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What it means to incorporate several cultures on a deep level

So my vacuum chamber is broken and I gave my precursor molecule to someone else to do an experiment with that hasn’t worked yet, and I’m a little short on research I can actually do. I decided to see if I could dig up some more research pertaining to TCKs with the free time. (Don’t tell my advisor! I printed 200 pages on Friday!) I found a lot of stuff that sounds cool. I haven’t read nearly all of it yet, but one paper stood out to me as particularly interesting. I wrote a blog post on it with some more detail, but I was wondering what you guys thought of the thesis and of what I think is a good way to pinpoint how a TCK is different from a CCK.

In the paper (Hong, Y.-Y., Morris, M. W., Chiu, C.-Y., & Benet-Martinez, V. (2000) Multicultural Minds: A Dynamic Constructivist Approach to Culture and Cognition. American Psychologist, 55(7), 709-720), Hong et al point out that culture has been seen in cross-cultural psychology like a contact lens that influences you all the time. They think seeing culture as a network of knowledge makes better sense, because that makes it natural to describe being part of more than one culture as having two or more culture networks that can kick in. Intuitively, that makes total sense to me. Sometimes something makes me ‘kick in’ to a particular cultural mode. In the paper, they talk about people using one cultural network in one situation and another network in another situation.

I think that we third culture kids have cross-linked cultural networks. Bicultural people and CCKs can switch between two networks, whereas I think we just fuse our cultural networks into one big network and that’s why it’s so frustrating when people we meet don’t understand all of our culture networks. I think that’s what the third culture really is – connecting several cultures into one cultural network. What do you guys think? Makes sense? Did I miss something? Feel free to comment here or on my blog, if you like.

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Posted by Tess at 9:26 pm on January 20th, 2008. Comments
Categories: General Forum, Research. Tags: , .

  • Julie
    I think you have it there we are fussing together all the cultural information in our heads keeping all the parts of every culture that we like and getting ride of the parts of the cultures we don't until we have a total mix and in one place will act and think in one culture and in another situation will act and think in another. WE know where a few of those lines are and adapt to the cuture we are living in a bit but sometimes we dont' know where they are and jsut go our own way. Subcounsously I think may TCKS act more like one culture when they are around people of that culture and more like another then they are around it but they don't always realize this althoguh sometimes do but don't know how to change that.
  • Ayako
    I agree.

    It's much like people who aren't coordinate bilinguals in the world of linguistics.

    We don't keep the different cultures in neat little boxes and mix them up on a deep level.

    So even though we do modify our behavior to fit the needs of where we are - we will never be able to act out one culture perfectly without any foreign influences.
  • Neil
    I have commented on a similar issue on another post. It seems to me that our thinking about TCKs and cultural identity and subsequent behaviors is rather simplistic. Many non-TCKs think it is an either/or construct rather than a both/and. In a graduate class where we were discussing language development, I envited a TCK in from France. When they asked what language does he think in, his immediate intriguing response to the grad students was "Both, it just depends on who I'm with and what we are discussing." Then they asked how do you keeo them separate in your mind..."I don't, they are simply there together and I pull up what I need." I research could be quite helpful and interesting. Do you think that TCKs feel a need/pressure to be one or the other and I wonder how that correlates to the struggle with identity.
  • IngridGiles
    The real internal struggle (for me, anyway) comes when you have two different cultures fully inside you at the same time, in a situation where the cultures have opposing values. I can't think of any examples right now, but it happens to me every once in a while.
  • Ayako
    I understand what you mean IngridGiles. Japanese and American culture don't exactly have many intersections.

    This really comes out to the fore when you are a conference interpreter and the American account executive says the message in the advertisement isn't clear (and in your face enough) and the Japanese copywriter says well, that's an offensive way of communicating to the Japanese because they prefer to 'wrap words up in a bit of fancy paper'.

    I know the Japanese guy means that they don't like having messages shoved in their face but he'll use indirect and ambiguous expressions to get his point across and the American executive gets more and more aggravated and is more and more in the face of the Japanese guy who gets really offended. As an interpreter I have no choice but to translate exactly what they're saying word for word - unless someone gives me license to 'interpret' what people are trying to say and it's very frustrating.

    *Actually I'm guilty of helping people understand each other better - which is not necessarily considered a good thing where interpreters are concerned - but hell, you can't waste company time upholding principles that get nobody anywhere :p

    Tess: Part of the problem I have had is people being so race oriented that they have mostly refused to acknowledge that the inside of my mind could be even more messed up than a person of mixed race - just because I am 100% Japanese. I've had Japanese people insisting that I can be something I can't be based on my race, whereas they excuse people of mixed race from this obligation.

