Contents of Socialization

It will be useful to list the contents of socialization.

1. Language: This is the most important means of communication, learnt through the process of socialization. We have mentioned earlier that a child living in total isolation is incapable of articulating his speech in a meaningful manner. A human has an enormous potential to produce various sounds, but any given individual is able to actualize only a small amount of this vast potential. He gets exposed to the language of the group in which he is born. Through constant listening and repetition of set phrases and sentences, he acquires the skill in reproducing them first without understanding them, but later associates meaning with them and unconsciously picks up the pattern we call grammar. There is no society—preliterate or literate—that does not have its own language; it does not require linguists and grammarians to teach it to the young. The mother, and later older siblings, become teachers of language to the child. Reading and writing are skills that develop later, but effective participation in the social sphere requires competence in communicating in the common language. Communication involves both sending and receiving messages and their right interpretation.
2. Locomotion: From its elders, the child picks up mannerisms such as walking, sitting, standing, etc. There are studies that tell us that while swimming is a common exercise, people belonging to different cultures master this art differently, in terms of controlling the breath, use of the hands and legs while swimming, and even making some sounds. People living near the sea or the river master the art of swimming as part of their socialization.
3. Behaviour patterns. These are part of the learning process. Forms of salutation and greeting, manner of speaking, expressions of emotion—smiling, crying, show of grief, etc.—are all culturally conditioned.
4. Dressing pattern: Clothes are not only meant to cover the body and protect it from the elements, but also to announce one’s status vis-à-vis others. Some clothes may be unisex, but hairstyles, certain other clothes, special marks on the forehead or chin are all status diacriticals.
5. Knowledge about society, religion, economy and polity. This is that aspect of the process of socialization that anthropologists call enculturation. Ofcourse, it also includes some of the items mentioned above, particularly the many things taught via mathematical sums, or history or civics.

This is a broad list indicating that socialization serves the purpose of making the child a useful and active member of society. Through this process, he is oriented towards the society and feels a part of it. Those deviating from the norms of culture become marginal. They are variously called criminals, people of the underworld, or renegades (when they begin orienting themselves to a different society, begin adopting the lifestyle of that society and plan to move out). That is the reason why earlier studies of social disorganization attributed all deviant behaviour to the poverty of socialization and to weaker mechanisms of social control. Such an approach was also condemned by some as ‘status-quoist’ and ‘anti-change’.

FINAL WORD

What the process of socialization basically does is transform the human individual from a mere instinct-bearing biological being to a person who has internalized the norms and behaviour learnt socially, in the company of others. Freud called it a process of transformation from an ‘id’ into an ‘ego’. But the ego is not just ‘I’. A socialized person distinguishes between ‘I’ (the subjective part of the self—the actor) and ‘me’ (the objective form of the personal pronoun). He not only knows who ‘he’ is, but also tends to know what others expect from him. When he asserts himself, it is his ‘I’, but when he acts while giving due regard to the question ‘what is expected of “me”’, his action is in relation to others. Charles H. Cooley has called this the ‘looking-glass self’ (Cooley, 1902). Socialization creates a mirror—a looking glass—in which the person sees his own image as seen by others; the ‘others’ serve as the mirror. Every time a person acts, he considers what the other party will think, how they will react. It is this estimate of others’ response that helps him to modify his behaviour suitably. A wrong anticipation can damage the interaction, or bring in unanticipated consequences. Similarly, a wrong estimation of the likely response to the other party can create a crisis in relationships.

Let us explain the concepts of Id, Ego and Superego as proposed by Freud.

The Id (it is a Latin word for ‘it’) is the unorganized and inaccessible part of the personality structure. Described as ‘a cauldron full of seething excitations’, its energy is derived from its instincts. It strives to satisfy instinctual needs for personal pleasure. The id is biologically inherited, and is part of the somatic organization. The newborn child is regarded as completely ‘id-ridden’. His mind is a mass of instinctive drives and impulses and craves the immediate satisfaction of bodily needs for food, water, sex, and other basic impulses. It is amoral and without a sense of time. It is completely illogical, primarily sexual and infantile, and does not take ‘no’ for an answer. It is regarded as the reservoir of the libido or the ‘instinctive drive to create’. The id-ridden child is ‘ego-centric’—in the sense that he thinks he is at the centre of the universe and others exist for him.

