Sorry, I learned the term from this essay (
https://siderea.livejournal.com/1159765.html) and assumed it was a correct usage.
To be clear, though, while moving to a new society will cause quite gradual, passive assimilation, I wasn’t really talking about that case. In such cases, you still tend to think of your old community as “your community”, and might e.g. seek out an association of expats from your old society to hang out with, since you still share their mores.
But moving to a university, or joining the military, or joining a cult, or going to prison, or marrying into money—these are communities, not societies. They actively “digest” you. In all these cases, you are given new connections who serve as both direct role-models for, and judges of, your current degree of assimilation; and, further, you are usually striving to assimilate as quickly as possible (whether you’re there voluntarily or not) because your lack of cultural awareness is one of the things keeping you back from having status and power in your new community.
Would you not call what any/all of these entities do—one of the major roles they perform for their members—enculturation? If not, then it seems that I have misunderstood the term.
(Tangent/side note: I didn’t make the connection of prison-as-community-that-assimilates until I was writing this. Isn’t the whole goal of reducing recidivism better expressed as “reducing the potential for prison to serve as an enculturating/assimilating force upon prisoners”?)