Cross-cultural Contact Research Articles

Gender Rules: Discrimination and tradition among Caribbean-born women in US colleges

The experiences of immigrant women of color withinUShigher education provide a unique opportunity to understand the complex influences of intersecting identities within the context of changing social contexts. To determine how the social categories of gender, class, race, and nationality operate in Caribbean immigrant women’s experience of being college students, focus groups were conducted with 27 English-speaking Caribbean-born women attending NYC undergraduate colleges. Data show when women move to the US they come from gendered cultural traditions that determined their social roles in the Caribbean. For most women, these rules continue to operate in the US. However, gender roles and traditions are not homogenous throughout the Caribbean, hence, there is variation in how they play out in women’s experiences in the US. Further, the formerly distinct boundaries between some Caribbean traditions and US traditions are being challenged. These findings underline the complex influence of intersecting identities in women’s roles and call attention to how they affect social identification in the context of college pursuits and other aspects of their lives. In light of increased cross-cultural contact and globalization these findings provide a better understanding of factors affecting the psychological adjustment of Caribbean immigrant women in the US and have implications for enhancing their adaptation across changing social contexts.

Teluk Benoa dan laut Serangan Sebagai “laut peradaban” di Bali

This study aims to reveal the trade networks and dynamics of maritime history in the waters of Bali, especially in the 19th century. There is an interesting aspect in the study of maritime history in Bali namely the importance of Benoa Bay marine area to be the entrance to Bali since many centuries ago. Benoa Bay region directly opposite the Indian Ocean is also associated with Lombok and Bali Straits that become the entry point of the sea trade between Asia and Australia. The study used historical and ethnographic methods. The historical method as well as ethnographic were used to discuss maritime cultural dynamics to the community around the region of Benoa Bay of Bali waters. The results showed that Benoa Bay area turned into the arena of cultural interactions resulting in he mixed culture (mestizo) which produces a different customs from other regions. The occurrence of cross-cultural and civilization contacts put this region as a typical region or special zones outside the sphere of Islamization as the Sea of Civilization.

Wrestling with Tradition: Revitalizing the Orkney Chair and Other Culturally Significant Crafts

Across the world, “culturally significant” designs, products, and practices – such as traditional crafts – have been pushed to the margins by the forces of modernization and globalization. Appreciation of the positive attributes of these traditions drives widespread revitalization initiatives, often involving designers. Awareness of the cultural ramifications of design-led revitalization may deter enthusiasm for radical initiatives and instead promote preservation efforts. Yet a deconstruction of the popular understandings of tradition and origin indicates a need for change and cross-cultural contact. This article proposes that social value – central to a traditional craft’s cultural significance – should be used to guide revitalization.

Psychological Foundations of Xenophilia: Understanding and Measuring the Motivational Functions of Exploratory Cross-Cultural Contact.

Two multipart studies (total N = 1,638) were conducted to introduce and test a functional perspective on exploratory cross-cultural contact. Studies 1a and 1b addressed the lack of standardized measures and developed a psychometrically valid inventory of six individual motivational functions: knowledge and understanding, value expression, professional advancement, social development, personal-, and group-image concerns. Studies 2a and 2b produced experimental evidence that different environments offer differing "fulfillment opportunities" such that the motivating potential of a distinct contact function results from a function by environment fit. First, participants were more persuaded by and wanted to visit a cultural center more when it matched their motivational functions (Study 2a). Second, participants showed a preference to choose an intercultural interaction partner with a higher potential over a partner with a lower potential to fulfill their primary cross-cultural contact motivation (Study 2b, preregistered). Theoretical and practical implications of this perspective are discussed.

