Ancestral Country Research Articles

Gudu-Guduwa: Healing Disconnection Through Incorporating Bush and Animal-Assisted Therapies Into Therapeutic Practice: A First Nations Reflection

As mental health therapists, too often we see outward symptoms of lives impacted by complex trauma. Disconnection from self, others (families and community), and Country is at a crisis point. Looking to our First Nations healing knowledges, the author explores her experiences as a First Nations woman and therapist, and how she incorporates bush and animal assisted therapies into her private practice. Areas that the article touches on include healing on your ancestral Country, healing on Country that is not your own, healing when you do not know where your Country is, and incorporating animal assisted therapies into your healing modalities.

'It's Just Not Working', a Qualitative Exploration of the Weight-Related Healthcare Experiences of Individuals of Arab Heritage With Higher Weight in Australia.

Culturally and linguistically diverse population groups disproportionately experience higher weight and other non-weight-related discrimination in healthcare settings outside of their ancestral country. Little is known about the experiences of individuals with Arab heritage. This study aimed to qualitatively explore the intersectional weight-related healthcare experiences of individuals of Arab heritage with higher weight in Australia. A general inductive enquiry approach was used. Purposive, convenience and snowball sampling was used to recruit individuals of Arab heritage residing in Australia. Individuals were invited to participate in an online semistructured interview. Interviews were recorded, transcribedand thematically analysed. Fifteen participants took part in the study. Of these participants, 93% were female (n = 14), 80% were aged between 18 and 44 years (n = 12), 73% were university educated (n = 11), 53% were born outside of Australia (n = 8)and all were Muslim (n = 15). Four main themes were identified: (1) appearance-based judgement, (2) generalised advice and assumptions, (3) cultural responsivenessand (4) healthcare system constraints. Individuals of Arab heritage with higher weight in Australia, namely, females, often perceive their healthcare experiences as dismissive of their cultural and religious needs and driven by causality assumptions around weight. It is crucial that care delivered encompasses cultural humility, is weight-inclusiveand acknowledges systemic constraints. Cultural safety training benchmarks, healthcare management reformand weight-inclusive healthcare approaches are recommended to assist healthcare providers in delivering effective, holisticand culturally safe care. Insights gained from conversations with Arab heritage community members with lived experiences regarding weight-related healthcare encounters informed the study design and approach.

The Immigrant Next Door

We study how decades-long exposure to individuals of a given foreign descent shapes natives’ attitudes and behavior toward that group. Using individualized donations data, we show that long-term exposure to a given foreign ancestry leads to more generous behavior specifically toward that group’s ancestral country. Focusing on exposure to Arab Muslims to examine mechanisms, we show that long-term exposure (i) decreases explicit and implicit prejudice against Arab Muslims, (ii) reduces support for policies and political candidates hostile toward Arab Muslims, (iii) increases charitable donations to Arab countries, (iv) leads to more personal contact with Arab Muslims, and (v) increases knowledge of Arab Muslims and Islam. (JEL D64, D83, D91, J15)

Evolutionary analysis of all eleven genes of species C rotaviruses circulating in humans and domestic animals

Species C rotaviruses (RVC) are the second most common rotavirus species known to cause gastroenteritis in humans and pigs and with occurrence documented in cattle, dogs, ferrets, and sloth bears. Despite the host-specific nature of RVC genotypes, cross-species transmission, reassortment, and recombination events are also documented. In the present study, we inferred the evolutionary history of globally circulating RVC strains, including time scale stasis, the most probable ancestral country, and the most probable source host using Bayesian methods implemented in BEAST v.1.8.4.The human-derived RVC strains were majorly monophyletic and further grouped into two lineages. The RVC strains derived from pigs were monophyletic for the VP1 and the remaining genes were classified into 2 to 4 groups based on the high posterior support. The root mean age for all the genes indicated the circulation of RVC for over 800 years. Overall, the time to Most Recent Common Ancestor of human RVC strains dated back to the beginning of the 20th century. The VP7 and NSP2 genes had the lowest rates of evolution compared to other genes. The majority of the genes of RVC showed their origin in Japan except for VP7 and VP4 genes in South Korea. The phylogeographic analysis with the country as a trait showed the role of Japan, China, and India in the dispersion of the virus. In the current study, significant transmission links between different hosts were analyzed for the first time using the host as a trait. Significant transmission links between pigs and other animal species as well as humans indicate possible transmission from the pig as a source host and suggest monitoring of proximity with animals.

