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Comparing cultures within-subjects : A cognitive account of acculturation as a framework for cross-cultural study
Robert W. Schrauf Anthropological Theory 2002 2: 98 DOI: 10.1177/1463499602002001290 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ant.sagepub.com/content/2/1/98

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Anthropological Theory
Copyright 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 2(1): 98115 [1463-4996(200203)2:1;98115;022290]

Comparing cultures within-subjects

A cognitive account of acculturation as a framework for cross-cultural study
Robert W. Schrauf Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago, USA

Abstract Cross-culturally comparable units of culture may be found in the experience of immigrants for whom certain experiential domains of meaning from the rst culture are brought into comparison and contrast with corresponding domains in the second culture. The notion of domains is here developed out of semantic domain from cognitive anthropology, cognitive domain from cognitive linguistics, and discourse domain from second language acquisition. The clue to such domains is immigrants coming to greater second language uency in some areas of experience and less in other areas (communicative and cultural competence). These distinctions are used to develop a cognitive theory of acculturation that focuses research on cultures withinsubjects (within immigrants) in contrast to the traditional focus on comparison between cultural groups (between subjects). This article is speculative and derives from work in cognitive anthropology, ethnographic report, studies of second language acquisition, and psycholinguistic studies of bilingual memory. Key Words acculturation bilingualism cognitive anthropology immigration second language acquisition units of culture

INTRODUCTION

Formal comparisons between two or more cultures require the denition and operationalization of units of culture. At lower levels of magnication, comparison is made between cultural groups. The investigator looks at some cultural meaning system in one group (for instance, healing among the BaKongo in Lower Zaire) and compares it to the same system in another group (say, healing among the Amish in the state of Ohio in the United States). Comparison is made between subjects (between cultural groups in this case) in terms of the topic of interest to the cross-culturalist. In this case, medical meaning systems are compared. This is made extraordinarily difcult, of course, by the
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fact that meanings and behaviors are not isolated entities but are embedded in local networks of meanings and behaviors. Furthermore, networks (unlike matrices, tables, charts, and maps) do not display obvious seams, edges, fault lines, or borders. Add a diachronic dimension let networks transform over time and the task becomes mind-boggling. At a higher level of magnication, it is possible to address the cross-cultural project, not by comparing cultures at the level of the social group (the BaKongo vs. the Amish), but rather at the level of the bicultural individual (e.g. the Taiwanese immigrant in Los Angeles). Here, the investigator looks at cultural meaning systems as they meet and coexist or are transformed or deteriorate and disappear within the experience of the immigrant (e.g. kanpo and biomedicine vs. exclusive biomedicine). This comparison is made within subjects distinguishing two cultural meaning systems within-individuals: one from the culture of origin, the other from the culture of adoption. No doubt this too is made extraordinarily difcult by the networks-of-meaning-problem just mentioned exacerbated tremendously by variability among persons (personality, developmental history, emotional state, and so on). Additionally, whereas in comparing cultures at the level of the group, there is unquestionably two of something (one in Lower Zaire, the other in Amish Ohio), in the case of the immigrant, there may be only one of something (something too syncretistic or too eclectic to be of much analytic use). After all, multiple cultural combinations within individuals are possible. For these reasons, this approach may not provide much more clarity a priori on the units of culture question. It may, however, provide a great deal of clarity a posteriori on such units.
CULTURE CONTACT: BEFORE AND AFTER

What critically distinguishes the within-subjects approach is the fact that culture contact causes change in the individual, and change is an observable process. The acculturation of the immigrant offers a window onto two comparable cultural meaning systems before and after culture contact. Particularly illuminating in this regard is the experience of the individual who emigrates as an adult. Having been enculturated in a rst culture via childhood socialization, the adult immigrant engages in a new acculturative project in a second culture that may differ markedly from the cognitive and affective expectations of reality that he or she developed as a child and youth. Tracking such cultural adaptations within individuals who must negotiate these systems renders this approach more akin to clinical research where a treatment is made and outcomes monitored except in this case, and in true anthropological fashion, the treatment has occurred in nature: people emigrate. Methodologically, this simplies the issue of dening and operationalizing units of comparison. While it is true that networks of meaning within subjects do not show seams, borders, or edges any more than they do within whole societies, nevertheless, in situation after situation, the immigrant is faced with nding out whether the cultural meaning systems of his or her culture of origin will match the cultural meaning systems of the culture of adoption. Thus, for example, there is growing immigration from Mexico to the Piedmont area of North Carolina. Not surprisingly in this situation, young Mexican women and men sometimes fall in love with Anglo women and men, and the cultural meaning systems of romantic love and gender relations (e.g. rural Mexican vs. urban US) are placed in comparison, contrast, and sometimes conict.
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Monitoring these experiences of contrast, conict, and resolution will tell us what the relevant categories (cultural units) are. These are cultural domains (Borgatti, 1994) which may then serve as comparable units for cross-cultural research. As such they are useful for cutting up real life for purposes of analysis (with no accompanying commitment to their ontological status).
ONE CULTURE IS UNDERSTOOD IN TERMS OF ANOTHER