高校世界史におけるアフリカ史学習の開発 : 単元「宗教を通した異文化接触:アフリカ黒人世界の歴史」

高校世界史におけるアフリカ史学習の開発 : 単元「宗教を通した異文化接触:アフリカ黒人世界の歴史」

Good guests and obnoxious gringos: Cosmopolitan ideals among North American migrants to Cuenca, Ecuador

This article develops an empirical study of the cosmopolitan ideals of North American lifestyle migrants in Cuenca, Ecuador. It is meant as a corrective to existing studies, which often perceive cosmopolitanism to be a disposition, worldview, or cultural condition, but miss the importance of transnational and cosmopolitan cultural beliefs that emerge in novel ways within the new cultural fields constituted by lifestyle migration and that may significantly reconfigure status and economic class relations. In addition, it extends our empirical knowledge of North American cultural codes as they migrate to an international setting. North Americans in Ecuador express desire for cross-cultural contact and integration, and demonstrate this through a number of practices that serve to demarcate legitimate from illegitimate forms of transnational mobility. This legitimate form of transnationalism is painted in sharp relief from the profane ‘obnoxious gringo,’ who ‘should go back where they came from.’ These discourses emerge from North American cultural beliefs about travel and transnationalism, as well as from North American attitudes towards migration from low-income countries to the United States and Canada.

Crossing Borders from France to Japan – and America

Historical cross-cultural contact, between Japan and the West, and, in return, between the West and Japan, is a richly-textured and remarkably modern story. In this issue, we expand our understanding of material exchanges, and consider the introduction of French modernism to a reluctant space, far from the shores of France, or the US. And to put this issue into the current context, we can also consider the effects of building new walls, new restrictions, and new barriers to exchanges of all sorts, while also contemplating the “sanctuary” that can be offered in order to maintain our obligations, and to promote dignity rather than criminalization.

The graduate(s): the harvests of Israel’s integrated multicultural bilingual education

Advocates of integration and cross cultural contact believe schools have a seminal role to play in perpetuating or breaking the cycle of violence and division in conflicted societies. Historically, segregated schools are the norm in such societies. An alternative educational model is provided through integrated schools—schools where children from different national, ethnic, or religious groups are deliberately educated together. Integrated schools are believed to be essential in contributing to the healing of the wounds that afflict conflicted societies, easing the path toward peace, reconciliation, and integration. The present study reports on interviews conducted with the three first cohorts of students which graduated from the only integrated school in Israel running through K12. The interviewees are shown to have been able to successfully negotiate present reigning societal believes in all that regards to the ethos of the conflict and adopt perspectives which help them overcome hatred, fear, and anger while recognizing present sociopolitical complexities and difficulties. All in all the schools? environment and educational practices seem to help counter the socio-psychological infrastructures which evolve in the context of intractable conflicts.

Perceptions of extended concurrent speech in Mandarin

In this paper, we adopt Kádár and Haugh’s (2013) discursive-interactional approach to argue that extended concurrent speech for floor taking or topic switching can be perceived as normal and qiàdàng (appropriate). Spontaneous mundane conversations and interviews in Mandarin were collected and transcribed by means of interactional sociolinguistic methods. A close analysis was conducted on participants’ responses to the extended concurrent speech for floor taking or topic switching and their retrospective thoughts. Results show that the participants did not view the speech as inappropriate. They produced the speech to achieve relational goals, clarify things, collaborate on a topic, claim participatory rights or display high involvement. They enjoyed conversing around a trivial topic in informal settings. This challenges the argument of long overlapping, floor taking or topic switching as problematic in the literature. The findings indicate the importance of embracing different perspectives from varying sources to understand perceptions of turn-taking mechanisms in Mandarin conversation. This study can contribute to our understanding of interpersonal pragmatics and the conventional views/norms that might cause communication misunderstanding in cross-cultural contact.