Corruption and Voter Turnout: Evidence From Second Generation Americans

When studying corruption’s consequences for voter turnout, reverse causality hinders identification; corruption may affect turnout, but an engaged citizenry may also improve governance. However, because good instruments are hard to find, most studies do not adjust for the issue. Here, I surmount the endogeneity problem by predicting turnout among second generation Americans with the level of corruption in their ancestral country. The core intuition is that the best predictors of turnout—education, income, and civic duty—are endogenous to corruption, internationally mobile, and reproduced inter-generationally. Thus, corruption in one country can affect turnout among the American-born children of the country’s émigrés. However, because turnout in US elections does not affect corruption in the ancestral country, there is no threat of reverse causality. Estimating the model with data from the Current Population Survey and the Varieties of Democracy Project reveals a statistically robust, substantively sizable negative effect of corruption on turnout.

Culture and Gender Differences in Willingness to Compete

Abstract We investigate how culture affects gender differences in willingness to compete in a large pre-registered experiment using an epidemiological approach. Our sample of 1,943 Norwegians with parents born in 59 different countries shows a smaller gender gap in willingness to compete among individuals of more gender-equal ancestries. The difference is driven by women with parents from more gender-equal countries wanting to compete more and men with the same ancestry wanting to compete less. The results are robust to controlling for a large set of factors at the individual, parental and ancestral country levels, indicating that gendered culture shapes competitive preferences.

Lender individualism and monitoring: Evidence from syndicated loans

This paper addresses the question, “Does lenders’ culture affect their monitoring efforts and style?”, by exploring whether lender individualism affects the loan monitoring of U.S. borrowers for a sample of 27,164 syndicated loan facilities granted between 1998 and 2017. We proxy lender individualism based on the ancestral country of origin of the lead bank's CEO. We show that lender individualism leads to a less stringent monitoring style. We find that individualist lenders resort less to covenant monitoring, impose less strict contract terms, such as performance pricing and rely more on soft information. We also provide evidence that individualist lenders retain a larger loan share and deal with a larger number of lenders. Finally, we find that some governance characteristics (board size and percentage of female directors) and other CEO features (cash compensation, tenure, and non-duality) moderate the negative association between lender individualism and loan monitoring.