With constant interactions with other members and the cultural milieu, the id is brought into control. The internalized part of the cultural milieu constitutes a person’s superego. Sandwiched between the twin pressures of the superego and the id, the child develops his ego. The closer he is to the id, he remains an ‘idiot’, and the farther he moves from it towards the superego, he becomes a well-adjusted ego. The Ego thus comprises that ‘organized part of the personality structure that includes defensive, perceptual, intellectual-cognitive, and executive functions’. The ego is that part of the id that has been modified by the direct influence of the external world (based on Freud, 1923); by this, we primarily mean culture. In the personality structure of an individual, the superego is almost the opposite of the id and works for the suppression of the id, like a charioteer holding the reins of a horse to keep the beast under control and guide its movements in accordance with the norms of the road. The compromise that results from the competing demands of the self and society is called sublimation. ‘The Super-ego controls our sense of right and wrong and guilt. It helps us fit into society by getting us to act in socially acceptable ways.’

To recapitulate, socialization is a process through which the individual learns to perform social roles and acquire the values and norms of a society’s culture. That is how individual behavioural dispositions are integrated with the needs of the social structure. The child inherits the knowledge pool of society and is made to conform to the societal norms of behaviour. However, all learning is not necessarily socialization, and socialization does not include all learning. In a way socialization is indoctrination, where the learner is mainly the recipient.

A NOTE ON POLITICAL SOCIALIZATION

In the area of sociology, very little research on socialization has been carried out, particularly in societies ofthe South. Ofcourse, some cultural anthropologists have devoted their time and attention to this aspect of social life. Most ethnographies devote a chapter or two to the rites de passage (rites during the journey of life), in which they talk of the rituals associated with the major crises of life, namely birth, initiation, marriage and death. Margaret Mead did a ground breaking work on socialization by producing a monograph titled Coming of Age in Samoa. Although some of its findings have later been challenged, it still remains a major landmark. In this regard, I wish to briefly allude to the controversy surrounding Margaret Mead’s work.⁷ Boas found in her work a strong argument against the ‘apostles of Eugenics’ who floated the ‘nurture versus nature’ controversy. Boas was of the view that ‘the social stimulus is infinitely more potent than the biological mechanism’. He regarded the eugenics movement as a ‘pseudo scientific cult’, and said that ‘racial interpretation of history [is] irremediably dangerous’. To quote Freeman: ‘The extreme doctrines of the hereditarians, Boas pointed out, had set anthropologists and biologists at odds, and so much so that a “parting of ways” had been reached’ (1984: 5). Boas’ students—Kroeber and Lowie—worked hard to propound a doctrine of absolute cultural determinism that excluded biological variables. Mead’s work was refuted by Freeman on the ground that in her enthusiasm to side with cultural determinism, she somehow ignored the role of genetic factors, and thus misguided her audience by a faulty portrayal of the cultural reality of the Samoans. In the US, Freeman’s became a ‘seismic event’ as it raised some key ethical issues pertaining to the writings of the world’s most respected and highly acclaimed anthropologist.

 

 

The author with Margaret Mead in 1975

 

There is another work by Hamed Ammar, Growing up in an Egyptian Village (1954), which is an ethnographic account of the process of socialization. In the same tradition is the by David Landy on Tropical Childhood (1965).

Political socialization are, however, rare. The credit must go to Herbert Hyman, who produced a collection of essays in 1959 on Political Socialization, which encouraged scholars to pay attention to this aspect of socialization.

