rethinking culture

21
Rethinking Culture and Identity in Psychology: Towards a Transnational Cultural Psychology Sunil Bhatia Connecticut College Abstract This article shows how the construction of transnational migrant communities across international borders poses a challenge to the assumed “natural” isomorphism of space, nations, and cultures that typically exists in theories of cultural and cross-cultural psychology. One of the princi- pal aims of this article is to add to the critical impulse that initially defined the vision of cultural psychology by ana- lyzing how transnational diaspora communities have become new sites for the rethinking of core concepts such as culture, self, nation and identity. By drawing on Gupta and Ferguson’s (1992) work, I present three important ways through which cultural theorizing can be recon- figured in the present transnational context. Given that currently one-fifth of all children in the U.S. are immi- grants (Hernandez, 1999), questions related to acculturation, culture, and identity are central to the field of psychology. Furthermore, ques- tions about migration and the construction of identity are paramount today as the rate of immigrants in the U.S. rapidly increased in the 1990s to “nearly a million new immigrants per year” (Su ´ arez-Orozco & Su ´ arez-Orozco, 2001, p. 55). In our field, however, analyses of immi- grant populations, their patterns of social relations, and systems of meanings have continued to be enmeshed within theories that approach each society as a discrete and bounded entity with its own separate culture and history. Traditionally, much of mainstream psychology has been occupied with developing universal, linear models and theories of immigrant identity, acculturation and adaptation. For instance, cross-cultural psy- chologists have studied topics such as acculturation and acculturative stress (Berry, 1998), socialization and enculturation (Camilleri & Malewska-Peyre, 1997), and bicultural identity (LaFromboise, Cole- man & Gerton, 1998). This body of cross-cultural research, though commendable for bringing issues of immigrant identity to the table, has largely presented migration as a series of fixed phases and stages

Upload: aaron-ponce

Post on 11-Jul-2016

28 views

Category:

Documents


2 download

DESCRIPTION

Culture and diasporic communities

TRANSCRIPT

Page 1: Rethinking Culture

\\server05\productn\T\THE\27-2\THE202.txt unknown Seq: 1 22-APR-08 8:12

Rethinking Culture and Identity in Psychology: Towards aTransnational Cultural Psychology

Sunil Bhatia

Connecticut College

Abstract

This article shows how the construction of transnationalmigrant communities across international borders poses achallenge to the assumed “natural” isomorphism of space,nations, and cultures that typically exists in theories ofcultural and cross-cultural psychology. One of the princi-pal aims of this article is to add to the critical impulse thatinitially defined the vision of cultural psychology by ana-lyzing how transnational diaspora communities havebecome new sites for the rethinking of core concepts suchas culture, self, nation and identity. By drawing on Guptaand Ferguson’s (1992) work, I present three importantways through which cultural theorizing can be recon-figured in the present transnational context.

Given that currently one-fifth of all children in the U.S. are immi-grants (Hernandez, 1999), questions related to acculturation, culture,and identity are central to the field of psychology. Furthermore, ques-tions about migration and the construction of identity are paramounttoday as the rate of immigrants in the U.S. rapidly increased in the1990s to “nearly a million new immigrants per year” (Suarez-Orozco &Suarez-Orozco, 2001, p. 55). In our field, however, analyses of immi-grant populations, their patterns of social relations, and systems ofmeanings have continued to be enmeshed within theories thatapproach each society as a discrete and bounded entity with its ownseparate culture and history.

Traditionally, much of mainstream psychology has been occupiedwith developing universal, linear models and theories of immigrantidentity, acculturation and adaptation. For instance, cross-cultural psy-chologists have studied topics such as acculturation and acculturativestress (Berry, 1998), socialization and enculturation (Camilleri &Malewska-Peyre, 1997), and bicultural identity (LaFromboise, Cole-man & Gerton, 1998). This body of cross-cultural research, thoughcommendable for bringing issues of immigrant identity to the table,has largely presented migration as a series of fixed phases and stages

Page 2: Rethinking Culture

\\server05\productn\T\THE\27-2\THE202.txt unknown Seq: 2 22-APR-08 8:12

302 J. of Theoretical and Philosophical Psy. 27(2), 2007 & 28(1), 2008

that do not account for the specific culturally distinct and politicallyentrenched experiences of new transnational immigrants.

The “new” immigrants present a dramatically different demographicportrait from the previous great wave of immigration at the turn of thelast century. In 1890, more than 90% of immigrants were European.In 1990, only 25% of migrants were European, 25% were Asian, and43% were from Latin America (Rong & Preissle, 1998). This strikingshift can be largely attributed to the changes in immigration law in the1960s when several racially motivated “Exclusion Acts” were elimi-nated in order to meet the demands of the U.S. labor market(Mohanty, 1991). These new immigrants often find themselves strug-gling with asymmetrical cultural positions, racially charged contexts,and an oppressive political rhetoric. This article shows how the con-struction of transnational migrant communities across internationalborders poses a challenge to the assumed “natural” isomorphism ofspace, nations, and cultures that typically exists in theories of culturaland cross-cultural psychology.

According to van der Veer (1992, p.1), in the early 1990s, about 8million South Asians, 22 million Chinese, 11 million Jews, 300 millionpeople of African descent and 350 million Europeans were living asmigrant populations. The formation of diaspora cultures as tran-scending space and time has led to the creation of identities that areoften characterized as multiple, fractured, dual, shifting, and hybrid-ized. The investigation of these identities is critical because they notonly make up huge swathes of our population, but also provide a veryvaluable site from which psychology has an opportunity to remakeitself as a field that continues to be relevant in a world that is rapidlybecoming transnational, diverse, and global.

Conceptualizing Culture and Identity

In an effort to distinguish cross-cultural psychology from culturalpsychology and cultural anthropology, Segall, Lonner and Berry (1998)define culture as “comprising a set of independent or contextual vari-ables affecting various aspects of individual behavior” (p.1102). Con-cepts such as culture, society, and history are defined as a broad classof variables that are designated as objective and universal. Further-more, universalist assumptions about culture are based on the idea thatthere are: “basic characteristics common to all members of the species(i.e., constituting a set of psychological givens) and that culture influ-ences the development and display of them (i.e., culture plays differentvariations on these underlying themes called ‘variform universals’)” (p.1104).

