Proculturation: Self-reconstruction by making “fusion cocktails” of alien and familiar meanings

Abstract

This paper considers mental processes unfolding during humans’ movement in a foreign environment and aims to overcome theoretical discrepancies concerning culture and acculturation between sociocultural anthropology and cross-cultural psychology under the frame of cultural psychology. I propose to perceive culture as a multi-self-centered semiotic field, which is populated by signs and meanings, necessarily emphasizing its heterogeneity and incoherence. Cultures have hazy boundaries and are embedded into the wider web of meanings. In fact, there is one big global culture and all humans are involved in mediating it through intersubjective interactions. Further, the term proculturation is used to fill the gaps left by mainstream acculturation research, which has been mainly oriented on measuring ontologized trait-like characteristics in terms of bidimensional mechanic relationship between cultures and related correlations. Namely, proculturation specifically reflects real-life human experiences and the role of (inter)subjectivity in the process of adaptation in emigration or elsewhere in any unfamiliar environment. Most importantly proculturation implies triadic semiotic relations and the possibility of the creation of novel fusions of meanings, by mixing various ingredients in the process of mediation between familiar and unfamiliar ideas and experiences. Proculturation is catalytically conditioned by references to temporal dimensions and essentially is ever-continuing process.