Acculturation

Acculturation is the study of the process of how a culture changes as a result of contact with people from a different culture. Herskovits, M. (1972). "acculturation", in Leach, M. (ed) Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend. 3rd ed. p.5-6
== History ==
The term "acculturation" was first used by J. W. Powell in 1880 to describe cultures borrowing from each other. 
It was quickly replaced by the term "diffusion", which initially attempted to reconstruct the prehistory of cultural interaction based on the distribution of various cultural traits. Diffusion reached its initial climax in 1925, after which it began to lose its prominence due to the fact that its findings are generally difficult to provide any real evidence for. By the mid 1930s, "acculturation" was replacing "diffusion". 
In the USA, research into acculturation became known as "acculturation studies", and put emphasis on the lives of people and instead of looking at prehistory, focused mostly on historical interactions. It looked not only at what was borrowed by a receiving culture, but also the context of the borrowing and why part of another culture was incorporated into that of the receiving culture, as well as how these borrowed cultural aspects have then been altered by the receiving culture. 
In the UK, it was instead known as "culture contact research", and a committee of the Social Science Research Council made the Memorandum for the Study of Acculturation in 1935 to direct and focus research on this field. Notably, this committee's definition of "acculturation" included the importance of the duration and intensity of cultural contact as aspects of study, something which was quickly discarded by scholars since they could not be measured satisfactorily, and instead researchers focused on the observation and use of historical documents to study how a culture changes. 
== Use ==
Acculturation has a major role in the study of folklore, and folklore studies provide much data that researchers looking into acculturation can use:
* Folktales can be broken down into a number of elements (motifs), including characters, events, and plot details.
* Literary forms can be used to show how people during the time of a story's composition lived their lives.
* Acculturation can be used to understand how variations of a particular motif arise. 
== References ==
Category:Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend
Category:Anthropology