There are several limitations to describing the concept of culture as avariable. Separating culture from individual psychological operationsor psychological processes is based on the notion that the self has some

Page 3: Rethinking Culture

\\server05\productn\T\THE\27-2\THE202.txt unknown Seq: 3 22-APR-08 8:12

Rethinking Culture 303

natural properties that are already assumed to be there prior to cul-ture. The “psychological givens” refers to a core, essential self that hasan independent, objective, universal reality. The role of culture as avariable, then, is to shape or mold the psychological operations or the“underlying variform universals” that are contained in the universalself. Elaborating on the different aspects of the universal self, Segall,Lonner and Berry (1998) suggest that cross cultural psychologistsexamine “cultural variables very carefully (a process they call ‘peelingthe onion’) in order to reveal the ‘psychic’ unity of mankind at the coreof culture” (p. 1104). They state that “most cross-cultural psycholo-gists, whose ultimate concern is with individual behavior, use the con-cept of culture to identify contexts or to designate a set of antecedentvariables” (p. 105). Classifying culture as an “antecedent” variable andthe properties of the self as universal, natural and pre-given is a viewthat plays an important role in shaping acculturation research in cross-cultural psychology.

Consider, for example, how the concept of culture is designated as avariable in cross-cultural psychology to describe the acculturation pro-cess of immigrants. Berry and Sam’s (1998) definition of acculturationbasically assumes that all immigrating individuals and groups manifestthe same kind of psychological operations during the acculturationprocess. The social and historical factors that influence an immigrant’sacculturation are, at best, referred to as a “broad class of variables”that are different and separate from psychological-individual level vari-ables (Berry and Sam, 1998, p. 300). Such a view emphasizes the pointthat although different immigrants are influenced by distinctive cul-tural “variables” such as history, ethnicity, race and gender, the“underlying” psychological operations involved in the acculturationprocess are not taken to be mutually constituted with those “vari-ables” or properties of culture. Thus, for Berry and his colleagues, cul-ture and history are variables that enable the “display” of the pre-given properties of the acculturating self, but these very variables arenot taken to be inextricably interwoven with the self. The historicaland political aspects of immigration rarely enter the discussion, andwhen they do, they are classified as group variables.

The new cultural psychology movement started out as a critique ofgeneral psychology and the “variable approach” in cross-cultural psy-chology. In contrast to cross-cultural psychology, culture in culturalpsychology is not described as an independent variable, but as an inter-pretive concept. Cultural psychology refers to the resources, language,communicative practices, artifacts, tools, institutions, myths, practices,customs, histories, everyday activities, and folklore that mediate thedevelopment of self and human mental functioning. Bruner (1986,1990), in particular, contributed to the understanding of identity interms of the narrative construction of self from cultural resources and

Page 4: Rethinking Culture

\\server05\productn\T\THE\27-2\THE202.txt unknown Seq: 4 22-APR-08 8:12

304 J. of Theoretical and Philosophical Psy. 27(2), 2007 & 28(1), 2008

processes. Bruner (1990) writes that “cultural psychology, almost bydefinition, will not be preoccupied with ‘behavior’ but with action, itsintentionally based counterpart, and more specifically with situatedaction in a cultural setting and in the mutually interacting intentionalstates of the participants” (p. 19). In short, Bruner is concerned withhow people use canonical and ordinary understanding of events tointerpret and give “narrative meaning” to breaches, deviation, andother extraordinary mitigating conditions in everyday, cultural life. Thefocus here is not only on understanding cultural meaning systemsthrough sense and reference, but also on how individuals make senseof the cultural events around them.

Shweder (1990) outlined a vision of contemporary cultural psychol-ogy—as the study of “the way cultural traditions and social practicesregulate, express, transform, and permute the human psyche, resultingless in psychic unity for human kind than in ethnic divergences inmind, self, and emotion” (p.1). This vision of cultural psychology hasbeen reconstituted and expanded upon by cultural psychologists whoadopt a sociocultural approach to studying human development andhuman action (Cole, 1996; Rogoff, 1991; Werstch, 1998; Valsiner,1998). Cole shares the vision of cultural psychology that is articulatedby Shweder and the sociocultural theory offered by Wertsch but differsfrom them by adopting a cultural-historical approach to studyinghuman action and human mental functioning. The basic thesis of thisapproach, as explained by Cole (1996), “is that the structure and devel-opment of human psychological processes emerge through culturallymediated, historically developing, practical activity” (p.108).

Cultural psychologists are fundamentally concerned with the soci-ocultural situatedness of all human mental functioning. Socioculturalpsychologists bring a developmental and interpretive perspective tounderstanding human action. For instance, Wertsch (1998) believesthat the “task of a sociocultural approach is to explicate the relation-ship between human action, on the one hand, and the cultural, institu-tional and historical contexts in which this action occurs, on the other”(p. 24). He is interested in looking at the tension between the agentand mediational means or the ways in which cultural tools—such aslanguage, narrative, and communication—shape human mental func-tioning. Wertsch’s analysis of mediated action is intended to emphasizethe mutual interaction between the culture and the individual.

A cursory examination of the vision of cultural psychology offeredby these prominent scholars tells us that they are all concerned withexplaining how culture as a system of everyday practices, customs, tra-ditions, and artifacts shapes the contours of human identity and think-ing. Additionally, their focus is on delineating the social and culturalfoundations of human development and the joint and co-constructednature of all human action. The basic framework of cultural psychol-

Page 5: Rethinking Culture

\\server05\productn\T\THE\27-2\THE202.txt unknown Seq: 5 22-APR-08 8:12

Rethinking Culture 305

ogy goes well beyond the mechanistic and central processing metaphoremployed by general psychology to explain human action. It tran-scends the platonic universalism of both cross-cultural psychology andgeneral psychology and gives us a dynamic, situated, and practice-based notion of culture. It focuses on the creation of symbolic mean-ing as grounded in everyday life and seeks to explain the constructed,mediated, and relational nature of all human activity.

All three proponents of cultural psychology—Bruner, Shweder andCole—imagine cultural psychology as an interpretive discipline thatuses methodologies from the social sciences and the humanities. Thesetheorists focus on symbolic meanings, practices, and activity contexts,but they have neglected to discuss the implications of transnationalism,migration, and creation of diaspora communities for the concepts ofculture, identity, and difference. The key arguments of this article fallwithin the overarching framework and vision of cultural psychology,but my larger aim is to push its horizon and theoretical scope toinclude an analysis of migration, diasporic cultures, and global identi-ties. The vision of theorists such as Bruner, Cole, and Shweder is broadenough in its scope to include those critical definitions of culture thathave been discussed by scholars in cultural anthropology and diasporastudies in order to address conflicting and contested notions of cultureand identity.