Hidden Words: Searching for meaning in a rubber stamp

Hidden WordsSearching for meaning in a rubber stamp Uljana Wolf (bio) Translated by Sophie Seita (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Mot Caché, 1978. [End Page 164] in 1978, theresa hak kyung cha made a stamp—a rubber stamp, not a postage stamp—for a small exhibition in Amsterdam. Cha, whose "mail art," writing, and performances explore patterns of public circulation, mistranslation, and exchange, made the stamp to fit on a standard postcard. At the stamp's center are two words, outlined in black: mot caché (French for "hidden word"). Arranged in an oval around them are other French words, in mirror image—empreinte révèle signe évoque énonce dévoile marque tache inscrite trace—all of which relate to the act of inscription. [End Page 165] After the stamp is applied to paper, the outer circle of words becomes legible. The words in the middle, however, hide themselves again. (They now say tom éhcac.) So the "correct expression," at least in this mode and direction of reading, stays behind, on the stamp, elsewhere. The words of inscription wrap around the hidden word(s) like a glove, within which: a center that doesn't send. But there's another word, too. In the lower right-hand corner of the stamp, uncapitalized: cha, Theresa's family name. At first glance, the name lies outside the word circle of inscription. But if you look again, you notice that the name also lies buried within the phrase in the middle of the stamp, in the rearranged letters of the word caché. In this way, "cha" itself is the mot caché: the hidden word. What exactly is being sent with this postcard? Is the hidden word meant to be a Korean name, or is it so untranslatable as to be absent, undetectable? Does everyone who sees the stamp or the postcard have access to the same hidden word? The same experience of displacement? When I came across Dictee in New York a few years ago, it was like receiving a dispatch, a linguistic memo I didn't understand. It stayed with me, this dispatch, because (I now realize) as a German poet writing mostly in the language I was raised in, I was and am always in search of paths that lead me away: away from the sorts of understanding that I've inherited; away from my ways of thinking as an East-, perhaps post-East-, perhaps multi-German writer; away from the categories of estrangement and non-estrangement in my life, which has long swung like a pendulum between New York and Berlin. For me, being a multilingual writer means that words are always inscribed with ghost-words. Cha's work was particularly relevant to my experience of multilayered cultural and linguistic self-estrangement. Dictee explores the same obsessions and methods that characterize Cha's mail art: fragmentary, translingual language pointing to the failure of translation; documentary material questioning the possibility of singular memory; conversations that straddle [End Page 166] Click for larger view View full resolution A postcard from Cha addressed to her brother John Cha and his family. A Mot Caché impression in black ink is stamped on one side. [End Page 167] multiple artistic mediums. In both the stamp and the book, Cha makes traceable what it means to be someone who has a language that is not "the right one," not their own, not original or real—a language that exists only on a fantasized, distant, handmade stamp. A stamp perhaps like: home. Like: nation. Like: mother tongue. When we use the term mother tongue, which language are we referring to? Just as the stamped image exists in an in-between realm, adrift and unbelonging, Dictee also demonstrates the failure to construct possible identifications through the actual language of the mother. Cha's own mother, Cha Hyung Soon, grew up as a refugee in Manchuria, moving between the language of exile (Chinese), that of occupation (Japanese), and that of her ancestral country (Korean). For Cha, the search for heritage, for the place of the mother and her language, is not a search for a state of monolingual belonging. Rather: her rebellious...

Aggressive CEOs and bank mergers and acquisitions

The U.S. banking industry has seen waves of mergers since the 1980s. Despite a significant body of research on the determinants of these waves, there are few studies of how CEOs influence banks’ mergers and acquisitions (M&As). This paper studies the effect of CEO aggressiveness on bank M&As. We construct a new measure of bank CEO aggressiveness based on CEOs’ ancestral countries of origin and data on inter-country wars. We find that aggressive CEOs are more likely to acquire other banks. Moreover, the impact of CEO aggressiveness on bank M&A decisions is more pronounced when the CEOs are from larger and more profitable banks, when CEOs have a longer tenure, and when CEOs’ ancestral country of origin has a more masculine culture. Moreover, we show that aggressive CEOs are more likely to make acquisitions when CEOs possess more cultural maintenance, which captures the extent to which CEOs retain their original cultural values and beliefs. Finally, we document positive short-term stock market reactions to bank M&As initiated by aggressive CEOs.

The (Re)socialization of participatory political culture: Immigrants’ political participation between their contemporary country and their ancestral country

We study the reproduction and change of participatory political culture by examining how immigrants' political engagement develops in the cross-pressure between their country of residence and their ancestral country. To explain patterns of political (re)socialization, we suggest a mechanism of proximity-conditioned social diffusion, which stipulates that immigrants' retention and adoption of a given participatory culture is a function of spatial and temporal proximity to native bearers of this culture, from which diffusion occurs. Analyzing the political participation of thousands of first and second generation immigrants in the European Social Survey (2002–2018), we find that immigrants come to adopt the participatory culture of their new country and lose that of their ancestral country through a symmetrical temporal process: having stayed longer in the destination country—either being a second generation immigrant or a first generation immigrant, who lived there longer—they adopt this participatory culture more strongly, while at the same time loosening their connection to the culture of the ancestral country. Spatial proximity to natives also conditions immigrants' adoption of the prevailing culture of the destination country as immigrants’ participatory inclinations resemble that of natives in their residential regions within the destination country.