This approach capitalizes on the fact that observation and theory construction are always limited to the insights generated by a comparison of two or more cultures at one time. Contrastive analysis in studies of second-language acquisition provides the model describing this problem. Contrastive analysis (Gass, 1996; Lado, 1957; Selinker, 1992) argues that learning a second language is made difcult by interferences from elements in the rst language. That is, familiar phonetic, morphemic, and syntactic elements from the rst language are transferred by learners into their productions of the second language. For example, the English speaker learning French might put direct and indirect pronoun objects after the verb instead of before it. In theory, the specic differences between the native language and the target language (as linguistic systems) could be identied, and these differences would predict the kinds of mistakes learners would make. Contrastive analysis proved problematic for second language acquisition because the analysis of differences between languages as systematic wholes did not successfully predict actual difculties experienced by second language learners as individuals. Nevertheless, the original insight of contrastive analysis and the critique of it are instructive for the approach I have advocated for studying acculturation. It is in fact the interference from immigrants culture of origin, in their attempt to adapt to the culture of adoption, that brings the experience of acculturation into awareness so that it can be reected upon. This interference must be studied on the ground, as it were, in the actual experience of immigrant adaptation. The implication of a within-subjects approach to ethnography is that what we know about any two cultures is shaped by (and limited to) the particular contrasts that emerge as a result of the encounter between them. That is, if we study the Moroccan immigrant to Andaluca, then what we know of the culture of Andaluca and the culture of northern Morocco will be limited by the contrasts between the two cultures in the experience of the immigrant. A different immigrant would foreground different contrasts. Thus, a focus on the Breton who migrated to Andaluca could very well give us a somewhat different picture of Andalusian culture. The dimensions of contrast would differ. I suggest that this is a fundamental epistemological conundrum of cultural anthropology. Common sense argues that research in both social science and human intercultural experience is predicated on some common, if not universal, analytic categories (else the conversation simply cannot continue). Yet in its most fundamental and concrete sense primary eldwork data in anthropology can only be gathered by comparing one culture with another culture. Whether the comparison is between the anthropologists own culture and the culture of his or her eldwork, or between two cultures in the immigrants process of acculturation, the anthropological project is inherently dyadic and cross-cultural. The study of acculturation measuring cultural variability withinsubjects has the advantage of making immigrants experience of this duality the focus of research.
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DOMAIN-SPECIFIC LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

This article outlines a systematic approach to acculturation based on (1) the idea of distinct experiential domains and (2) an extended analogy between acculturation and second language acquisition. As I use it, the notion of domain refers to a particular area of human experience for which we possess a specic language: for example, we have a specic way of talking about family relations and obligations, a specic way of talking about work and occupation, a specic way of talking about sickness and health care, about politics and laws, about games and sports, and so on. In this article I argue that (1) the adult immigrant engages the new culture not all at once (indeed, such cognitive overload would be paralyzing) but domain by domain, and (2) language shifts in experiential domains provide the clues to patterns of acculturation. This approach is by no means new in studies of immigration. The social science measurement of acculturation in the United States relies largely on the measurement of language shift (for review, see Dana, 1996). A quick review of acculturation scales reveals that most include a subset of questions that require self-report about language use and comprehension in particular domains. Questions focus on language use and/or preference by domain: e.g. home, school, and work (Szapocznik et al., 1978). Questions in the domain of media typically ask about language preference for movies, television, books, newspapers (e.g. Cortes et al., 1994; Cuellar et al., 1995; Mendoza, 1989; Szapocznik et al., 1978). Questions in the social domain ask about language-use with nuclear family members, extended family members, friends, workmates, neighbors (Mendoza, 1989; Schrauf and Rubin, 1998). Some scales ask for self-report of language prociency across domains (Marin and Gamba, 1996; Schrauf and Rubin, 1998). Acculturation scales aggregate responses across domains to assess the level of acculturation for individuals. My focus on individual domains provides a more ne-grained analysis of acculturation patterns while simultaneously placing in relief shifts in cultural meaning systems, thus making them more visible and easier to compare. Stated succinctly the argument is as follows: most immigrants come to linguistic and communicative competence in some second-language domains but not others. Systematic study of the particular domains in which adjustments are made provides a clue to units of cultural comparison and contrast. Central to this formulation are the concepts of domain, competence, mental representation of bilingual discourse abilities, and the actors goals and networks.
COGNITIVE, SEMANTIC, AND DISCOURSE DIMENSIONS