Transnationalism and Diaspora

The displacement of millions of migrant laborers, refugees and pro-fessionals from the postcolonial “Third World” to the “First World”and the formation of numerous migrant “ethnic enclaves” is now oneof the most important defining features of the 20th century. Thesemovements of dislocation and displacement are the defining featuresof our contemporary globalized world. Much of this displacement hasoccurred and continues to do so in relation to imperialist and coloniallegacies, “for in some sense, the Third-Worldization and hybridizationin the First World merely follow upon the prior flows of population,armies, goods, and capital that in the colonial era mainly moved out-ward” (Lavie & Swedenberg, 1996, p. 9).

Diasporas distinctly attempt to maintain (real and/or imagined) con-nections and commitments to their homeland and recognize them-selves as a collective community. In other words, people who simplylive outside their ancestral homeland cannot automatically be consid-ered as living in diasporas (Toloyan, 1996). Where once the term wasused to refer to the migrations of Jewish populations, it now refers to abroad range of dislocations experienced by several groups of people.The term diaspora has been increasingly used both in scholarly dis-course and the larger lay community. Toloyan attributes the expandingusage of this term in part to the acceleration of immigration to the

Page 6: Rethinking Culture

\\server05\productn\T\THE\27-2\THE202.txt unknown Seq: 6 22-APR-08 8:12

306 J. of Theoretical and Philosophical Psy. 27(2), 2007 & 28(1), 2008

industrialized worlds; to the lack of assimilation of many immigrantgroups; to institutional links with the homeland; to sustained work bymany immigrant groups to create and maintain their own religiousinstitutions, language schools, community centers, newspapers, andradio stations; and to the American university itself where manydiasporan elites have converged to forge theoretical sites to addressimmigrant identity and transnationalism (Bhatia, 2007). Examples ofdiasporic immigrants in the United States are Armenian-Americans,Japanese-Americans, Asian-Indians, Latino/a and Chicano/a commu-nities in the U.S., and so on.

Race has always played a key role in constructing the collectiveidentity of the diaspora. Given the existence of racial prejudice inAmerican society, these non-European/non-white immigrants morelikely have had to face exclusion and discrimination than their Euro-pean counterparts. These non-European/non-white diasporic commu-nities bring into sharp relief the sense of constantly negotiatingbetween here and there, past and present, homeland and hostland, selfand other. Subsequently, through personal and collective remember-ing, tales of discrimination, hardships and sheer exploitation are keptalive in most non-European, non-white immigrant communities. Suchnarratives have played a large part in constructing and maintainingwhat are known as diasporas. Such negotiations have not been ade-quately recognized or understood in many of the acculturation modelsand the existing current literature on immigrant experiences in thefield of cultural and cross-cultural psychology.

Although the term transnational has been around for more than twodecades and has been used in various contexts, it was first employed bycultural anthropologists Nina Glick-Schiller, Linda Basch, and Chris-tian Szanton-Blanc (1995) as a theoretical construct to study contem-porary migrant communities in the early 1990s. The concept oftransnationalism was used by these scholars to provide a new analyticframework to understand how the new immigrants construct andreinvent their cultures and identities as they move between interna-tional borders, multiple societies, and nation states. Glick-Schiller,Basch, and Blanc (1995) define the new “immigrants as ‘transnational’whose lived experiences and every day activities are shaped by multi-ple connections and linkages to several nations and cultures throughtravel, technology, and media” (p. 48). The web of contradictory dis-courses related to race, community, ethnicity, and loyalty experiencedby the new transnational immigrants as well as their children demandthat we rethink our traditional notions of culture and acculturation.

The term transnationalism has gained importance in contemporarystudies of capital flows, commodities, public spaces, social movements,migration circuits, non-governmental organization, trade and citizen-ship. Vertovec (1999) suggests that this term has been used among soci-

Page 7: Rethinking Culture

\\server05\productn\T\THE\27-2\THE202.txt unknown Seq: 7 22-APR-08 8:12

Rethinking Culture 307

ologists, feminists, and anthropologists in six distinct but overlappingways—as “social morphology,” “type of consciousness,” “mode of cul-tural reproduction,” “avenue of capital,” “a site of political engage-ment,” and “reconstruction of place or locality” (p. 447). The socialformations, as reflected in the creation of diasporas, are createdthrough dense networks of people spanning ties to multiple nationsand global spaces and are described as transforming institutions, eco-nomic, political structures, and cultural spaces in both the host societyand the homeland.

Clifford (1994) pointed out that the concept of diaspora, with itsoverreaching and all-encompassing function, often results in a slippage“between invocations of diaspora experience, diasporic discourses, anddistinct historical experiences of diaspora.” These three aspects of thediaspora do indeed get entangled with each other in practice becausetheorizing about the diaspora, according to Clifford (1994), is “alwaysembedded in particular maps and histories”(p. 302).

One useful way to think about diaspora is to examine it either as atypology, a “descriptive term” or as a “condition” that is producedthrough and embedded in particular historical, socio-cultural, eco-nomic and political experiences of movement, dislocation and displace-ment (Anthias, 1998; Brah, 1996; Vertovec, 1999). Scholars concernedwith mapping an objective or classical definition of diaspora oftenwork from a list of features or qualities that have become the criteriafor defining the boundaries of the concept of diaspora. For example,Safran (1991) writes that members of diasporic community: (a) share ahistory of being dispersed from a common point of origin or a home-land; (b) construct memories of the homeland and express a deep long-ing for the eventual return to their homeland; (c) often experiencediscrimination and marginality in their new location; and (d) maintaina sense of collective consciousness and solidarity with each other. Whatfails to get mentioned in the typological approaches, Anthias (1998)asserts, is the way in which the different diaspora groups are sociallypositioned to each other within and between groups and also in rela-tion to the larger society of their homeland. The performance ofdiverse cultural rituals and routines may give rise to a sense of ethnicidentity that incorporate notions of race, class and gender in radicallydifferent ways. Thus, the diasporic condition is not only created as aresult of movement and displacement but is intricately interwoven withthe cultural shifts that have occurred in both the modern and post-modern world. Clifford (1994) argues that Safran’s objectivist criteriafor identifying groups as diasporas are based on an “ideal type” thatmainly fits the Jewish diaspora. He observes that not all diasporas orstories of displacement and violent dispersal are based on a “teleologyof return” (p. 306). Pointing to South-Asian and African diasporas inthe U.S. and Britain, he argues that these dispersed communities are

Page 8: Rethinking Culture

\\server05\productn\T\THE\27-2\THE202.txt unknown Seq: 8 22-APR-08 8:12

308 J. of Theoretical and Philosophical Psy. 27(2), 2007 & 28(1), 2008

not necessarily seeking an eventual return to their homeland, as such,and are mainly interested in maintaining and creating the culture thatthey left behind.

