1. IGCSE Global Perspectives
Tradition, enculturation, socialization, cultural policy, acculturation
IGCSE Global Perspectives

2. Tradition
A tradition is a practice, custom, or story that is memorized and passed down from generation to generation, originally without the need for a writing system.
Tools to aid this process include poetic devices such as rhyme and alliteration.
The stories thus preserved are also referred to as tradition, or as part of an oral tradition.

3. Enculturation
Enculturation is the process by which a person learns the requirements of the culture by which he or she is surrounded, and acquires values and behaviours that are appropriate or necessary in that culture.
If successful, enculturation results in competence in the language, values and rituals of the culture.

4. Socialization
The process whereby people learn the attitudes, values, and actions appropriate for individuals as members of a particular culture.
It may provide the individual with the skills and habits necessary for participating within their own society; a society itself is formed through a plurality of shared norms, customs, values, traditions, social roles, symbols and languages.
Socialization is thus ‘the means by which social and cultural continuity are attained’.

5. Types of socialization
Primary socialization
Secondary socialization
Developmental socialization
Anticipatory socialization
Resocialization

6. Agents of Socialization
Agents of socialization are the people and groups that influence our self-concept, emotions, attitudes, and behavior.
The Family
Education
Religion
Peer groups
The Mass Media
Other Agents: Work Place, Public institutions

7. Cultural Policy
Cultural policy is concerned with the regulation and management of culture and in particular with the administration of those institutions that produce and govern the form and content of cultural products.
However, questions of policy formation and enactment are connected to wider issues of cultural politics.
That is, cultural policy is not only a technical problem of administration, but also one of cultural values and social power set in the overall context of the production and circulation of symbolic meanings.

8. Acculturation
The term ‘acculturation’ indicates the processes of transformation and adaptation which take place within cultures when two or more groups - each of which has specific cultural and behavioural models - enter into relations with one another.
The phenomenon of acculturation refers to both the acquisition of a new culture - ‘other’ than the culture of origin - by an individual, e.g. a migrant, and, more generally, to the acquisition by a social group of the cultural traits of another society.
Thus, the term refers not only to the ‘process of cultural change’, but also to the resulting condition.

9. ‘Reciprocal acculturation’ refers to processes of bi-directional cultural transfer. ‘Reciprocal acculturation’ can be considered ‘transformation through a network’ as it takes place in a complex scenario of reciprocity in which a culture can only export its cultural models on a continuous basis if it is also open to return stimuli which modify its models.
‘Asymmetric acculturation’ refers to a particular intercultural relationship established between a ‘superior’ and an ‘inferior’ culture when the latter has no choice but to accept the traits of the dominant culture.