    If we can come up with a thesis that makes sense I can throw it at my sister who has published books on cross cultural communication. She's a hardcore TCK herself so she'll understand why this issue is important.
  • Peter
    In my case the different cultures are fused. However it is a very weird fusion. I've lived my entire life in countries either in Europe or North America, so most of my cultural influences come from there. (my dad also lived in the Middle East as well, so there is an indirect influence through there as well) When I am in North America, I act more North American, however deep inside I have European preferences which prevent me from being fully North American. (that and not having citizenship) However in Europe, I act more European, but the North American influences play a great role in how I think and behave. It's really hard to explain.

    Also for languages. I speak several languages at various levels of fluency and I also kind of switch between them in various situations. However Czech, which I am not as comfortable with, but had native level fluency in, has kind of taken a back seat and cannot use it with the ease I once did, since I no longer live in the environment and really none of my close family is from that language environment. I usually exclusively try to use one language in a situation, however sometimes when I am trying to speak fast I mix in words from other languages, because the word comes up first in that language.
  • Isa
    Hey Tess

    I read your blog -- i love it! It's really very interesting! Thanks for taking the time to write such great stuff.That entry you wrote helped me understand and give me the vocabulary needed to explain this. I thought that i was the only one!!

    I was wondering where you get all these great resources from? I would very much like to read them especially

    Schaetti, B. F. (2001). Global Nomad Identity: Hypothesizing a Developmental Model (Doctoral dissertation, The Union Institute, 2001.) Dissertation Abstracts, 9992721

    Is it possible for you to email it to me (if it is on your comp). I'm at

    isa.roe@gmail.com

    I'll continue to read your blog!
  • I'm searching academic databases. Because I'm a student at a major research university, I'm taking advantage of all the resources they have. It's free for me now, but once I leave it would get quite expensive to get the papers. I have a paper copy of the dissertation for sure, not sure if I have a PDF or if I can get one. When I wrote my Honors, I ordered it from Dissertation Abstracts, but my college was much much smaller and not research-oriented like my current school is. I'll see what I can do.

    Glad to hear you enjoyed reading the blog! Although academia may not have quite caught up with what we among ourselves know or suspect, what they have done (like the Hong et al paper) has helped me get some vocabulary to use as well. I'm happy that others benefit, too :)
  • warona
    from the ages 11 months to 8 years old i was taught english in an american environment, from 8-12 in a very british environment. i then attended international school, (over 50 nationalities, only 500 students)from 12 to 18 but the system was british, after that it was off to the states for uni, 5 years later i was back in botswana (very brit influenced). every time i moved i changed the way i spoke, i'd drop slang from this place i'd just come, slant my accent back to where ever i was, drop or pick up my "u"s accordingly etc. basically i would make that shift in my head, in my behaviour so that i would not stick out too much. having folks cracking up at my speech every two minutes is funny for about...well...two minutes!

    but when i decided to move to canada, i was fed up! i was all like "its time they just took me as is!" i made a conscious decision not change my speech, slang, accent, anything!

    of course now its been almost a year and i am sick of explaining every other word that comes out of my mouth and am seriously considering just picking up north american english again.

    ugh! and they say its one language...
  • Ayako
    I passed on our thoughts in this thread to my sister who teaches at Keio University and she passed it on to her colleague who thinks it's a very interesting.
  • Lynn
    Hi Tess,

    There's some literature on identity integration which is related to your "one cultural network" idea in cross-cultural psychology. Benet-Martinez (one of the authors on the Hong fish study you talked about) is doing research on this.

    There's many methodological problems in this literature (from a knit-picky psychologist's perspective) but the construct they're getting at is what you're talking about, although it's in a bicultural immigration context.

    Obviously there's many contextual differences between immigrants and TCKs, but I think in general, when you're exposed to multiple cultures you naturally perceive dissonance or value conflict, and you try to resolve this conflict. The end result I think, is your "one cultural network". It's the by-product of the negotiation that goes on in your head of different value systems. You make trade-offs, compromises, and forge conceptual links between different values to form an integrated, differentiated, "one cultural network" schema. You're able to articulate when, where, and why certain values are right over others, or you try to blend them together. It's the process of making an absolute out of not having any absolutes. I think cognitive complexity is definitely an outcome of this process.

    But this is easier said than done though-- the emotional consequences that many TCKs go through, and some never resolve, I think is the consequence of not being able to reach resolution. It's hard comparing apples and oranges, or qualitatively different value systems. Add on top of that the accountability pressures you face from the cultural groups in question and you drive yourself crazy.

    Anyway, great post. What is your real line of research? :) I used to be a molecular biologist but became a cross-cultural psychologist.
  • Lynn
    P.S. Also check out Tadmor and Tetlock (2006) in Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology.
  • I'm researching chemical vapor deposition of thin ruthenium films. Molecular biology, huh? Maybe it's not too late for me either.. :)
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