Glick-Schiller, Basch and Szanton-Blanc (1995) argue that contem-porary migrants construct their identities by inhabiting multiple cul-tures, societies, and languages. How is this simultaneous linkage andembeddedness of self and identity in multiple social fields constitutedand reconstituted? The new transnational migration has realigned theconception of majority and minority cultures and the concomitant con-cepts of assimilation, resistance, adaptation, and ethnicity that areassociated with it (Clifford, 1994).

Mohanty (1991) points out that the immigration and citizenship poli-cies of the U.S. in the last 200 years have been state-fostered “racialregimes” intended to keep “slaves,” “indentured laborers” and non-European “foreigners” as aliens and outsiders (pp. 23-25). Further-more, she suggests that the history of immigration and naturalizationin the U.S. parallels the process of racialization that spans the annihila-tion of Native Americans, the history of slavery and the civil rightsmovement. By comparing the history of the immigration of Europeanpeople and the history of the immigration of the “people of color” tothe U.S., Mohanty (1991) suggests the patterns of immigration and citi-zenship laws for both groups (European and non-European) werebased on racial heritage and the “economic exigencies” of the state (p.24).

The experience of migrant identity in contemporary diaspora cultureis firmly intertwined with socio-cultural factors such as colonialism,immigration, and racialized laws (Bhatia and Ram, 2001, 2004). Thekey point for many scholars of migration is that if the concept of dias-pora is to serve as a useful analytical tool to understand new forms ofidentity, then diasporic journeys and formations must be historicizedand explained through a framework that shows difference and similari-ties within and between groups. We need to show how these variousdiaspora groups are positioned in relation to the dominant group in thesocial structures and divisions of society (Brah, 1996).

In sum, transnational practices and diaspora communities havebecome important sites for the reconstruction of culture, identity,diversity and difference. In these sites, personhood acquires hybrid,creolized, hyphenated cultural properties and gets transformed into an“other” with multiple, shifting and conflicting identities. If the conceptof diaspora is to serve as a useful analytical tool for comprehending theconstruction of identity in the present transnational world, then wemust reexamine the specific ways in which the central concept of cul-ture is being reconfigured and contested.

Page 9: Rethinking Culture

\\server05\productn\T\THE\27-2\THE202.txt unknown Seq: 9 22-APR-08 8:12

Rethinking Culture 309

Rethinking Culture in Re-territorialized Spheres

Several scholars in anthropology and sociology have been concernedabout how the formation of diasporas across international bordersforce us to reconfigure the concept of culture and society and how timeand space are manifested in these concepts of culture. It is not surpris-ing that the back and forth movement of migrants across the globe hascoincided with the formation of new concepts, such as “decentering,”“hyperspace,” “deterritorialization,” “marginality,” “borderlands,”“transnational and diasporic spheres,” and “core and periphery.”

Gupta and Ferguson (1992) remark that these new concepts “forceus to reevaluate such central analytic concepts in anthropology as thatof ‘culture,’ and by extension, the idea of ‘cultural difference’ ” (p. 6).They outlined three important ways in which the concept of culture isproblematized and reconfigured in the present, global context. Most ofthe concepts related to culture in cross-cultural psychology are perme-ated with the idea that societies and cultures are distinctive entitiescreated by fragmentary, disconnected spaces. It is assumed that “dis-continuity forms the starting point from which to theorize contact, con-flict and contradictions between cultures and societies” (Gupta &Ferguson, 1992, p. 6). As a result of this assumption, we have a worldthat is neatly divided into nations and countries, each representing itsown culture, and, thus, the colors and lines on a world map areintended to reflect nations as disjointed, self-contained and, boundedby its territory and space. There is a belief that as we step into theseunitary spaces, we will see a variety of cultures, customs, and socialpractices that are unique to that place. For example, when an outsideror a foreigner embarks to visit the space associated with India, it isassumed that this non-native person will find Indian culture in all itsforms. Similarly, when one visits Germany, it is understood that onewill get a taste of German culture and a trip to the Untied States willpresent the tourist with the experience of “American culture.” Thephysical space or geographical territory with which cultures are associ-ated provides a “neutral grid” or a “central organizing principle” ontowhich ideas of “cultural difference, historical memory, and societalorganization are inscribed” (Gupta & Ferguson, 1992, p. 7).

The idea of culture as a discrete, spatial entity with its own bounda-ries gets contested when we look at how migrants, other transnationalprofessionals and low-wage workers, frequently cross borders. Howdoes one define the culture of the borderland or of migrant workerswho live in both Mexico and the U.S? How do borderlands force us toreconceptualize received notions of culture? Beside the culture of bor-derlands, there are cases of migrants, refugees, and expatriates whomove from one settlement to another, putting down their roots andcarrying their “culture” with them to new places of belonging. Thesegroups represent a rupture or a clear physical break between culture

Page 10: Rethinking Culture

\\server05\productn\T\THE\27-2\THE202.txt unknown Seq: 10 22-APR-08 8:12

310 J. of Theoretical and Philosophical Psy. 27(2), 2007 & 28(1), 2008

and nation, because they take their culture to the new homeland andreinvent and reimagine it in their new diaspora.

Gupta and Ferguson point out that the second problem that emergeswith the indirect juxtaposing of culture onto places is the dilemma ofhow to explain cultural differences and cultural variation within agiven locale. The multiculturalism movement has attempted to incor-porate notions of cultural variation within its larger conceptual frame-work. However, “multiculturalism,” Gupta and Ferguson (1992) argue,is both a “feeble acknowledgment of the fact that cultures have losttheir moorings in definite places and an attempt to subsume this plu-rality of cultures within the framework of a national identity” (p. 7).Another way in which cultural variation has been explained is throughthe idea of subcultures. The concept of subcultures reinforces thenotion that there are plural cultures, but these plural cultures aredescribed as existing in relation to a dominant or majority culturewithin the same space.

Similarly, where people from different regions live together, weoften invoke traditional notions of ethnicity to describe cultural varia-tion within a given neighborhood. We tend to explain those differ-ences by establishing natural linkages between people’s ethnicidentities and the places in which they live. For example, traditionalnotions of Italian and Irish identity in cross-cultural psychology aredefined by the physical relation to their respective national spacerather than to their “imagined,” “re-invented” notion of Italiannessand Irishness in their new world. The “new ethnics” from Mexico orChina, living in the borderlands and diasporas, have a much more com-plicated and contested relationship with the assumed national space oftheir origin than has been articulated by cross-cultural or culturalpsychologists.