Thinking style across cultures: an interview with Richard Nisbett

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to gain some insights from a leading scholar of the cross-cultural cognitive social psychology field on how cultural differences are viewed, understood, and dealt with, and thus to contribute to enrich the way cultural differences are framed in cross-cultural management research.Design/methodology/approachThe author conducts a formal, semi-structured interview with Richard Nisbett for a duration of 90 minutes. The author extracts the key message from the interview and re-structures the conversation in a meaningful manner.FindingsFrom his cognitive social psychology lens, Richard Nisbett views that any cross-cultural contact between different thinking styles is advantageous because differences help address the limitations of one’s own thinking style.Research limitations/implicationsThe insights from cross-cultural cognitive social psychology encourage cross-cultural management researchers to further investigate the positive consequences of cultural differences.Originality/valueRichard Nisbett’s own journey from a young scientist who describes himself as an extreme universalist, to a mature intellectual who understands and appreciates different thinking style, is itself a concrete example of how differences can lead to the positive. The author summarizes three factors that are key to a positive outcome of cultural differences: curiosity and openness to cultural differences; habit of critical thinking; and intense interaction with culturally different others.

Horion & Co. Greek Hybrid Names and their Value for the Study of Intercultural Contacts in Graeco-Roman Egypt

This article explores the corpus of Greek hybrid onomastic derivations attested in Graeco-Roman Egypt. These linguistically ‘mixed’ names, e. g. Anoubion or Besodoros, provide valuable insights into the nature of cross-cultural contacts and the formation of identity in Graeco-Roman Egypt. Theophoric derivations in particular allow us to corroborate earlier assumptions about the practice of religious assimilation in personal names.

The Attribution of Works of Russian Stonecutting Factories: Object, Design, and Issues of Authorship in the Context of Cross-Cultural Exchange

This article focuses on the study of the decorative and applied art of the 19 th century — the issue of attribution of authorship in the conditions of borrowing and transfer of taste, active cross-cultural contacts, the cosmopolitan art of the neostyle period, and the establishment of the industrial reproduction of decorative objects based on the principle of replication of a sample. This paper considers a specific source of borrowing (L’art industriel, an engraved album of Leon Feuchère’s drawings, 1839) and the interpretation of three samples from this illustrated edition by Russian masters of stonecutting of the second half of the 19 th century. The authors compare the approach towards the original in the works of the Malachite factory of the Demidov family (1847–1851) and the Imperial Kolyvan Polishing Factory, carried out in the 1870s according to the designs of Ivan A. Zlobin. The pieces of art analysed in this article are kept in the Royal Collection of Great Britain (for the first time in history, the authors provide information about two works of Russian masters in the collection), in the Mineralogical Museum of Alexander E. Fersman of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow), and Hotêl de Ville (Paris). Additionally, the authors consider sources from the library of Institut national de l’histoire de l’art (Paris, Doucet collection) and the collection of the Ministry of the Imperial Court of the Russian State Historical Archive (St Petersburg). Having analysed the aforementioned sources and compared them with graphic prototypes, the authors conclude that it is necessary to complete the existing attribution of the authors of stonecutting works with data about the original artworks. Referring to particular examples, the authors prove that it is impossible to only rely on a narrowly national approach to the history of Russian stonecutting art and that this art should be studied in the European context.

À chaque recette, son histoire: Viet Kieu Food Writing and the Emergence of a Transnational Poetics

ABSTRACTIf the insistence on Vietnamese culinary practices in contemporary literatures of the Vietnamese diaspora establishes writers/artists such as Kim Thúy and Clément Baloup as members of the Viet Kieu community, these practices also serve an important narrative function. Food acts as a stimulus for memory, connecting past and present, host country and country of origin, migrant and transnational space. From this perspective, foodways provide spatiotemporal continuity while revealing the historical foundations of culture produced during the everyday interactions of cooking and eating. Yet unlike writers of the post-1.5 generation who engage with a more generic representation of Vietnamese cuisine, writers of the 1.5 generation like Kim Thúy distinguish among Vietnam's regional culinary traditions. The resulting narrative, of which Mãn (2013) is an example, recognizes and respects the diversity of Vietnamese identity that simultaneously resists and embraces cross-cultural contact and exchange. In light of these observations, this article demonstrates that ethnic foodways in Francophone Viet Kieu literature can emphasize both the global and the local, and explore how food, as a cultural signifier, and the Viet Kieu subject, as a consumer and/or producer of this signifier, can engender a transnational poetics.

