Cultural Accommodation Research Articles

Cultural Value Orientations and Accommodation among Heterosexual Relationships in Jamaica

In this study, we tested the following hypotheses concerning cultural value orientations as predictors of accommodation among heterosexual relationships in Jamaica: (a) Individuals' Group Orientation will be a significant positive predictor of Accommodation toward opposite-sex relationship partners, whereas (b) individuals' Self Orientation will not be significantly related to Accommodation toward opposite-sex relationship partners. A total of 287 individuals (44 males, 233 females, and 10 unspecified) participated in this study. Results of structural equation analyses of data for Blacks and persons of other races indicated that, contrary to our hypotheses, individuals' Self Orientation was a significant negative predictor of Accommodation, and individuals' Group Orientation was a nonsignificant positive predictor of Accommodation. Results of this study differ markedly from results previously obtained with predominantly White samples of heterosexuals and gays in the United States. Implications for the study of personal relationship processes in Jamaica and other predominantly Black nations are discussed.

The Significance of the Frontier in World History

AbstractTake a walk down the streets of any town in the western United States and you will see the legacy of a frontier: not the exceptional frontier of American mythology, but a fragment of the global frontier of European expansion over the last five hundred years. European weeds on the sidewalks, Eurasian microbes in Caucasian bodies, crosses on the church and in the cemetery, and Old World crops growing in the fields outside of town, all provide evidence of the modern expansion of European power. Now fly to Yunnan in China and see Muslim farmers harvesting Southeast Asian crops and worshiping in mosques that look like Chinese temples. These examples reveal that one of the most prominent facets of world history is the expansion and interchange of cultural and biological traditions that give rise to “frontier zones” of cultural interchange, accommodation, and conquest. Often fragmented by modern national borders, these frontier zones represent one of the major areas of global change. Despite the ubiquity of such zones, there exist few clear standards for defining frontiers or for studying them. Using a combination of scholarship from the study of the American West and some comparative examples from other world frontiers, a few observations can be made.

Achieving Organizational Change Within the Context of Cultural Competence

SUMMARY Cultural competence has become more topical as the United States has become more diverse. Conceptualizing culture as constantly emerging in interaction, practitioners can enhance their skills through an inquiry-centered approach to clients. Using ethnographic inquiry, and building skills as culture brokers, social workers can work toward mutual cultural accommodation. This process of mutual adaptation, based on carefully obtained and interpreted information about the other's vantage, has the potential to enhance client outcomes and encourage organizational change based on mutual respect.

The Normalization of ‘Sensible’ Recreational Drug Use

Five key dimensions of normalization are identified: availability/access; drug trying rates; usage rates; accommodating attitudes to ‘sensible’ recreational drug use especially by non users; and degree of cultural accommodation of illegal drug use. A review of recent UK research is provided for each measure. The NW England Longitudinal Study continues to monitor normalization based on the recapture of 465 young adults (in year 2000) of a cohort previously surveyed/interviewed across their adolescence (1991 to 1995).The availability of drugs remains high with over 90% having been in drug offer situations. Accessibility is highest for cannabis, followed by ‘dance drugs’, with cocaine showing the steepest climb. Drug trying rates have risen incrementally from 36 percent at 14 to 76 percent at 22. At 18 over half reported past year drug use and at 22 the rate is unchanged (52 percent). Past month use at 32 percent has declined slightly. Males are now slightly more likely to be drug-involved on all measures. Socio-economic differences are not significant. Cannabis dominates recent usage (average three episodes a month). Half the abstainers have friends who have used cannabis. Nearly two thirds of abstainers held tolerant or approving attitudes of drug takers. Half held different views about different drugs, with cannabis use being most tolerated. The paper concludes that ‘sensible’ recreational drug use is becoming increasingly accommodated into the social lives of conventional young adults.

The Interaction Between Language and Culture: A Test of the Cultural Accommodation Hypothesis in Seven Countries

We investigate the cultural accommodation hypothesis in questionnaire-based research: Do respondents adjust their responses in a way that reflects the cultural values associated with the language of the questionnaire? A test of this hypothesis with a sample of university students in seven countries indicates that cultural accommodation plays an important role in cross-language research. Wir testen die Hypothese der kulturellen Anpassung in auf Fragebägen basierten Forschungsprojekten: Passen die Teilnehmer ihre Antworten den kulturellen Werten an, die mit der Sprache des Fragebogen verbunden sind? Ein Test dieser Hypothese anhand einer Umfrage unter Universitätsstudenten in sieben Ländern zeigt, das kulturelle Anpassung in der Tat eine wichtige Rolle in interlinguistischer Forschung einnimmt.

Challenges for Career Counseling in Asia: Variations in Cultural Accommodation

Using K. Lewin's (1938) concept of a force field analysis, a model is proposed for examining the challenges of providing career counseling in Asia in terms of prevailing and countervailing forces. The model also suggests a need to avoid a simple importation of Western models of career counseling, which may not be an optimal fit for the Asian cultural context. Instead, the cultural accommodation approach is offered as a viable alternative.