The rst key concept of this study is the notion of domain. It is developed more technically here out of three related bodies of theory: cognitive linguistics (cognitive domain), cognitive anthropology (semantic domain), and studies in second language acquisition (discourse domain). Generally speaking, the notion of experiential domain developed in this article is cognitive and the level of analysis is the level of mental representation in terms of schemas, mental models, prototypes, and symbols. Mental representation in this sense is not restricted to ideational content but is meant to include both motivational and emotional representation as well. It is the province of cognitive anthropology to explore how cultural knowledge is represented in individual minds and across populations. Methods and theory include: consensus analysis (Romney, 1994, 1999; Romney and Moore, 1998; Romney et al., 1986,
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1996, 1997), culture model theory (DAndrade and Strauss, 1992; Holland and Quinn, 1987; Shore, 1996) and notions of distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1996; Lave, 1988; Lave and Wenger, 1991). This approach differs from others that stress the emergence of meanings in socio-cultural interaction (in psychology: Wertsch, 1998; in cultural anthropology: Dilley, 1999; and in linguistic anthropology: Tedlock and Mannheim, 1995). As I shall argue later, however, mental representations carry with them the history of their emergence in socio-cultural contexts (see also Schrauf and Rubin, in press).
Cognitive domain

In cognitive linguistics, the notion of cognitive domain describes not some slice of observable human experience to which language refers but rather to a psychological context. Cognitive domains are mental experiences, representational spaces, concepts or conceptual complexes (Langacker, 1987: 147). As we interactively acquire socioculturally mediated concepts, we develop the cognitive domains that are their internal, mental contexts. Cognitive domains arise from our mental experiences in the process of concept formation, which in turn comes as the result of perception. While sensuous dimension of perceptual processes should most probably be considered universal (global), the physical, psychological, and sociological dimensions which constitute the basis for concept formation emerge as a network of sociocultural factors and personal predispositions of language users, such as intelligence, education, emotions, beliefs, values, attitudes, motivations, etc.; in short, they are idiosyncratic and/or culture-specic (or local). Ultimately, cognitive domains emerge as products of cognition conditioned by culture. (Tabakowska, 1999: 82)
Semantic domain

In cognitive anthropology, consensus analysis focuses on the representation of cultural knowledge in semantic domains. In one sense, a semantic domain is a lexical-referential organization of knowledge. A semantic domain may be dened as an organized set of words, all on the same level of contrast, that refer to a single conceptual category, such as kinship terms, animal names, color terms, or emotion terms (Romney et al., 2000: 518). Within a semantic domain, the meaning of a term is dened by its location relative to all the other terms (Romney et al., 2000: 518; for a review of semantic domain in cognitive anthropology, see DAndrade, 1995). In an extended sense, a cultural domain is made up of items which members of a culture recognize as belonging together in a particular category. Operationally, such a domain may be established by asking members of a culture to free-list as many items as possible that belong in the domain. Items constituting a cultural domain need not be simply names, but may be any of a number of relations (see Spradley, 1979, 1980; Werner and Schoepe, 1987). Garcia Alba de Alba et al. (1998) asked members of a Mexican barrio, What causes high blood pressure? and found that individuals of different age groups and educational level produced very similar lists. Similarly, Caulkins (1998) asked Scottish entrepreneurs to list kinds of business success and found considerable agreement among his informants in the terms they used to depict success.
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Where lists are too diverse, and where there is little agreement on the structure of the domain, one may suspect that no unied cultural domain exists. Cultural domains, then, are discovered empirically. Knowledge of cultural domains is not distributed uniformly in the population. Even apart from immigrants, some knowledge domains are widely shared (e.g. how to get food in a restaurant) while others are narrowly shared (how to x a car). For all people, and for immigrants, there is a tendency to learn and internalize knowledge domains according to ones needs and goals and in culturally prescribed ways.
Discourse domain