Cross-Cultural Contact: A Preliminary Study on the Cross-Cultural Communication between Taiwanese Undergraduates and International Students—A Case Study on the International College of Ming Chuan University

<p><em>Based on cross-cultural theory, </em><em>this study applies in-depth interviewing and focus group testing to examine the difficulties and challenges faced by Taiwanese undergraduates while communicating with international students in an English immersion instruction environment at the International College and analyze how the former should adapt themselves to the cross-cultural learning environment. This study indicates that language competence is the main factor affecting local students’ adaptation to the cross-cultural environment at the International College.</em><em> Low language proficiency, pertaining to either schoolwork or interpersonal communication, is the main cause of anxiety and nervousness among local students during the earlier stage of adaptation. According to the adaptation curve, the honeymoon stage experienced by local students following enrollment is extremely short and is usually accompanied by anxiety and uneasiness. Their adaptation stage comprises two aspects, schoolwork and life.</em><em> Regarding the schoolwork aspect, local students face a relatively long crisis stage because only after making certain improvement in English proficiency can they gradually adapt themselves to the cross-cultural learning environment. However, in terms of the life aspect, it takes a comparatively shorter time for local students to adapt themselves to cross-cultural conflicts, and they can rapidly enter the </em><em>recovery and biculturalism adaptation stages.</em><em></em></p>

Tibet in the Crimea? Polish Embassy to the Kalmyks of 1653 and a Project of an Anti-Muslim Alliance

In early modern world, cross-cultural contacts were not a monopoly of Western European ‘trading nations’ and they were not made exclusively through trans-ocean trade. Buddhist Kalmyks arrived in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the seventeenth century and have remained there until today. Following the medieval tradition when Christian Europe looked for allies in Inner Asia against ‘the Muslim danger’, Moscow and Warsaw competed to win the Kalmyks over so that they would become their allies against the Crimean Tatars. In 1653, the Polish court prepared an embassy to the Kalmyks, proposing to help them conquer the Crimean Peninsula in return for a military alliance. Curiously, the letters of the Polish king and chancellor were written in Turkish and drawn in Arabic script, as in that period these were the accepted media of Eurasian communication, even though the letters’ tenor was anti-Muslim. Both letters are extant today and their content is analysed in the article.

Predicting CQ Development in the Context of Experiential Cross-Cultural Training: The Role of Social Dominance Orientation and the Propensity to Change Stereotypes

With increasing globalization and multicultural diversity comes a need for better understanding of the factors that predict cultural intelligence (CQ) development. Previous literature identifies cross-cultural contact and experiential contact-based training as effective in CQ development; however, individuals differ in their propensity to engage in and benefit from intergroup contact. Drawing on social dominance theory research and cultural learning models, I examine the relationships between individual social dominance orientation (SDO), the propensity to change stereotypes, and CQ development in the context of experiential cross-cultural training involving contact with a culturally different group. A pre- and postdesign study conducted among 122 postgraduate students demonstrated that SDO is directly and negatively related to the propensity to change stereotypes and indirectly and negatively related to CQ development following contact-based training. The propensity to change stereotypes mediated the negative relationship between SDO and CQ development. My findings here suggest that socially dominant individuals are less likely to benefit from experiential contact-based cross-cultural training; on the other hand, individuals with greater propensity to change stereotypes are likely to develop greater CQ. Education and training professionals should carefully consider the role of individual variables in CQ development and experiential cross-cultural training.

