Human Migration and Cultural Acclimatization: Indian Urban Scenario

Migrants’ behavioral association with a new place is always linked with the pattern of acculturation with the dominant culture group. This chapter revolves around the psychological behavior of urban migrants who have shifted to a new place for different purposes. The objectives of the present paper are: (1) to identify the strategies of coping from an individual point of view and (2) to analyze different coping mechanisms based on socio-cultural perspectives. Stress related to migration involves multiple traumatic events including fear of social avoidance, cultural shock, and economic hardship. Loneliness and boredom, weak social integration, poor access to counseling services, socioeconomic instability, detention, and communication difficulties all come as post-migration difficulties. Understanding local society and people has proved as an important coping strategy for migrants. The cultural adaptation model is said to be a more flexible explanatory framework to determine acculturation because the acculturative process emerges from intercultural contacts. The age-wise analysis of stress and coping mechanisms reveals that, after the immediate change in location, migrants first become quite conservative in nature due to resource constraints and in fear of new experiences of interaction with new culture groups. This study reveals that cultural acclimatization of migrants in urban areas includes language learning, adopting local foods, making friends, and participating in local cultural events as all these have proved themselves as important coping strategies in this regard.