because businesses prefer centralized scale at all levels, including education.
  - derefr 8y ago
    Sorry, I learned the term from this essay (https://siderea.livejournal.com/1159765.html https://siderea.livejournal.com/1159765.html) and assumed it was a correct usage. To be clear, though, while moving to a new society will cause quite gradual, passive assimilation, I wasn’t really talking about that case. In such cases, you still tend to think of your old community as “your community”, and might e.g. seek out an association of expats from your old society to hang out with, since you still share their mores. But moving to a university, or joining the military, or joining a cult, or going to prison, or marrying into money—these are communities, not societies. They actively “digest” you. In all these cases, you are given new connections who serve as both direct role-models for, and judges of, your current degree of assimilation; and, further, you are usually striving to assimilate as quickly as possible (whether you’re there voluntarily or not) because your lack of cultural awareness is one of the things keeping you back from having status and power in your new community. Would you not call what any/all of these entities do—one of the major roles they perform for their members—enculturation? If not, then it seems that I have misunderstood the term. (Tangent/side note: I didn’t make the connection of prison-as-community-that-assimilates until I was writing this. Isn’t the whole goal of reducing recidivism better expressed as “reducing the potential for prison to serve as an enculturating/assimilating force upon prisoners”?)

It provides the continuation of that community and its values.

by ericd 8y ago

It provides the continuation of that community and its values.

No, that’s what you get when a young, productive adult joins a community and enculturates to it. It’s why universities are happy to “adopt” new human beings into their communities: they can charge you for your net-negative production years at the university (undergrad), turning them into net-zero years; and then they will begin getting net-positive returns from you (either through TAing during graduate studies; or researching for your Ph.D and then having your IP confiscated and profited off of; or just going into industry and then making large alumni donations.) Your community will only get net-negative returns when a human is raised through their teenage years in your community, and then leaves, gets enculturated by some other community, and never comes back. This usually breeds resentment—think lower-class urban youth who go on to university and enculturate to the upper-middle-class culture there. If they come back to visit their old family and friends, they will see them as “acting as if they’re too good for us.” The resentment is usually for a good reason: once you’ve enculturated away from your home culture, you don’t tend to care much about it any more! So, unlike people who retain their home culture in another community, you won’t do things like sending money home to family, or coming back to help build or lead the community, once you have acquired the resources to do so.

AstralStorm 8y ago
Please do not invent new meanings for words like enculturate. The right word is assimilate. Enculturation is an active process as opposed to a passive one which is not what actually happens. The migration is mostly for economic reasons, and those are because businesses prefer centralized scale at all levels, including education.
- derefr 8y ago
  Sorry, I learned the term from this essay (https://siderea.livejournal.com/1159765.html https://siderea.livejournal.com/1159765.html) and assumed it was a correct usage. To be clear, though, while moving to a new society will cause quite gradual, passive assimilation, I wasn’t really talking about that case. In such cases, you still tend to think of your old community as “your community”, and might e.g. seek out an association of expats from your old society to hang out with, since you still share their mores. But moving to a university, or joining the military, or joining a cult, or going to prison, or marrying into money—these are communities, not societies. They actively “digest” you. In all these cases, you are given new connections who serve as both direct role-models for, and judges of, your current degree of assimilation; and, further, you are usually striving to assimilate as quickly as possible (whether you’re there voluntarily or not) because your lack of cultural awareness is one of the things keeping you back from having status and power in your new community. Would you not call what any/all of these entities do—one of the major roles they perform for their members—enculturation? If not, then it seems that I have misunderstood the term. (Tangent/side note: I didn’t make the connection of prison-as-community-that-assimilates until I was writing this. Isn’t the whole goal of reducing recidivism better expressed as “reducing the potential for prison to serve as an enculturating/assimilating force upon prisoners”?)