Deportable to Nowhere: Stateless Children as Challenges to State Logics of Immigration Control

Abstract This study draws on ethnographic fieldwork with undocumented and stateless families in Sabah, Malaysia to examine how deportability shapes children's relationships with the Malaysian state. By centering the perspectives of children and their families, the author argues that the figure of the stateless child challenges state logics of immigration control in two ways. First, born in Malaysia but without proper identity documentation or legal status from any nation, stateless youth in the study were “deportable to nowhere.” Second, Malaysian immigration control inadvertently transforms stateless children into the very “illegal” migrants that the government seeks to deter: for some, expulsion to their ancestral country and eventual illicit return to Malaysia marked the first times they had crossed an international border. The article concludes by discussing the implications of stateless children for the nation-state system's organizational principles more broadly.

“‘For Your Freedom and Ours’: Polonia and the Struggle for Polish Independence,” special issue, Rocznik Przemyski 55, no. 3 (23)

“‘For Your Freedom and Ours’: Polonia and the Struggle for Polish Independence,” special issue, <i>Rocznik Przemyski</i> 55, no. 3 (23)

Lender Trust and Bank Loan Contracts

We examine the contractual implications of a lender’s trust for corporate loans. We measure how trusting a lender is using the average trust attitude in the chief executive officer’s ancestral country of origin. We find that banks with trusting CEOs charge lower interest rates in U.S. syndicated loans. This effect is identified within existing lender–borrower relationships and similar types of loans. Further analyses indicate that trust reduces the cost of credit by boosting the perceived credibility of borrower information and by mitigating contracting problems. We corroborate our findings by conducting a survey of loan officers with experience in loan syndication. This paper was accepted by Gustavo Manso, finance. Supplemental Material: The internet appendix and data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4371 .

Emigrants, Refugees, and the Post-Colonial Novel, or the In-Between as an Articulatory Space. Editorial Introduction

The issue of emigration and refugees is one of the major global problems of the contemporary world. The challenges faced by nations, states, and cultures in the face of the above-men­tioned phenomena include issues of social, historical, and cultural policy, but also an ethical dimension and the character of practical social involvement. Challenges to work through historical legacies and traumas in a spirit of respect for difference and the cultural legacy of peoples who were once colonised play an extremely important role. The multicultural ten­dency of the politics of history is inclined towards a project of entangled history or histoire croisée. In the context of increased emigration phenomena, it is necessary to rework and re­fashion the notion of nation, to remove from it the traces of an essentialist approach marked by nationalism and ethnocentrism. The most important challenge, however, is to change the way we think about the concepts of nation, emigration, and exile, i.e., to ‘decolonise minds’. The postcolonial novel is a literary genre that is closely related to the aforementioned chal­lenges. The key issues of the postcolonial novel are emigration and exile. The genre addresses the theme of emigration both synchronically, diagnosing current problems, but also histor­ically, recalling the colonial conditions of current relations. Emigrant narratives are about articulating the experience of being between cultures, countries, and times. The postcolonial novel provides an insight into the dynamics of changing attitudes of successive generations of emigrants towards the culture of the ancestral country and the country of present residence. The generational dynamics of the postcolonial and expatriate novel show the transformation of rhetoric from nostalgia to irony. As proposed by Rosi Braidotti, one can speak of a tran­sition from the figure of the outlaw to that of the nomad; the figure subversively oriented, questioning all restrictions and top-down imposed political and cultural orders.

Transnational Cross-Border Family Ties: Diasporic Lives of Bangladeshis in Italy and Beyond

The scope of this paper is to gain a better understanding of how Bangladeshi migrants in Italy maintain transnational family attachments, across multiple destinations, with the home country as well as with several host countries. The data comes from fieldwork in Northeast Italy. Research methods include in-depth interviews and participant observation. The findings reveal that a high proportion of Bangladeshi migrants maintain a variety of transnational and diasporic ties with their family and friends living in the country of origin and different European countries. These include family obligations, remittances, establishing businesses back home, visits and communication. They also preserve their national identity in this host society by maintaining cultural ways of belonging and through religious practices and involvement in Bangladeshi politics. The findings have also shown that Italian Bangladeshi families work to foster transnational family ties among the new generations born in Italy, who have little knowledge of their ancestral country. On a final note, this paper argues that transnational connections with the homeland play an important role in shaping the diasporic lives of Bangladeshis in Italy.

