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What it means to incorporate several cultures on a deep level
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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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January 22nd, 2008 at 11:16 am
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
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January 22nd, 2008 at 3:57 pm
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…
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February 3rd, 2008 at 9:24 am
hi Neil
“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.”
I don’t know HOW that relates to the struggle of identity, but I know that it relates very tightly to it (or at least in my case).
When I repatriated to Brazil when I was 7, I felt the need/pressure to forget about my life and values from the UK. I find it’s related to the “either/or instead of both/and” construct that you talked about.
I’m not sure if this came from inside of me or from people around me, but I grew up believing that I could only be one OR the other.
UK and Brazil aren’t exactly very similar, so I grew up with a constant identity crysis and conflict of values.
From my younger years through my late teen age, I struggled as much as I could to NOT BE Brazilian, thus cultivating and maybe even exagerating some of the British values I had learned. I think sometimes it was all about being an opposite-Brazilian, because if I were anywhere near being a Brazilian it meant that I’d have to let go of being British.
I still don’t know if this is a natural human thought (that we have to be one OR the other) or if it was influenced by adults’ comments around me.
All I know is that I grew up in a country that was the opposite of many things I believed in. But at the same time, I thought it was my country. So there was a constant struggle inside of me, because I thought I HAD to be something that I couldn’t.
When I was 20 I decided to end this struggle by succumbing to the Brazlian culture and values. In a shallow level, I think I was successful (I went to the parties that everybody went, pretended to like the music that everybody did, pretended to behave just like them), but deep inside I had the feeling that I was getting farther and farther away from my real values.
It all came to an end when I was suffering from reverse cultural shock after having gone to Canada for 2 months, and found out about the TCK concept during the crysis.
Knowing about TCK gave me a sense of identity that I had never had before in my life.
It freed me from the obligation of being a Brazilian, thus “fixing” the last 5 years of identity/inner conflicts of my life (from 20 to 25, when I was shallowly happy for finally being able to fit in, but depressed deep inside for having to step away from my real values).
And at the same time, it freed me from the need of being anti-Brazilian (I don’t have to make a point in not-being one of them, because I don’t HAVE to be one of them). Thus “fixing” the inner conflicts I had had from 7 to 20.
Interestingly, it has also allowed me to like somethings from Brazil, that if I did before, I’d feel guilty (because then I would be betraying my “Britishness”).
So allowing myself to like/be parts of one AND parts of the other culture was very liberating.
I’m not sure this is good enough for a thesis, or even an article, but I am a living proof that the “either/or” thing has a HUGE impact on identity.
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February 3rd, 2008 at 10:53 am
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.
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February 26th, 2008 at 11:11 am
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.
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February 26th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
P.S. Also check out Tadmor and Tetlock (2006) in Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology.
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March 3rd, 2008 at 8:52 am
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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