Introduction

The major source of recruitment of members in a society is via birth. Children born out of wedlock are ‘natural’ members of the society of their parents. The newborn, however, is a biological brute. No matter in what society it is born, it possesses the same attributes that are characteristic of the species called Homo Sapiens. These characteristics distinguish the newborn from other infra-human species, notwithstanding further distinctions based on racial features. Children of White, Yellow or Black races—technically called Cuacasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid, respectively—possess the same biological make-up that is not to be found among other animals. Yet, as the infant grows, differences begin to occur in its behaviour and way of living. These are not biologically inherited, but learnt and acquired from the social surroundings. People belonging to the same race, for example, may represent different cultures. A child born in China, or of Chinese parentage, but reared in an African country will speak the language of that country and lead the lifestyle of the society where it lives. Similarly, a child of African parentage reared in China will become Chinese, his racial features remaining unchanged. This process of growing up has been the subject matter of study for psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists. And it is variously called socialization and enculturation. Of course, specialists in these disciplines have focused on different aspects of this complicated process that transforms the biological human into a social being.

What distinguishes the human animal from other animals is the relatively small amount of instinctive behaviour, and a comparatively huge capacity to learn, unlearn, and relearn or learn anew. In fact, learning is a life-long activity with humans; so is the characteristic of forgetfulness. Through learning, mostly imitative, a child transforms itself from a biological brute to a ‘social animal’, and from beingjust ‘social’ to a ‘culture-bearing’ person. A human being is thus a person who is social, bearing a stamp of the culture in which he/she is reared, and yet maintains his/her individuality. No other animal possesses all three attributes. To develop the individual personality, society and culture play important roles.

The analysis of the process of socialization in social science literature is relatively recent. As said earlier, sociologists talked of socialization and anthropologists of enculturation. In common usage, however, is the term socialization which, by implication, also encompasses enculturation. In effect, one can see that for a child, it is important to first become ‘social’ and then be inducted into one’s ‘culture’. When a person moves from one culture to another, he enters yet another process of enculturation—learning the norms and mores of the new host culture; this adds to the person’s cultural capital, and may make his original cultural orientation (to the parent culture) somewhat subdued.

It is interesting that MacIver and Page, in their celebrated on Society (which first appeared in 1950), make no mention of the term socialization. It does not figure in the index. It has, however, three devoted in Part Two of One to ‘Society and Environment’. Sociology by Ogburn and Nimkoff (first published in 1940), a reference to socialization occurs briefly in the on social deviation, where social deviation is regarded as the ‘failure in socialization’.¹ They provide a brief definition of socialization as the ‘process by which the individual learns to conform to the norms of the group’² and as a ‘process of assimilation of newcomers. Some of the newcomers are immigrants from other societies or subcultures of the same society, but generally most of the newcomers are new-born babies’ (1958: 301). The authors have not dwelt on the process itself, but have focused on the consequences of the process, particularly that of enculturation, to attribute deviation to poor upbringing.

A survey of sociological literature suggests that while concern has been shown about the problems related to socialization in even the writings of Durkheim and Sigmund Freud, the term first figured in the writings of social scientists as late as the 1930s and early 1940s. Interest in this process simultaneously emerged in sociology, social anthropology and psychology. Robert Park and John Dollard wrote on this theme in the American Journal of Sociology in 1939. That same year, A. Kardiner (psychologist) and Ralph Linton (anthropologist) came out with a titled The Individual and His Society. Preceding these publications was Gardner Murphy’s Experimental Psychology, which carried the subtitle An Interpretation of Research on the Socialization of the Individual.