In second language acquisition studies, Discourse Domain Theory describes a discourse domain as a topical area in which an individual feels knowledgeable and especially invested. The theory predicts that for such domains, learners will produce secondlanguage talk that is more complex, more independent, and more coherent (Young, 1999: 110). They will also perceive themselves as more competent and invested in that domain than in areas where they have not acquired a similar discourse competency (Whyte, 1992, 1995). Domain and competence interact. In this article, I use this composite notion of domain (cognitive, semantic, and discourse) to explain how the immigrant becomes selectively knowledgeable and linguistically competent in those second language/second culture domains in which he or she is personally invested. Relative communicative competence signals patterns of acculturation and highlights points of cultural comparison and contrast.
LINGUISTIC, COMMUNICATIVE, AND CULTURAL COMPETENCE

A second key concept in this study is competence. The notion developed here draws on three further areas of research: in formal linguistics (linguistic competence), the ethnography of speaking (communicative competence), and cognitive anthropology (cultural competence).
Linguistic competence

A person with linguistic competence, in the Chomskyan understanding of the term (Chomsky, 1965), is a person capable of forming all and only those sentences admissible in a given language. Such knowledge is comprised of the tacit knowledge underlying the grammatical structure of clauses and sentences (Ochs, 1988: 33).
Communicative competence

A person with communicative competence, in the tradition of the ethnography of speaking (Hymes, 1972), is one who knows how language (e.g. specic genres and registers) is used in particular speech situations. Native speakers of a language are those who attain both linguistic and communicative competence via childhood language socialization. Immigrants learning a second language in the culture of adoption can develop both linguistic and communicative competence via everyday learning in their second culture. Alternately, in the case where the exception proves the rule, persons acquiring a second language in a classroom in their own country far from the cultural context in which that language is naturally spoken may acquire linguistic but not communicative competence (for distinctions between spontaneous and guided learning, see Klein, 1986).
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Cultural competence

As an analog to linguistic and communicative competence, anthropologists have suggested the notion of cultural competence (Agar, 1991). The process of acculturation into a culture results in knowing whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members, and to do so in any role that they accept for any one of themselves (Goodenough, 1964). Acculturation involves competence in the ideational realm that constitutes a culture schemata, scripts, models, frames . . . that are culturally constituted, socially distributed, and personally construed (Poole, 1994: 833). In the tradition of consensus analysis (Romney, 1994, 1999; Romney et al., 1986) anthropologists also speak of cultural competence as the degree to which an individual shares the knowledge (representations) held collectively by the group. In this article, competence implies all three forms insofar as they are mutually related. Obviously, some measure of linguistic competence undergirds communicative competence, and attaining communicative competence implies knowledge of and practical sensitivity to cultural nuances.
BECOMING BILINGUAL: COMPETENCE BY DOMAIN

Immigrants attain competence linguistic, communicative, and cultural domain by domain, and not globally. One way of highlighting this fact is by way of contrast to earlier formulations. In early psycholinguistic studies of bilingualism, Weinrich (1953) and Ervin and Osgood (1954) distinguished between compound and coordinate bilinguals. Compound bilinguals are those who learn their two languages in one context. This is the individual who grows up speaking two languages from birth, often in a multilingual society. Coordinate bilinguals are those who learn one language in one (cultural) context and a second language in another (cultural) context. This is the situation of the prototypical adult immigrant envisioned in this article. The compoundcoordinate distinction has not fared well for a number of reasons. First, even compound bilinguals tend to develop variable linguistic and communicative competence by domain. So, for example, in the multilingual society of Luxembourg German is the language of elementary education, religion, and journalism; French is the language of secondary education, ofcial usage, government bureaucracy, street signage, and a few others, while Letzebuergesch, though functioning only in the L (low)-variety (i.e. as the language of the home, street, workplace, etc.) is also an admissible variety for addressing Parliament. (Schiffman, 1993: 136) In addition, numerous studies of bilingualism by linguistic anthropologists have explored how the use of one or the other language in multilingual societies may be gendered (Burton et al., 1994; Harvey, 1999). Participants in these studies are compound bilinguals who develop linguistic and communicative competence in different languages for different domains. The reason is quite practical: acquiring equivalent lexical entries, syntactic forms, and idiomatic uency for every domain of life is simply unnecessary. The need to develop linguistic and communicative competence is situationally driven. The case is even more obvious for coordinate bilinguals. For immigrants, acquisition of communicative competence in the domain of work is usually vital, and therefore may long precede communicative competence in domains such as kinship or politics.
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Further, for some domains, persons may never develop communicative competence for the simple reason that it would be superuous. Why should the El Salvadoran immigrant living in Washington, DC learn the appropriate English for Catholic practice (in the domain of religion) if the relevant worshipping community is entirely Spanish, rituals are conducted in Spanish, devotional materials are distributed in Spanish, and Spanish speaking priests and nuns are readily available? In this sense, all bilinguals are coordinate bilinguals.
MENTALLY REPRESENTED DISCOURSE HISTORIES

