Richard Thurnwald, “The Psychology of Acculturation” (1932)

This single-authored theoretical article defines acculturation as a psychological and social process rather than as the simple movement of culture traits. Thurnwald writes against a museum-like view of diffusion in which an artifact, custom, or institution passes unchanged from one people to another. For him, every borrowed element enters an already organized field of habits, desires, authorities, ecological conditions, and memories; consequently, adoption is also alteration.

The acquisition of any civilizatory accomplishment is not limited to the act of acceptance like the moving of an object from one case in a museum to another.

The essay’s examples—European money in Africa, iron tools in America and New Guinea, altered uses of weapons, ornaments, and implements—show that material things acquire new meanings through use. A coin may become a prestige object, a tool may reorder labor, and an imported institution may disturb relations of gender, rank, wealth, or ritual authority. Thurnwald’s emphasis is therefore less on the origin of a borrowed trait than on the social route by which it becomes intelligible and effective.

And, the very process of the acceptance of these new things is indicative of the path of acculturation.

Thurnwald connects acculturation to learning, but he does not reduce it to individual psychology. Persons acquire habits through age, need, imitation, success, frustration, and prestige; societies likewise change through patterned interaction among differentiated persons. Chiefs, elders, craftsmen, servants, missionaries, captives, migrants, women, and children may each become agents of transmission, depending on the object involved and the structure of the receiving community. What is accepted is inseparable from who first accepts it, who resists it, and what social value becomes attached to it.

The situation is closely related to the process of learning which we all have to face from birth to death, although the periods of youth are filled with more intensive learning and the later stages with less.

The article’s central methodological contribution is to treat diffusion as social psychology. Acculturation is mediated by fear, admiration, rivalry, coercion, curiosity, resentment, and the prestige of acknowledged models. Thurnwald distinguishes selective, rejective, eliminative, and transformative tendencies: a group may choose only certain foreign goods, refuse others as threats to tradition, replace older forms, or adapt imported objects to unexpected purposes. These categories let him explain why similar contacts produce unlike results and why borrowing often changes both old and new elements at once.

Thurnwald organizes the determinants of acculturation around the relation between giving and receiving peoples, the constitution of the receiving society, and the circumstances of contact. His language of “primitive” peoples and ethnic personality belongs to the colonial anthropology of the 1930s, and the essay often assumes asymmetrical encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans. Yet his analysis is not a simple progress narrative. Contact may produce withdrawal, imitation, dependence, loss of self-assertion, or renewed ethnic consciousness; it may also be shaped by war, epidemic, trade, missionization, forced labor, intermarriage, or schooling.

It is the cooperation, particularly that of the leaders in each branch of pursuit, that builds up the community.

The conclusion contrasts older acculturative processes—often gradual, intimate, and embedded in kinship, slavery, migration, or co-residence—with modern colonial contact, where schools, missions, courts, ordinances, wage labor, and technical instruction accelerate change. The enduring value of the essay lies in its insistence that acculturation is not additive. Borrowed traits are filtered through local organization and human motivation, and their consequences unfold through institutions and persons. Its limitations lie in its period vocabulary and colonial assumptions, but its durable claim is that the psychology of acceptance, refusal, and transformation is central to social history.