The important question of postcoloniality, write Gupta and Fergu-son (1992), is “which places do the hybrid cultures of postcolonialitybelong?” (p.8). Does the colonial encounter create a “new culture” inboth the colonized and colonizing country, or does it destabilize thenotion that nations and cultures are isomorphic? For example, theterm culture as generally defined in cross cultural psychology and spe-cifically operationalized” in the acculturation model proposed byBerry and his colleagues both implicitly and explicitly posits one Indiaor one China or one Japan and so on, “out there” in a fixed geographi-cal and territorial space. Such a conception of culture overlooks howthe growing presence of diasporic communities, with their continuousback and forth negotiations between the cultures of their homelandand their hostland, contradict and contest homogenous and stableunderstandings of culture (Bhatia, 2002).

Page 11: Rethinking Culture

\\server05\productn\T\THE\27-2\THE202.txt unknown Seq: 11 22-APR-08 8:12

Rethinking Culture 311

It is important to mention here that in the world of diaspora andborderland formations, the concept of space has not become irrelevantbut rather

it has been reterritorialized in a way that does not con-form to the experience of space that characterizes the eraof high modernity. It is this that forces us to reconceptual-ize fundamentally the politics of community, solidarity,identity, and cultural difference. (Gupta & Ferguson,1992, p. 9)

How is this concept of culture being reterritorialized?

Towards a Transnational Cultural Psychology

We live in an age where transnational immigration, border crossingsand global media are proliferating at an increasing rate. Discussionsabout the self — which are further intensified by issues of gender,class, sexuality, ethnicity and nationality — challenge the grand narra-tives of the bounded Cartesian self. Acquiring knowledge about issuesof self and identity becomes all the more critical in the face of sweep-ing demographic changes in the United States and Europe whereencounters with diverse histories, languages, religions, and ethnicitieshave emerged as central to the daily lives in many urban, metropolitancultural spaces.

The phenomenon of migration and displacement of people acrossthe different parts of the globe should be central to the field of psy-chology. In particular, the concept of diaspora forces both cross-cul-tural and cultural psychologists to reexamine how we define culture,community, and cultural difference in a world where international bor-ders are becoming porous, and journeys, travel and migration betweengeographical spaces are rampant. The construction of transnationalselves across the “First World” are global and plural, but the theoriesthat are used in “American Psychology” continue to frame self andidentity within local frameworks. These local, conceptual frameworks,while useful in many respects, have failed to address the conflict andcomplexity that these hybrid identities have come to represent.

The concepts of culture and self need to be problematized andreconfigured within the context of a global and transnational culturalpsychology. The field of psychology has focused on the mutual consti-tution between culture and self, but has not yet investigated the com-plexities associated with the formation of the selves and identities thatare created in the borderland and the postcolonial diasporas. The ideaof a transnational sphere makes any narrow, atomic, and boundednotion of a community and culture outdated. Diasporas have led to thearticulation of new forms of selfhood, community, and solidarity thatare not based on the concept of space where “contiguity and face-to-

Page 12: Rethinking Culture

\\server05\productn\T\THE\27-2\THE202.txt unknown Seq: 12 22-APR-08 8:12

312 J. of Theoretical and Philosophical Psy. 27(2), 2007 & 28(1), 2008

face contact are paramount” (Gupta & Ferguson, 1992, p. 8). Theglobal movements between capital, labor, goods, people, and ideashave enabled the creation of transnational spaces and diasporic cul-tures. In these spaces, culture and its components such as home, lan-guage, and self refers to multiple dwelling points. There is a qualitativedistinction between contemporary immigrants and past immigrants ofthe early twentieth century (Glick-Schiller, Basch, and Szanton-Blanc,1995). The story of the earlier form of immigration involves images ofpermanent displacement and a complete break from their homelandand a hard transition to a new language and life in a new world. Thejourney involved a movement away from one’s culture and customsand a step towards acquiring an ethnic identity and then an eventualassimilation in the “melting pot” of the majority culture.

Capturing the essence of how contemporary migrants access theirnostalgic memories of home, Rushdie (1991) writes:

our physical alienation from India almost inevitablymeans that we will not be capable of reclaiming preciselythe thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fic-tions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imag-inary homelands, Indias of the mind. (p.10)

Postcolonial theorist R. Radhakrishnan in his book, Diasporic Media-tions (1996), uses his own experience as an Indian immigrant in theUnited States as a point of entry to reflect critically on how any under-standing of culture is inevitably linked with current debates on thepolitics of culture, colonialism, and transnationalism. For instance, hequestions what it means “to be” from a particular culture, as in “beingIndian.” His eleven-year-old son’s question, “Am I Indian or Ameri-can?” compels him to question the authenticity of cultural identity.Contemporary global movements and globalization impulses (vari-ously motivated) force us to abandon such seamless conceptions ofsimilarities and differences between national cultures in favor ofhybridized, diasporized, and heterogeneous notions of culture (Hall,1993, p. 356). To posit static, immovable, immutable constructions ofculture is a convenient fiction that allows us, as Hall (1991) acerbicallyremarks, “to get a good night’s sleep.” For it allows us to believe that,in spite of the fact that history is “constantly breaking in unpredictableways . . . we somehow go on being the same” (p. 43).

In the last decade many prominent scholars of migration studieshave pointed out that the canonical “straight-line” and linear assimila-tion theory proposed by Warner and Srole (1945) is not useful indescribing the contemporary patterns of non-European migration.Alba and Nee (2003) write that these old theories of assimilation areformulated on the assumption that assimilation in American society issuccessful when ethnic groups “unlearn” and drop their cultural prac-tices and rituals. This model of acculturation is defined as “unlineal

Page 13: Rethinking Culture

\\server05\productn\T\THE\27-2\THE202.txt unknown Seq: 13 22-APR-08 8:12

Rethinking Culture 313

acculturation — where the bargain was straightforward: please checkall your cultural baggage before you pass through the Golden Gate”(Suarez-Orozco & Suarez-Orozco, 2001, p. 160). Assimilation inAmerican society occurred through the erasure of one’s cultural iden-tity, unlearning one’s ethnic cultural practices and beliefs, entering“the melting pot” and successfully acquiring the core values of main-stream American culture. Becoming American, in these old models ofacculturation, was clearly associated with becoming “white.” Immigra-tion scholars Richard Alba and Victor Nee (2003) elaborate on thispoint:

Another feature that has been found objectionable in theold formulation of assimilation is its apparent ethnocen-trism, which elevates a particular cultural model, that ofmiddle-class Protestant whites of British ancestry, to thenormative standard by which other groups are to beassessed and toward which they should aspire . . . Assimi-lation then meant becoming more like middle-class Prot-estant whites. (p. 4)

Thus, within the context of the rapid migration of people from non-European countries, Alba and Nee (2003) ask an important question:“How then should assimilation be defined, given the prospects for amore racially diverse mainstream arising from large-scale migration ofnon-Europeans?” (p. 11). Similarly, other scholars of migration such asSuarez-Orozco & Suarez-Orozco (2001) write that within the contextof the migration of the non-European, non-English speaking popula-tion, the “incantation of many observers — acculturate, acculturate,acculturate — needs rethinking. . . the first issue that needs airing isthe basic question of ‘acculturating to what?’ ” (p. 157).