This anthropological notion of linguistic-communicative-cultural competence stands in direct contrast to the narrower understanding of language uency as it is often portrayed in psycholinguistic studies of bilingualism. In these studies, the governing metaphor for language is that language is a code. The code metaphor implies that (a) there are objects-in-the-world, (b) there are names for those objects, and (c) the bilingual has two sets of names for these objects (whereas the monolingual has just one set of names). The code metaphor reduces language to its ostensive function and therefore offers an extremely simplistic mode for semantic reference. From this perspective, language, at the level of semantics, consists of a set of linguistic labels for non-linguistic things. This is language as Wittgenstein understood it in Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein, 1961[1922]): word-elements must be hooked up with world-elements. Oftentimes in cognitive studies of bilingualism, the objects-in-the-world are substituted by concepts or images in the mind for which, again, the bilingual has two sets of labels. But this does no more than drag the code metaphor inside the mind and substitutes nonlinguistic, mental referents for non-linguistic objects-in-the-world. To Wittgenstein, sustained reection suggested that things were otherwise, and in the Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein, 1953) he developed the notion that language plays a wide variety of functions other than the ostensive. Thus, the meaning of any utterance is constituted only within the particular language game that is being played. At issue are meanings, not objects (and one need not be a symbolic anthropologist or philosophical idealist to appreciate this point). To speak of language games is to speak of cultural contexts, and meanings are thoroughly socio-cultural in the sense that they are shaped by the context in which they emerge and are employed. Further, these contexts are essentially dialogic (Goodwin and Duranti, 1992; Tedlock and Mannheim, 1995). Meaning, then, emerges in discourse. Meanings are negotiated, challenged, argued about, imposed, altered or reinterpreted to reect changed circumstances or changed goals and aspirations of individuals and groups. In brief, meanings are subjected to manipulations (Holy, 1999: 53). Meanings are constituted in the discourse contexts in which they are invoked. This is the force of pragmatics and indexicality in studies of language-in-use (Hanks, 1996; Silverstein, 1976, 1987). Among the resources immigrants learn to manipulate are the language registers, genres, idioms, and special vocabularies that signal social belonging and facilitate goal attainment (Koven, 1998; Woolard, 1997). Moving from one network and domain to others, people can use linguistic resources exibly to position themselves and others (Zentella, 1997). Language use reects both a contextual strategy within local networks and the internalization of cultural meaning systems. Thus, meanings are created anew in culturally-specic discourse
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contexts. In sum, the bilingual is not an individual with alternate codes for some commonly available set of objects-in-the-world, but a person whose linguistic and communicative competence in a particular domain (from a history of discourse involvement in that domain) enables him or her to engage in the ongoing conversation of other persons also involved in that domain. Meanings are encoded in memory as the residue of conversational dialogues and social uses of language through which they have come about. The notion that meaning is an achievement-in-discourse is not news to anthropologists, but what needs to be established anew is the notion that meaning does not emerge ex nihilo (out of nothingness, as medieval theologians might have it) between two sociocultural agents interacting in a particular domain. The linguistic and communicative competence of the cultural actors reects a discourse history of previous involvement in the domain in which they interact. Cognitively, this discourse history is a series of mental representations at lexical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic levels that undergird competence in the domain (similar to the contextual representation necessary for the determination of word meaning; Miller, 1999: 13). These are part and parcel of the socio-culturally constituted meanings at issue. Thus, where cognitive studies of bilingualism tend to reduce language to the mental coding of concepts and images, anthropologists tend to locate the achievement of meaning in social interaction and ignore the reality of the history of mental representations that actors bring to the encounter. Both perspectives are critical: mental concepts and images are encoded networks (histories) of meanings. According to the foregoing, then, discourse histories are encoded in memory as mental representations. Speakers access these representations when speaking. They may also access them in response to experimental stimulation. Studies in cognitive psychology of bilingual memory are now beginning to focus on how the semantic representations of bilinguals (the meanings-in-the-head) are in fact thoroughly cultural concepts with intimate links to their appropriate lexical entries (Pavlenko, 1999; Schrauf and Rubin, in press). This is the cognitive correlate to the work described earlier in linguistic anthropology. The bilingual is the person who possesses these competencies grounded in domain-specic discourse histories. Both the competence and discourse histories are rooted in mental representations corresponding to a particular domain. These experiences are the result of needing and developing competence in certain areas but not others. Acculturation and second-language learning foster the development of a bilingual mind as well as a bilingual speaker (Schrauf, 2000).
VARIABLE COMPETENCE IN DIFFERENT DOMAINS

