Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Socialization describes the process through which people and especially children are made to take on the ideas and behaviour appropriate to life in a particular society. As such it describes an essentially passive process and takes for granted a theory of the *person as ‘an individual in society’.
Here *‘society’ and ‘the *individual’ are conceived of as phenomena of different orders; society as a phenomenon of collective life is understood to precede and to encompass the individual.
Anthropologists’ traditional concern was to analyse and compare the ideas and practices that informed daily life among the different peoples of the world. For the purposes of analysis, they identified relatively discrete domains of collective phenomena such as *kinship, *political economy and *religion. And because ‘the individual’ was understood to be a product of ‘society’, socialization could properly be studied only when these collective phenomena were understood. This perspective meant that studies of socialization were accorded a marginal position with respect to mainstream anthropology.
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