Beyond Assimilation and Hybridity: The Case for Acculturation as a Multidimensional Framework

Abstract

When people from different cultures come into sustained contact, the changes that follow are rarely simple or predictable. This paper argues that among the conceptual frameworks developed to account for these changes, acculturation offers the most analytically complete account. Assimilation reduces a complex process to a linear trajectory of absorption, while hybridity, despite its theoretical productivity, resists the kind of empirical operationalization that applied research requires. Acculturation, by contrast, integrates behavioral, psychological, social, and cultural dimensions of change within a framework that is both theoretically grounded and empirically usable. Drawing on Berry (1997, 2005), Bhabha (1994), Gordon (1964), and related scholarship, this paper makes the case for acculturation as the preferred framework for studying cultural contact in contemporary multicultural societies.