Typically, therefore, the bilinguals two languages are used in particular and different domains. This has several consequences. First, uency in either the rst or second language will vary with the domain. For some domains, a person may be a balanced bilingual, equally competent speaking either language, while for other domains he or she may be adept in one language but limited (or wholly incapable) in the other. For purposes of characterizing bilingual competence, it is important to determine relative competence in key second-language domains (Schrauf and Rubin, 1998). Secondly, communicative competence in any given domain is not constant, but varies over time. Given second-language acquisition for a particular domain, a person may acquire uency
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in that domain, fossilize at some point in that domain, or become linguistically and communicatively functional (but not uent) in that domain. Thirdly, sustained use of the second language may cause rst language attrition in that domain (Schrauf, 1999). Over time, the second language comes to replace the rst (Kenny, 1996), though in this latter case it is probably more accurate to say that the rst language becomes inaccessible rather than lost (Seliger, 1996). By extension, given the close connection (though not identication) of communicative and cultural competence, it is more accurate to say that cultural competence is domain specic as well. As with second language acquisition, acculturation by domain is situationally driven and occurs in some domains but not others. Moreover, acculturation in any domain is by degree and varies over time. Finally, very advanced acculturation in a given domain may result in a corresponding deculturation in the cultural schemata of the culture of origin. Any psychological theory of acculturation must be recalibrated to explain, not acculturation as a wholesale change in socio-cultural identity, but rather, acculturation as a process applying to individual cultural domains.
STRATEGIZING CULTURAL ADAPTION BY DOMAIN