Towards a transdimensional home: home-making in the narrations of Norwegians of Turkish descent

Building on current scholarship and empirical evidence from the research conducted by the author on Norwegian Turkish communities in the city of Drammen, Norway, this paper discusses the process of home-making by the descendants of Turkish immigrants in Norway, the so-called second- and third-generation. By doing so it develops a model of a transdimensional home that attempts to embrace the multiple and seemingly contradictory meanings and reflections of home involving eight dimensions identified in the narrations of the respondents: spatial, material, relational, home as routines and protection, home as origin, sensorial home, gendered relationships at home, and rejection from home. The model of a transdimensional home highlights people’s emotional and practical balancing acts between the ancestral country of origin and the place they live in. It aims at grasping the dynamics between these dimensions, approaching home as occurring at their intersection. It also underlines the processual character of the making of home in relation to the surrounding circumstances.

The Cultural Origins of CEO Overconfidence

We explore the role of cultural heritage in explaining CEOs overconfidence and its impact on the propensity and performance of corporate acquisitions. CEOs are more prone to overconfidence if the culture in their ancestral country of origin is characterized by strong individualism, independence, long-term orientation, and inequality. We find that the culture-related sources of CEO overconfidence have a significantly negative impact on acquisition performance.

Intergenerational Transmission of Culture among Immigrants: Gender Gap in Education among First and Second Generations

Abstract. This paper illustrates the intergenerational transmission of the gender gap in education among first and second-generation immigrants. Using the Current Population Survey (1994-2018), we find that the difference in female-male education persists from the home country to the new environment. A one standard deviation increase of the ancestral country’s female-male difference in schooling is associated with 17.2% and 2.5% of a standard deviation increase in the gender gap among first and second generations, respectively. Since gender perspective in education uncovers a new channel for cultural transmission among families, we interpret the findings as evidence of cultural persistence among first generations and partial cultural assimilation of second generations. Moreover, Disaggregation into country-groups reveals different paths for this transmission: descendants of immigrants of lower-income countries show fewer attachments to the gender opinions of their home country. Average local education of natives can facilitate the acculturation process. Immigrants residing in states with higher education reveal a lower tendency to follow their home country attitudes regarding the gender gap. Keywords. Gender Gap, Immigration, Human Capital, Education, Assimilation. JEL. J15, J16, Z13, I20.

Global emergence and evolutionary dynamics of bluetongue virus

Bluetongue virus (BTV) epidemics are responsible for worldwide economic losses of up to US$ 3 billion. Understanding the global evolutionary epidemiology of BTV is critical in designing intervention programs. Here we employed phylodynamic models to quantify the evolutionary characteristics, spatiotemporal origins, and multi-host transmission dynamics of BTV across the globe. We inferred that goats are the ancestral hosts for BTV but are less likely to be important for cross-species transmission, sheep and cattle continue to be important for the transmission and maintenance of infection between other species. Our models pointed to China and India, countries with the highest population of goats, as the likely ancestral country for BTV emergence and dispersal worldwide over 1000 years ago. However, the increased diversification and dispersal of BTV coincided with the initiation of transcontinental livestock trade after the 1850s. Our analysis uncovered important epidemiological aspects of BTV that may guide future molecular surveillance of BTV.

Hollywood’s Depiction of Italian American Servicemen During the Italian Campaign of World War II

This article analyzes the portrayal of Italian American servicemen in Hollywood films set in Italy during the Italian Campaign of World War II (1943-1945) and produced from the time of the war to the present. Addressing this widely overlooked theme, the study shows how the American film industry perceived and represented one of the largest ethnic groups in the US forces, who were deployed to liberate their ancestral country from Axis control. Special attention is paid to representations of the servicemen's relationship with the Italian population and to their expressions of American patriotism.