The American Family in India

Abstract

In India, overseas American men under govern ment, business, missionary, and cultural-exchange sponsorship typically are married. Although their wives perform many of the same functions abroad as at home, the cultural, social, and physical contexts are quite divergent. In addition, their "de pendency" and "representational" statuses mean that family life and work life of husbands are closely intertwined. There are three areas which are unusually productive of family stresses early in the overseas assignment which ramify into the effectiveness of the primary employee: unavailability of housing and protracted stays in hotels; difficulties in inter acting with servants because of the gross cultural, social, and linguistic disparities between the American wife and house hold employees; and illness precipitated by high exposure to hazards for which they have not yet developed routinized health practices. Wives, the local American communities, and the organizational sponsors have developed reasonably satis factory "third-cultural" solutions which in time are utilized by most families to meet these stress-producing circumstances. A fourth area, inadequate educational facilities for children, because it is least subject to individual resolution or even the action of a single organization, remains a major obstacle in the retention of American fathers most qualified for work roles in India, especially as their children approach the secondary school age.