Theories of assimilation are being reconceptualized by incorporatingissues related to contemporary ideas and realities, such as boundarycrossings, race and transnational activities. Scholars have recentlyincorporated the transnational aspects of current migration by propos-ing concepts such as “segmented assimilation” (Portes & Zhou, 1993),“transnational communities” (Glick-Schiller, Basch & Szanton-Blanc,1995), and “transnational villager” (Levitt, 2001). All these terms referto the ways in which the experiences of the new first- and second-gen-eration immigrants are shaped by the back and forth movementbetween multiple homes and societies, communication between homeand host cultures via media and technology, commercial linkages andfinancial remittances between sending and receiving societies, racialencounters and discrimination in the host society, the culture of theinner city area, the presence of social networks across borders, and theimmigrant communities’ emphasis on the preservation of their homeculture. In particular, Suarez-Orozco and Suarez-Orozco (2001) havehighlighted the psychosocial experiences associated with migration and

Page 14: Rethinking Culture

\\server05\productn\T\THE\27-2\THE202.txt unknown Seq: 14 22-APR-08 8:12

314 J. of Theoretical and Philosophical Psy. 27(2), 2007 & 28(1), 2008

how the majority of children of these non-European immigrants and“people of color” come to “experience American culture from the van-tage point of poor urban neighborhoods. Limited opportunities, ethnictensions, violence, drugs, and gangs characterize many of these set-tings” (pp.157-158).

Several scholars working within a transnational framework of accul-turation point out that experiences of the children of European immi-grants in the early part of the century cannot be used as a guide tostudy the experiences of the new, mostly non-European second-gener-ation immigrants. Portes and Zhou (1993) who outlined three possibleacculturation pathways for second-generation migrants explained:

One of them replicates the time-honored portrayal ofgrowing acculturation and parallel integration into thewhite middle-class; a second leads straight into the oppo-site direction to permanent poverty and assimilation intothe underclass; still a third associates rapid economicadvancement with deliberate preservation of the immi-grant’s community’s values and tight solidarity. (p. 82)

Immigrants living in transnational diasporas are connected to dualsocieties and inhabit multiple homes, roles, identities and languages.Their networks and ideas of belonging transcend national boundariesthat bring together the local and the global, and the home and hostculture, into a single “social field.” Glick-Schiller, Basch and Szanton-Blanc (1995) define the new immigrants as transmigrants whose pat-tern of activities are structured around multiple and continuous link-ages across the national borders. Immigrants reinvent and reconstructtheir identity as they move from the culture of their homeland to theirnew cultures. The developmental processes that underpin migrantidentity are structured by multiple end goals. Such goals are mani-fested through localized power struggles, and asymmetrical relation-ships of privilege in our communities. These ideological struggles inthese community practices are often about what constitutes a norma-tive identity, or what cultural standards one should uphold in our life.

Such struggles about the norms or “core values” have deep implica-tions for not only how we live generally, but also how we go aboutdiscussing issues of immigration, culture, acculturation, and selfhood.The concept of hybridity allows us to explore the politics of identityconstruction from multiple and conflicting developmental goals. Itaffords us with analyzing how new identities are being constructed as aresult of travel and movement between “here” and “there,” home andelsewhere, des (home) and pardes (abroad), and the center and theperiphery.

If cultural psychology–or rather any psychology anchored in thepolitics of culture— is to become relevant in the contemporary global

Page 15: Rethinking Culture

\\server05\productn\T\THE\27-2\THE202.txt unknown Seq: 15 22-APR-08 8:12

Rethinking Culture 315

world, it must pay attention to the ways in which diasporic, hyphenatedand hybridized identities are being formed across first world metropol-itan cities. The concepts of culture and identity that I have articulatedabove by using the framework of transnational diasporas pushes cul-tural psychology to reexamine how it theorizes about the centralnotion of culture in its expanding body of knowledge. Bruner (1986,1990) outlined a vision of cultural psychology that was primarily con-cerned with examining the “folk psychology” or the “folk human sci-ence” of how people with desires, beliefs, goals and intentional statesinhabit symbolic worlds and use narrative to make meaning and inter-pret their experiences. Shweder (1990) theorized about cultural prac-tices, and Cole (1996) adopted a cultural historical approach. Humanmental functioning and psychological processes are conceived toemerge as a result of new forms of activity in which individuals employtools to alter the cultural and material organization of everyday life,including using language as a semiotic tool to organize and structuresocial relationships, cultural activities and mental functions. Culture isformed as a result of the historically accumulated experiences with allthe artifacts that social groups have produced and implemented oversuccessive generations.

If we combine the key concepts of cultural psychology that are out-lined by Cole, Bruner and Shweder, we can begin to build the basicfoundation for the discipline of contemporary cultural psychology.Clearly, what is missing in the building blocks of cultural psychology ishow the rapid formation of diasporas as transnational communities,the collusion between the first and third world spaces, the spread ofglobal contexts, the creation of hybrid-identities and movement ofhighly skilled labor, people, ideas, commodities, artifacts across inter-national borders have led to new configurations of culture and self. Weknow that concepts such as race, class, and power are intricately wovenwith the fabric of culture and their meanings are recreated in thediasporic spaces. However, both cross-cultural and cultural psychologyhave yet to take up the mantle of exploring how the concepts thatmake up the components of culture acquire new meanings within thecontexts of transnational migration.