Cultural Accommodations in Southwest China: The "Han Miao" and Problems in the Ethnography of the Hmong

The Hmong of southern China define themselves as an unmarked category in relation to two significant others: the Chinese and the Yi. Using data from fieldwork in Sichuan, the A. examines some problems of Hmong ethnography, inquiring why color terms were used for some groups of Hmong, as well as subdivisions of them. He attempts to consider the Hmong not only in terms of their relationships with the Han, but also with the Yi. However, the weight of historical evidence is against this; the Hmong were a very isolated group. Many Hmong subdivisions did arise through intermarriage with Chinese, but if culture is often transmitted maternally, how were Confucian values disseminated to minority populations through intermarriages with Chinese males? The official classification of Hmong (together with other groups) as Miao posits a fierce opposition between Han and Miao, yet the Hmong have stories of how Hmong and Han were originally two brothers worshipping at the same paternal grave, whose descendants lost touch with each other. This sort of genealogical model (variety out of unity) shows how idioms of patrilineality may overlap with diffusionist culturalist notions of assimilation to a greater Chinese identity. The genealogical model contrasts with a more existentialist and constructivist model that emphasizes the way identity may emerge from, or be imposed on, cultural differences. In fact both are mutually constitutive.

Cultural and language effects on Chinese bilinguals' and Canadians' responses to advertising

The first objective of this study was to examine how Hong Kong Chinese and Anglo-Canadians differed in their perceptions of the honesty and forcefulness of a message source in informational advertising. A second objective was to explore the reaction of bilingual Chinese subjects to an advertisement and questionnaire administered either in their native language or in their second language. An experiment was carried out with Anglo-Canadian and Chinese students. Findings revealed that the former perceived significantly greater source honesty and less forcefulness in the ad compared to the latter group exposed to the instrument in their native language. The comparison of the English language and Chinese language treatments for the Chinese subjects revealed that the former perceived significantly greater source honesty, significantly less perception of forcefulness on the part of the source, and developed significantly greater attitudes towards the brand than the latter, similar to that found for the Anglo subjects. These results help to confirm the operation of a cultural accommodation process.

DOES THE LANGUAGE OF RESPONSE INFLUENCE SELF-PRESENTATION? A NEPALESE TEST OF THE CULTURAL ACCOMMODATION HYPOTHESIS

Responses to the Twenty Statements Test were obtained from 171 Nepalese university students assigned to respond either in English or Nepali. Contrary to the cultural accommodation hypothesis the respondents did not provide more idiocentric self-references in the English language condition. However, some language differences were found in specific aspects of the collective self. The respondents, tended to provide more small group self-references when responding in Nepali. Contrary to the Western literature there was little evidence of gender differences in self-construal. The need for finer-grained categorisation than a simple individual or collective self was emphasised.

The semiotics of anthropological authenticity: The film apparatus and cultural accommodation

This study examines the relationship between media constructions of First and indigenous peoples, and the “performative primitives” who are employed in “cultural” villages in the South African province of KwaZulu‐Natal (KZN), with specific reference to Shakaland where the TV series, Shaka Zulu, was filmed in the late 1970s. A Perceian‐derived semiotic method is applied in analysis of the nature of tourist encounters with performers, the relationship between the Western Same and the African Other, and anthropologists’ /observers’ studies as a kind of cultural tourist. Through a discussion of the relationship between science and priestcraft I offer a theory which accounts for new ways of thinking about relations between emotional and active rhetorical discourses. This new form of “scientific discourse” is argued so as to be couched within related discourses of “development”, “conservation”, and “eco‐tourism”.

The Indians and Brazil

A simple theme runs through Brazilian anthropologist Mercio Gomes’s The Indians and Brazil. Despite what many imagine, the identifiably Indian population of Brazil is not declining but growing, especially since the 1950s. This is the result not just of improvements in health care but of increasingly effective cultural accommodation promoted by more sophisticated leadership of both the indigenous communities and the nation. But if death and assimilation will not resolve the country’s centuries-old “Indian problem”—many would argue that it is more a “white” problem—what does this mean for Brazil?The first part of The Indians and Brazil is a history of Brazil “from the point of view of the Indians” (p. 15). From the outset the interest of the Europeans in the indigenous population was chiefly economic; what the Indians initially expected is less clear, though they soon learned to expect the worst. The author repeatedly indites the Land Law of 1850 as responsible for the loss of Indian lands, but he neglects the 1854 Reglamento (regulations) of this law that specifically guaranteed Indian community property. The point, in any event, is that laws of whatever sort had scant effect on land grabbing in the country’s vast interior and did not stop provinces and states in the late nineteenth century from simply declaring that Indians, and therefore indigenous rights, no longer existed. The obvious failure of the empire’s 1845 Reglamento—oddly translated here as “Regiment”—das missôes de catequese (Regulations for Christianizing Missions) as a mechanism of Indian assimilation and control and the international outcry following the abuses of the turn-of-the-century rubber boom prompted the new republican government to form the Indian Protection Agency (SPI) in 1910. But the idea of the inevitable demise of the indigenous population was so thoroughly entrenched in bureaucratic and popular imagination that the SPI, reorganized into FUNAI in the 1960s, sought only to bring about this end through acculturation and assimilation instead of the historically more common annihilation.If the author is correct, and Indians and Indian cultures are not disappearing, where do they fit in modern Brazil? The second half of The Indians and Brazil surveys the sociopolitical organization of surviving indigenous groups and their interactions with the rest of the nation and the nation-state. It is important to remember that the “Indian problem” is only one of many facing Brazil in the 1990s, and it is not a high priority for millions of poor Brazilians reeling under the effects of globalization and “savage capitalism.” Indigenous cultural groups enjoy a peculiar place in Brazilian law. On the one hand, they remain “minors” with limited but specific rights; on the other, the advantages of this special status are such that some caboclo (assimilated Indians/mixed bloods) communities are now reassuming visible indigenous identities, to press their cases. And in the vast Amazon basin, these rights make Indians the most important barrier to uncontrolled devastation.Questions remain: Is the population upturn permanent or only temporary? What resources are Brazil’s non-Indian people and the state willing to devote to two percent of the population, a population that, at least on paper, often controls vastly more resources per capita than do the non-Indian poor? What will be the effects of growing class differences within indigenous groups and competition among communities? Based on anthropological fieldwork and a wide range of secondary sources, The Indians and Brazil is particularly useful in that it raises almost as many questions as it answers, and were it available in paperback, it would be highly recommended for classroom use.

