The Cultural Adaptions in Divergent

Growing up as a military child, adapting to a new culture every three years was normal- including getting use to customs of people in countries abroad, such as when I lived in Japan. Moving to Japan as an American middle schooler was probably the biggest learning experience of my life in terms of respect for another culture, while still maintaining ideals and practices of my own American culture. Now, up until a week or so ago I would have called this experience and assimilation for my and my family. We visited sushi bars a few times a week, began learning the language, and engaging in a lot of local cultural traditions.

I previously thought assimilation was the only word to describe an acceptance for another culture. However, Berry's Two Dimensional Model of Culture and the Individual proves there are actually four different outcomes for the way a person accepts (or does not accept) a new culture. The recent movie Divergent is one movie where it seems all four are represented and if you haven't seen it, I'll try to make sense of it without spoiling the movie plot!



So basically, Divergent takes place in post-rebellion Chicago. Citizens have been separated into four different groups, or factions as they call them, to keep the peace. The main character, Beatrice, undergoes a choosing ceremony where she can decided whether she wants to become a part of her faction, Abnegation, for life or if she wants to move to one of the other four factions. She ends up choosing to change factions and become a Dauntless, where she is told she must leave her Abnegation past behind and devote herself wholeheartedly to becoming a strong, brave, bad-ass Dauntless- thus even changing her name to "Tris". Now, this is assimilation which, as Berry defines it is a movement of the individual towards the culture they are now in, and leaving behind their old one.



This isn't what Tris ends up doing, seeing as she is Divergent, but that's a part of the plot I'm not going to discuss here (hint hint go watch it). Instead, Tris begins to merge parts of her original Abnegation culture into her training and even refuses to estrange herself from her parents and brother, visiting with them. This is what Berry refers to as integration, in which a person synthesizes both cultures into their lifestyles.

During Dauntless training, Tris has peers who struggle with the way the faction does things, one of whom can't seem to learn aggression over kindness and refuses to embrace Dauntless ways of life. According to Berry, we can identify this as rejection, meaning a reaffirmation of a person's past/first culture as he or she rejects the new one.



The final outcome of Berry's model, marginalization, is described as an alienation from both cultures. In Divergent, this is best exemplified by "the factionless" who are the group of people who have been turned away from their faction and abandoned, or even themselves refused to be apart of a faction. These people are looked to as the scum in this society, people everyone else feels sorry for but don't want to end up being like.

While watching Divergent for about the 20th time this weekend, I connected a lot of Berry's model on individual participation in culture with the story lines as well as my own life.
I should say that this model doesn't fit feelings of individuals towards their cultural backgrounds into neat little boxes, but this gives us a great guideline to go refer to when creating productive conversations about issues such as immigration, international relations, and even our own travels and life experiences.