Implications for the Concepts of Acculturation and Assimilation

Bruner’s emphasis on individual and collective processes of sense-making through using overarching concepts such as culture and iden-tity needs to be extended to the contemporary domain of transnationalmigration. These transnational negotiations of self in diasporic commu-nities are filtered through the prism of race and nationality, and thesekinds of identity negotiation are commonplace in the migrant commu-nities such as Mexican-Americans, Arab-Americans, Chinese-Canadi-ans, Turkish-Germans, Franco-Maghrebi and British-Indians across the

Page 16: Rethinking Culture

\\server05\productn\T\THE\27-2\THE202.txt unknown Seq: 16 22-APR-08 8:12

316 J. of Theoretical and Philosophical Psy. 27(2), 2007 & 28(1), 2008

“First World” metropolitan cites. The back and forth transnationalmovement of the new, non-European migrants between multiple cul-tures, societies, homes and languages has played an important role inshaping their acculturation trajectories in the U.S. When new immi-grants enter the United States, they are introduced to the stories, lega-cies and the immigration heritage of their respective ethnic group.Kondo (1996) analyzes how the memory of the incarceration of Japa-nese Americans and emblematic cases such as the beating death ofVincent Chin, a Chinese-American engineer by two white unemployedautoworkers, represent the contested notions of community and homeas experienced and narrated by many Asian immigrants.

When theorizing about acculturation, a common approach in cross-cultural psychology has been to assume a rather distinct separationbetween an immigrant’s home culture and the host culture. Hermansand Kempen (1998) noted that acculturation in cross-cultural psychol-ogy is seen as the process by which a particular individual moves fromculture A to culture B in a fairly linear fashion. Typically, this distinc-tion between the home and host culture is taken to be at the nationallevel.

The slippage of nation with culture is quite pervasive in the cross-cultural literature. Hofstede (1980) cautions the reader to be carefulwhen discussing cultural difference solely at the national level and heoffers a series of categories that include gender, generation, ethnicity,etc. However, such categories are then put aside in favor of “collectingdata” at the level of nations because he argues that it makes “practicalsense to focus on cultural factors separating or uniting nations” (p. 12-13). Similarly, Gudykunst and Kim (1997), both of whom have beenvery influential in developing acculturation research, state that usuallyboundaries between cultures coincide with boundaries between coun-tries. Other prominent scholars like Segall, Lonner, and Berry (1998)refer to the preponderance of interest by cross-cultural psychologists inexamining the notion of individualism-collectivism as a cultural charac-teristic across “national samples.”

Conflating culture with nation is an extremely problematic position.Anderson (1991, p. 3) has famously argued that nation, nationality andnationalism are notoriously difficult to define, let alone analyze. Toposit that the “nation” can be understood as a durable, ontological,material, geopolitical concept ignores the counter narratives, the con-tested identities, and the historical inventions that continuously chal-lenge any unified understanding of a nation. A nation is more than ageographically identified space; rather, it is what Anderson terms an“imagined community,” what Renan (1990, p. 19) calls a “spiritualprinciple” constituted by memories that swallow up discordant details,and what Bhabha (1994, p. 297) refers to as a series of narrations con-structed by “scraps, patches and rags.”

Page 17: Rethinking Culture

\\server05\productn\T\THE\27-2\THE202.txt unknown Seq: 17 22-APR-08 8:12

Rethinking Culture 317

Moreover, when we consider the history of colonialism, we areforced to abandon national-level classifications of culture. Postcolonialwriters have persistently sought to demonstrate how formerly colo-nized cultures bear indelible, imperial inscriptions. As Spivak (1993, p.48) comments, the “subject-position of the citizen of a recentlydecolonized ‘nation’ is epistemically fractured,” and can “inhabitwidely different epistemes, violently at odds with each other.” The nowinfamous, but then celebrated, Macaulay Minute, stated with imperialcertitude that: “We (the British) must at present do our best to form. . . a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, inopinions, in morals and in intellect” (Macaulay, 1835/1972, p. 249). Soif history and culture are inseparably tied to the construction of self,then any discussion with regard to an Indian immigrant, for example,must account for the cultural genealogy of “English India,” whichaccording to Suleri (1992, p. 3) is extensive enough to include bothcolonial and postcolonial histories.

From the formation of the modern nation state that is deeply inter-twined with colonial and imperialist policies to the vast flows of migra-tion from “Third World” postcolonial societies to the “First World,”the idea that culture can be circumscribed and defined by nationalboundaries is highly debatable. Cross-cultural psychology in general,and the acculturation model proposed by Berry and his colleagues inparticular, is circumscribed and defined by national boundaries.Hermans and Kempen (1998) argue that such monolithic concepts ofculture and nation fail to explain the challenges accompanying theacculturation process within a world where the local and the global aremixing and moving, merging and creating new “contact zones”between different cultures (p. 1117).

Concluding Comments

I have articulated how studying the practices of transnational diaspo-ras has important implications for examining “bounded” notions ofculture and identity that exist in the field of cultural and cross-culturalpsychology. Contemporary migrants recreate their culture, ritual andpractices from home, and in the process they also recreate their identi-ties. The cultural memories of home and the accompanying nostalgiaof friends and families that were left behind, play an important role indeveloping their migrant selves. Their development, then, occursthrough the actual and imagined transnational cultural locations andpractices in their homeland as well as their suburban homes and work-places in the U.S. diaspora. The development of their identity isembedded in a network of multiple and often contested cultural prac-tices. Their relationship with their families and friends has evolved outof a long distance relationship that is based on internet and cable TVmaterials, emails, imagined and real conversations, and phone-calls.

Page 18: Rethinking Culture

\\server05\productn\T\THE\27-2\THE202.txt unknown Seq: 18 22-APR-08 8:12

318 J. of Theoretical and Philosophical Psy. 27(2), 2007 & 28(1), 2008

The demands of living a transnational life means that they are alsoadapting to cultural changes that are occurring on two fronts.

Any meaningful study of their social and emotional developmentwould have to include an understanding of how the culture “here” andfrom “over there” shapes the meaning of their selves. My emphasis onstudying the cultural practices in diasporic spheres falls squarely withinthe vision of cultural psychology. The concept of diaspora and the phe-nomenon of transnational movement of people and cultures requireboth cross-cultural and cultural psychologists to reexamine how wedefine culture, identity, home, and cultural difference.

References

Alba, R. & Nee, V. (2003). Remaking the American mainstream:Assimilation and contemporary immigration. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press.

Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities. London: Verso.Anthias, F. (1998). Evaluating ‘diaspora’: Beyond ethnicity? Sociology,

32, 557-580.Berry, J. W. (1998). Acculturative stress. In P. B. Organista, K.M.

Cren, & G. Marin (Eds.), Readings in Ethnic Psychology (pp. 117-122). New York: Routledge.