For the monocultural individual who speaks only one language, cultural domains have only one language associated with them. In contrast, for the bicultural/bilingual, any given cultural domain may have two, or more, associated meaning systems and two languages. In this regard, it is important to note that acculturation is not a unilinear process where acquisition of the cultural meanings, behaviors, and values of the adopted culture necessarily implies a process of culture shedding (Berry, 1992) of those from the culture of origin. Of course, for some individuals there is a loss of some cultural experience and the replacement by another. Pavlenko (1998) has gathered the rst person accounts of bilingual authors, all adult second language learners, and chronicled the stages of loss of the rst language (and rst language identity) and subsequent gain and reconstruction. Instructive in this regard are the reections of author Jan Novak: My Czech had begun to deteriorate. There were times now when I could not recall an everyday word, such as carrot, ler, or sloth. I would waste the day probing the labyrinthine recesses of my memory because to get help from a dictionary seemed only to legitimize the loss. . . . Computers, graft, football, and other things were becoming easier to talk about in English. (Novak, 1994: 265; quoted in Pavlenko, 1998) Most often a person retains and cultivates his or her ethnic identity and, at the same time, engages the ideology and practices of the culture of adoption. LaFromboise et al. (1993) refer to this as biculturalism. Furthermore, this process of assuming the new cultural schemata and retaining or adjusting old ones is both an active and passive process. That is, a person may make attitudinal and behavioral changes quite consciously, while also acquiring new attitudes and patterns of action without awareness of the change. Insofar as adaptation to the larger culture is left to the individual (and not a forced choice), the experience of acculturation may be characterized in four ways. Berry and his colleagues (Berry, 1984; Berry et al., 1989, 1992) have identied four such acculturation
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strategies (a 2x2 model) based on two variables: (a) the degree to which ones identity in and the characteristics of the culture of origin are to be maintained (what I will call ethnic maintenance), and (b) the degree to which the ideology and practices of the wider culture are to be incorporated (what I will call cultural incorporation). Integration describes high ethnic maintenance and high cultural incorporation (this is LaFromboises biculturalism). Assimilation describes low ethnic maintenance and high cultural incorporation. This is the unilineal strategy: adopting one culture means shedding the other. Separation describes high ethnic maintenance and low cultural incorporation. This is refusal to acculturate. Marginalization describes both low ethnic maintenance and low cultural incorporation. This is self-alienation from both the culture of origin and the culture of adoption. In the following I adopt Berrys strategy language with the caveat that not all adaptation or resistance is conscious and intentional. While the strategies just described may be understood to apply to an individuals overall orientation toward their cultural experience, I suggest that individuals choose strategies for each domain according to their goals and/or needs that may be met through acquiring competency in that domain. In any cultural domain, one may have a variety of experiences and strategies of adaptation. This reects the pluriformity of motives and needs that a person possesses in relation to a specic domain. This notion articulates with the current anthropological wisdom that individuals negotiate cultural ideologies and practices according to context. A domain such as getting a university education is not just one site of meaning and activity and therefore may require multiple strategies of adaptation, depending both on what is required to act competently at the various sites and the goals and needs of the individual actors. As an example of linguistic and cultural preservation of some rst cultural domains and adaptation to a second-culture domain, Diane Hoffman (1989a, 1989b) presents ethnographic data on Iranian immigrants to the San Francisco Bay Area. In any given linguistic community, when a language choice exists, certain domains will be associated with preferential use of one language over another. For Iranians, English was the language of the workplace, and its use connoted the values of technological expertise, efciency, and clear information exchange. (Farsi, on the other hand, was associated with art, emotional expression, friendship, and social renement.) (Hoffman, 1989b: 127) That the workplace domain required a language shift is not remarkable. Iranians willingly negotiated the various requirements for competency in that domain: language, technological skills, valuing efciency and clear information exchange. Hoffman notes that Iranians adopted a strategy of blending both American professional values and the English vocabulary associated with them into an Iranian cultural framework. This suggests not the replacement but the integration of meaning systems. On the other hand, in domains such as art and the ethnopsychology of emotion and friendship, Iranian immigrants to San Francisco seemed to have little interest in adopting second-culture meaning systems. This resistance is indicative of the cultural separation strategy described earlier. To talk of strategies and choices in acculturation to particular domains is to talk about
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the actors intentions and indeed, as indicated in this article, much of the variability in the degree of acculturation is explained by reference to the individuals intentions (conscious and unconscious). Just how much the immigrant wants to adopt the customs and ways of thinking of the culture of adoption and how much she wants to preserve the culture of origin is related to her needs and aims in a particular domain. In both enculturation in the rst culture and acculturation in the second, one learns the schemas of the new culture, and as psychological anthropologists have shown (DAndrade and Strauss, 1992), schemas carry with them embedded goals. As Strauss notes, . . . cultural models (i.e. culturally formed cognitive schemas, Quinn & Holland, 1987) can have motivational force because these models not only label and describe the world but also set forth goals (both conscious and unconscious) and elicit or include desires (DAndrade, 1981, 1984, 1990). (Strauss 1992: 3, italics in original) Whether an individual comes to feel the (emotive) evocation of a particular schema or act in accord with its directives (motive force) is partly due to personal decision and shaped by goals at higher levels (Strauss, 1992). And, again, acting out of either the rst culture or the second culture framework becomes a way of realizing these overarching goals. Again in Hoffmans study of Iranian immigrants (1989b), there is evidence that individuals choose different strategies of adaptation. Some negotiate adaptation to American cultural meanings via a kind of cultural eclecticism, in which the learner consciously picks and chooses what he or she perceives to be the self-consonant values present in the other culture, adding them on to form a new and ideally improved version of the self (Hoffman, 1989b: 42). For others, however, there is resistance to acculturation, and whatever adaptations are necessary seem to entail either alienation or loss of self. In the former case, the individual consciously and purposively takes up acculturation in particular domains. In the latter case, the individual struggles with adaptation as a threat to identity. Some of the individual differences in acculturation are explained by actors goals, both conscious and unconscious.
CONCLUSION