Textualizing Illness: Medicine and Culture in New England, 1620–1730

The study of religion, medicine, and cultural encounters on the New England frontier may seem to deal with separate topics. However, as Marc Priewe makes clear in Textualizing Illness, these topics are part of a larger cultural whole. Most importantly, for those interested in the history of medicine, Priewe's monograph goes a long way toward demonstrating the important cultural work done by ideas about illness and the body. As the title suggests, Priewe is interested in the ways illness is constructed through text. He bases his arguments on a wide range of documents—from letters and diaries to sermons and poetry—and examines them in the context of cultural exchange and synthesis. The book begins with a look at the meanings of illness in the context of the cross-cultural contact of the early New England frontier. Priewe notes that both English and indigenous cultures shared the belief that the health of the body was tied to the cosmos. As Priewe puts it, “both indigenous and imported theories of disease relied on an interrelation between natural and supernatural causes” (p. 94). In Anglo-American culture the idea of supernaturally inflected illness became particularly strong. Such a belief justified colonial conquest—weak native bodies had succumbed to disease through divine providence. Priewe suggests that the idea of inferior indigenous bodies influences not just colonial New England but much of American culture, including the doctrine of manifest destiny and other ideologies of conquest. Furthermore, this conception of illness helped shape the colonists' sense that they were part of a divine mission—another factor that contributed to American culture.

MARITIME CONNECTIONS AND CROSS-CULTURAL CONTACTS BETWEEN THE PEOPLES OF THE NUSANTARA AND THE EUROPEANS IN THE EARLY EIGHTEEN CENTURY

In this paper, I would like to discuss two extraordinary tales of two rather ordinary individuals in the service of the Dutch East India Company (henceforth: VOC), the first a Dutchman, Jacob Janssen de Roy, and the second a German, Georg Naporra (1731-1793). It is important to understand that all cross-cultural contacts between the peoples in the archipelago and westerners depended on seaborne trade and the vessels which plied the maritime routes. This was the only means of transportation and communication. As a consequence, cross-cultural contacts took place mainly in the port cities and coastal trading outposts. This can be clearly seen in the cases of our two ordinary Europeans: Jacob de Roy and Georg Naporra.

Joining together or pushing apart? Building relationships and exploring difference through shared education in Northern Ireland

In divided societies, the promotion of cross-cultural contact through the education system has been central to efforts to improve intergroup relations. This approach is informed by an understanding of the contact hypothesis, which suggests that positive contact with a member of a different group should contribute to improvements in attitudes towards the group as a whole. While a substantial body of research provides support for contact theory, critics have argued that its emphasis on harmonious encounters can result in the neglect of group differences and associated issues of conflict and discrimination during contact. The research discussed in this article explores this tension with reference to two shared education projects in Northern Ireland. Research data, gathered primarily through interviews with pupils, confirms that divisive issues are rarely addressed during contact and explores several influences on this: the nature of pupils’ relationships, the programme structure, and the prevailing social norms of avoidance.

Москва при Наполеоне: социальный опыт кросскультурного диалога (часть 2)

This article completes the analysis of the social aspects of cross-cultural contacts during the Napoleonic occupation of Moscow. A great fire that ignited on the evening of 14 September, combined with looting and violence, destroyed the contacts between the soldiers of the Grand Army and the local population which had begun to emerge in the first hours of the occupation. However, less than a couple of days later, the situation started to change as dialogue between the occupiers and the inhabitants resumed. Along with the purely pragmatic goals of the occupation authorities, an important role was played by human empathy. As for the Muscovites, most were concerned primarily with survival and the preservation of property where possible. However, there were quite a few who grabbed this excellent opportunity to enrich themselves. The bulk of these people were criminals or part of the urban poor, but there were also some Russian merchants involved. The most successful contacts after the great fire and the cessation of ‘official’ looting arose between persons of similar social and cultural levels. A significant difference lay in the purposes and consequences of such contacts. If the result of interactions with the middle and higher social strata was at least a partial return to normal public relations, then the results of interactions at the lower level was the organisation of joint criminal and semi-criminal actions. In general, the short period of cross-cultural dialogue during Napoleon’s occupation of Moscow gave many European nations, especially the French and Russian ones, a wealth of experience that defined processes of self-identification and inter-ethnic and inter-state interaction for decades or even centuries.