Berry, J. W., & Sam, D. (1997). Acculturation and adaptation. In J.W.Berry, M. H. Seagull, & C. Kagitcibasi (Eds.), Handbook ofCross-Cultural Psychology: Social behavior and applications, Vol.3 (pp. 291-326). Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. New York: Routledge.Bhatia, S. (2007). American Karma: Race, culture, and identity in the

Indian diaspora. New York: New York University Press.Bhatia, S. (2002). Acculturation, dialogical voices and the construction

of the diasporic self. Theory and Psychology, 12, 55-77.Bhatia, S., & Ram, A. (2001). Rethinking “acculturation” in relation to

diasporic cultures and postcolonial identities. Human Develop-ment, 44, 1-17.

Bhatia, S., & Ram, A. (2004). Culture, hybridity and the dialogical self:Cases from the South-Asian diaspora. Mind, Culture, and Activity,11, 224-241.

Brah, A. (1996). Cartographies of diaspora: contesting identities. NewYork: Routledge.

Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press.

Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-sity Press.

Clifford, J. (1994). Diasporas. Cultural Anthropology, 9, 302-338.Cole, M. (1996). Cultural Psychology: A once and future discipline.

Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Page 19: Rethinking Culture

\\server05\productn\T\THE\27-2\THE202.txt unknown Seq: 19 22-APR-08 8:12

Rethinking Culture 319

Glick-Schiller, N., Basch, L., & Szanton-Blanc, C. (1995). From immi-grant to transmigrant: Theorizing transnational migration. Anthro-pological Quarterly, 68, 48-63.

Gudykunst, W., & Kim, Y.Y. (1997). Communicating with strangers:An approach to intercultural communication (3rd ed.). New York:McGraw Hill.

Gupta, A., & Ferguson, J. (1992). Beyond “culture”: Space, identity,and the politics of difference. Cultural Anthropology, 7, 6-23.

Hall, S. (1991). Old and new identities, old and new ethnicities. InA.D. King (Ed.), Culture, globalization, and the world-system:Contemporary conditions for the representation of identity (pp. 41-68). Binghamton, NY: State University of New York.

Hall, S. (1993). Culture, community, nation. Cultural Studies, 7, 349-363.

Hermans, H. J. M., & Kempen, H. J. G. (1998). Moving cultures: Theperilous problems of cultural dichotomies in a globalizing society.American Psychologist, 53, 1111-1120.

Hernandez, D. J. (1999). Children of immigrants, one-fifth of America’schildren and growing: Their circumstances, prospects, and welfarereform. Master lecture presented at the biennial meeting of theSociety for Research in Child Development, Albuquerque, NM.

Hofstede, G. (1980). Culture’s consequences: International differencesin work-related values. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Kondo, D. (1996). The narrative production of “home,” community,and political identity in Asian-American theater. In S. Lavie & T.Swedenberg (Eds.), Displacement, diaspora and geographies ofidentity (pp. 97-118). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Lavie, S., & Swedenburg, T. (1996). Introduction: Displacement, dias-pora, and geographies of identity. In S. Lavie & T. Swedenberg(Eds.), Displacement, diaspora and geographies of identity (pp. 1-26). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Levitt, P. (2001). The transnational villagers. Los Angeles: Universityof California Press.

Macaulay, T. B. (1972). Minute on Indian education. In J. Clive (Ed.),Selected Writings (pp. 237-251). Chicago: University of ChicagoPress. (Original work published 1835)

Mohanty, C. T. (1991). Cartographies of struggle: Third world womenand the politics of feminism. In C. T. Mohanty, A. Russo, & L.Torres (Eds.), Third world women and the politics of feminism (pp.2-47). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Portes, A., & Zhou, M. (1993). The new second generation: Segmentedassimilation and its variants among post-1965 immigrant youth.Annals of American Academy of Political and Social Science, 530,74-98.

Page 20: Rethinking Culture

\\server05\productn\T\THE\27-2\THE202.txt unknown Seq: 20 22-APR-08 8:12

320 J. of Theoretical and Philosophical Psy. 27(2), 2007 & 28(1), 2008

Radhkrishnan, R. (1996). Diasporic mediations: Between home andlocation. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Renan, E. (1990). “What is a Nation.” In H. Bhabha (Ed.), Nation andNarration (pp. 9-22). New York: Routledge.

Rogoff, B. (1991). Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development insociocultural activity. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rong, X. L., & Prissele, J. (1998). Educating immigrant students: Whatwe need to know to meet the challenge. Thousands Oaks, CA:Corwin Press.

Rushdie, S. (1991). Imaginary homelands: Essays and criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta.

Safran, W. (1991). Diasporas in modern societies: Myths of homelandand return. Diaspora, 1, 83-99.

Segall, M. H., Lonner, W. J., & Berry, J. W. (1998). Cross-cultural psy-chology as a scholarly discipline: On the flowering of culture inbehavioral research. American Psychologist, 53, 1101-1110.

Shweder, R. A. (1990). Cultural psychology: What is it? In J. W. Stig-ler, R. A. Shweder, & G. Herdt (Eds.), Cultural psychology:Essays on comparative human development (pp.1-43). Cambridge,England: Cambridge University Press.

Spivak, G. (1993). Outside the teaching machine. New York: Routledge.Suarez-Orozco, M. M., & Suarez-Orozco, C. (2001). Children of immi-

gration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Suleri, S. (1992). The rhetoric of English India. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.Toloyan, K. (1996). Rethinking diaspora(s): Stateless power in the

transnational moment. Diaspora, 5, 3-35.Valsiner, J. (1998). The guided mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-

versity Press.van der Veer, P. (1992). Introduction: The diasporic imagination. In P.

van der Veer (Ed.), Nation and migration: The politics of space inthe South Asian diaspora (pp. 1-16). Philadelphia, PA: Universityof Pennsylvania.

Vertovec, S. (1999). Conceiving and researching transnationalism. Eth-nic and Racial Studies, 22 (2), 447- 462.

Warner, W. L. & Srole, L. (1945). The social systems of American eth-nic groups. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Wertsch, J. V. (1998). Mind as action. New York: Oxford UniversityPress.

Author Note

I am grateful for the thoughtful and incisive feedback given by LisaHoshmand, John Christopher, and Suzanne Kirschner on various ver-sions of this manuscript.

Page 21: Rethinking Culture

\\server05\productn\T\THE\27-2\THE202.txt unknown Seq: 21 22-APR-08 8:12

Rethinking Culture 321

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to SunilBhatia, Box 5474, Connecticut College, 270 Mohegan Avenue, NewLondon, CT 06320. E-mail: [email protected]