In this context, it is important to mention that political socialization plays a very significant role in political systems that are democratic, but not so in others. Broadly, political cultures are classified into three categories, Parochial, Subject and Participant political cultures, which correspond with traditional, authoritative and democratic political systems. In traditional systems, the sphere of the ‘political’ is not separated from other spheres—in some tribal societies, the political system as such is not noticeable (that is why they are called acephalic), and even in somewhat advanced societies of yore, the church and the state were inseparable. In such systems, there exists no need for any distinct political socialization. In authoritarian political systems, the people are the subjects ruled by the despot, and the subjects have no say in the affairs of the state. Regimes in such societies want to keep their subjects apolitical. It is the democratic systems that are participative in nature, and citizens are expected to be au courant with the goings-on in the polity and actively participate in the running of the state; they elect people to govern, they influence policy-making, and they agitate and protest against the governing elite. A well-informed citizenry is regarded as a prerequisite for the effective functioning of the democracy. No wonder such studies of political socialization had their origin in the United States, which prides itself as being a democratic polity. Students researching these areas tried to analyse how much ‘political content’ there was in the general process of socialization, and how politically relevant socialization was being conducted by different agents of socialization.

Most existing studies on political socialization have not focused on the process of political socialization; they analysed its content, and tried to measure the degree of political awareness and commitment amongst the common citizenry—both adults and citizens-in-the-making. Thus, there have been studies of mass media, election campaigns and party manifestos, and content analyses of school textbooks to cull out elements of political socialization.

In India, some of the studies carried out on the youth included some aspects of their political knowledge and involvement. Election studies done in the 1970s drew voter profiles in terms of their awareness of political issues, parties and political leaders; some even worked out political opinion profiles and tried to correlate them with their political participation. An India-specific Index of the Sense of Political Efficacy (SPE index) was developed by Yogesh Atal and used in his study titled Local Communities and National Politics (1971).

Surendra K. Gupta came out with a full-length monograph based on his study of school children in a district town in Uttar Pradesh. The study, titled Citizen in the Making, focused on the family and the school—the two potential agents of political socialization. Gupta regarded the family as the latent agent of political socialization, and the school as the manifest agent. Quoting Almond, the author defines manifest political socialization as ‘… an explicit transmission of information, values, or feelings vis-à-vis the roles, inputs and outputs of the political system’. Latent political socialization, on the other hand, is ‘transmission of information, values, or feelings vis-à-vis the roles, inputs and outputs of

other social systems, such as the family, which affect attitudes toward analogous roles, inputs and outputs of the political system’ (Gupta, 1975: 220).

Gupta interviewed a sample of students from a Higher Secondary school in a district town in Uttar Pradesh; he also interviewed, through a questionnaire, their teachers and parents. The analysis showed that the family does not serve as a direct agent of political socialization in small towns in India. In contrast, the teachers ranked higher than parents in terms of their political awareness; however, the parents were more open in expressing opinions on political matters than teachers, their comparative lack of political awareness notwithstanding. The study found that students in lower standards, and those with an urban background, have shown more leadership qualities. More than 75 per cent of the students in the sample exhibited a dependency trait as they perceived their family structure as ‘conservative’ and ‘authoritarian’; therefore, they were hesitant to plan their future and left it to their parents to decide their career for them. Compared to the family, students found the school climate liberal and democratic, this despite the fact that teachers preferred to be conservative and authoritarian vis-à-vis the students. In terms of reference group theory, the author interprets that students regarded their teachers as more liberal compared to their parents, and treated them as role models. Political awareness—of local, regional and national issues—in the student sample increased with age and educational level, but the awareness remained linked to the salience of the people and issues. Thus, for example, more students knew about the prime minister than about the President of India. The study supported the hypothesis that political involvement is associated with socio-economic status. In any case, the school in the small town did not serve as a major agent of political socialization, as was clear from the ranking of students on scales related to media exposure, political awareness, opinion and participation.

The study was conducted at a time when the fourth General Elections were being held in the country in 1967. In a pilot study carried out by Gupta, it was found that the political parties and their workers contributed a great deal to enlarging the knowledge base relative to politics. Equally important was the role of the mass media in political socialization. Children who did not have direct access to these media remained uninformed.

It must be stressed here that this study was conducted in 1967—over 40 years ago. With the spread of mass media and innovations in the curricula, the profile of students today in terms of political socialization would be greatly different. Sadly, research in this field is lacking.