This article argues that units of culture can be empirically discovered by attending to adult immigrants experience of culture contact. That is, as the immigrant encounters what they do here, those things that he or she has always taken for granted are made conscious and subject to reection. This process of culture contact takes place over time and in different experiential domains, as new challenges are met and new needs made manifest. Language shift is a principal clue to identifying these domains. As immigrants develop competence in a new domain, they generally acquire new abilities to communicate with others about that domain. To some extent the ability to use this new language is internalized and mental representations of that domain become bilingual. These two insights (1) that acculturation takes place domain by domain, and (2) that language shift is the clue to these changes provide the foundation for a cognitive theory of acculturation. The theoretical framework comprises three concepts: experiential domain, linguistic-communicative-cultural competence, and the mental encoding of discourse histories.
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The concept of experiential domain is heir to three current but diverse uses of domain: cognitive (from cognitive linguistics); semantic (from cognitive anthropology); and as discourse (from second language acquisition). As noted, a domain is a series of mental representations an imagistic and/or conceptual complex represented at a symbolic level by a set of linguistic contrasts and about which a person is linguistically articulate to some degree or another. For example, the domain of medical care (in the US) includes the prototypical task of seeing a doctor. A person must know when and how to make an appointment with a doctor, how to register with the nurse upon arrival, how to act in the waiting room, how to carry on appropriate patient-doctor discourse about the symptoms, how to arrange for payment with the insurance cards, how to get the prescription completed, and so forth. Individuals come to variable competence in experiential domains. My use of the concept of competence folds together linguistic knowledge (knowing what the words, syntax, and idioms are), communicative competence (knowing when to say what to whom), and cultural competence (knowing the beliefs and practices of the group). Such competence develops over time as the result of experience and social interaction with many other people. Competence is therefore not a static capacity but rests on a whole discourse history of multiple engagements in that domain. For example, one learns about holidays from anticipating a free day with co-workers, by hearing advertisements for holiday entertainment, by going to parades or by watching television. Talk shapes experiences and shapes ones expectations about the experiences. In this critical sense, meaning is an achievement of discourse over time. These discourse histories are encoded in memory as mental representations. Each new engagement in the domain depends on previously encoded mental representations and in turn reshapes the relevant representations. The immigrant, as a developing bilingual, arrives at new linguistic-communicativecultural competence in some experiential domains and not others. This process is governed in part by the exigencies of circumstance and in part by individual motivation and personal ideology. In any given domain, survival may depend on coming to competence, or, alternately, nothing may be lost by ignoring certain domains. Acculturation is in part a matter of choice: an immigrant may abandon, resist, embrace, or mix cultural competencies. As immigrants engage the new culture in domain after domain, cognitive changes take place. Discourse histories are modied and networks of mental representations are transformed. Because the mental representations of their culture-of-origin no longer work or are at odds with the appropriate representations for behavior in the culture-ofadoption, the immigrant becomes conscious of the cognitive, semantic and discourse domains that are now called into question. It is in the ongoing collision that the takenfor-granted assumptions of the past now rise to the surface and are no longer taken for granted. Through this process the immigrants themselves stand in a privileged position to generate the content and form of these new domains and to reect on those of their culture-of-origin. The anthropologist takes advantage of immigrants coming to awareness of cultural beliefs and practices, now placed in question, and tracks the changes that occur as acculturation takes place. It is the argument of this article that the changes occasioned by acculturation will mark the relevant cultural units of analysis for the anthropologist.
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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Victor de Munck, Robert Moore, and an anonymous reviewer of Anthropological Theory for reading and commenting on previous versions of this paper. This research was supported by the National Institute of Aging Grant #R01 AG16340-01A1.

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ROBERT W. SCHRAUF is a medical and psychological anthropologist at the Buehler Center on Aging at Northwestern University Medical School and the Northwestern University Cognitive Neurology Alzheimers Disease Research Center. His major interests are in the cognitive psychology of bilingualism and processes of encoding and retrieval in autobiographical memory. He works with healthy and cognitively impaired older adults. Address: Buehler Center on Aging, Northwestern University Medical School, 750 North Lake Shore Drive, Suite 601, Chicago, IL 60611-2611. [email: r-schrauf@northwestern.edu]

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