Acculturation and identity The domain of cultural studies can be understood as an interdisciplinary or postdisciplinary field of inquiry that explores

the production and inculcation of culture or maps of meaning. Cultural studies can be also be grasped as a discursive formation; that is, a group of ideas, images and practices, that provide ways of talking about, and conduct associated with, a particular topic, social activity or institutional site. That is, cultural studies is constituted by a regulated way of speaking about objects (which cultural studies brings into view) and coheres around key concepts, ideas and concerns that include different issues related essentially to culture. Central among the concerns of cultural studies is acculturation and identity. The concept of acculturation denotes the social processes by which we learn the knowledge and skills that enable us to be members of a culture in a given society. These processes implies the ability to go on in a culture which in turn requires the learning and acquisition of language, values and norms through imitation, practice and experimentation. Key elements of acculturation would include the family, peer groups, schools, work organizations and the media. The processes of acculturation represent the nurture side of the so called Nature vs Nurture debate, and are looked to by cultural theorists as forming the basis on which actors acquire a way of life and a way of seeing. The primary argument of cultural studies is that being a person requires the processes of acculturation. Here personhood is understood to be a culturally specific production whereby what it means to be a person is social and cultural as well. The study of acculturation, in this respect ,can be best viewd in connection to identity as both of them became central categories of cultural studies during the 1990s. Identity pertains to cultural descriptions of persons with which we emotionally identify and which concern sameness and difference, the personal and the social. For cultural studies, identity is a cultural construction because the discursive resources that form the material for identity formation are cultural in character. To conclude both of Identity and acculturation are consistent themes within cultural studies. In particular, we are constituted as individuals in a social process that is commonly understood as acculturation without which we would not be persons. Indeed, the very notion of what it is to be a person is a cultural question (for example, individualism is a marker of specifically modern societies) and without language the very concept of identity would be unintelligible to us.