Cultural Conflict and Political Accommodation at European Borderlands

Cultural Conflict and Political Accommodation at European Borderlands

Alden Cary Hayes (1916-1998)

Case, Richard 1983 Spirit Whispers to Blind Carver. Syracuse Herald American Stars Magazine: 9. Freedman, Michael 1998 On the Occasion of John Gwaltney's Retirement from University of Syracuse: May 4, 1989. Transforming Anthropology 7(2):62-64. Gwaltney, John L. 1970 The Thrice Shy: Cultural Accommodation to Blindness, and Other Disasters in a Mexican Community. New York: Columbia University Press. [1980]1993 Drylongso: A Self Portrait of Black America. New York: New Press. 1981 Common Sense and Science: Urban Core Black Observations. In Anthropologists at Home in North America: Methods and Issues in the Study of One's Own Society. Donald Messerschmidt, ed. Pp. 46-61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1986 The Dissenters: Voices from Contemporary America. New York: Random House.

Redefining Culture Through the Memorias of Elderly Latinas

The reminiscences of elderly Latinas can be a valuable source for understanding how migrants define cultural accommodation and capitalize on aspects of their own culture to make necessary adjustments to a new one. This article is based on an oral history project carried out with elderly Latinas in the Midwest in which the women share their life stories, including their reminiscences on the adjustments they made to living in the mainland United States. The reminiscences were avenues for rediscovering and reconceptualizing culture. The article addresses several methodological issues in narrative research: the roles and status of the researcher, the meaning of reciprocity, and the nature and meaning of the group sharing of stories.

Empire, Land, and the Construction of Racism in the Ohio Valley, 1673-1800

Over the last fifteen years, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Ohio Country and western Great Lakes have come into focus as scholars probe the interactions of the Indians, French, and British who lived, traded, farmed, and explored the region. No longer on the far side of the historian's frontier, the Ohio Country, one book at a time, is ceasing to be much of any frontier at all. As scholars uncover and air a wealth of information that twenty years ago was, for most historians, quite unimaginable in its richness, the challenge remains of finding the language and analytic tools to explain its meaning. It is why Richard White's middle ground, as a concept to explain diverse multi-ethnic relationships, proved so immediately attractive and has entrenched itself in the language we use.1 Historians have been less successful in connecting the trans-Appalachian West to the history of the seaboard colonies, which for so long have dominated our understanding of early modern North America. We can find examples of the middle ground of cultural accommodation from Nova Scotia to Florida, but we are just now tackling the problem of conceptualizing the linkages among the Ohio Country, the Atlantic seaboard and St. Lawrence colonies, European imperial states, and the post-1776 United States. It is this challenge that Eric Hinderaker takes on in Elusive Empires. Hinderaker defines his organizing concept, as processes [more] than structures, and more as creations of the people immediately engaged than of policy directives (p. xi). Three models of empire, in his rendering, competed for dominance in the Ohio Valley: empires of commerce, empires of land, and an empire of liberty, with the last being the most successful and the most racially exclusive. While Hinderaker acknowledges that these three imperial types are not mutually exclusive, he uses commerce, land, and liberty as economic, political, and ideological systems that Europeans and

A Chinaman's Chance: The Chinese on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier

Writers and historians have traditionally portrayed Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth-century American West as victims. For them, the American frontier was place that offered no more than a Chinaman's chance. By examining the early history of the Boise Basin, Idaho, Liping Zhu challenges the stereotypical image of the Chinese pioneers. Looking at various positive aspects of their experience, he takes an entirely new approach to the study of this ethnic minority. Between 1863 and 1910, large number of Chinese immigrants resided in Idaho's Boise Basin, searching for gold. As in many Rocky Mountain mining camps, they comprised majority of the population. Unlike settlers in many other boom-and-bust western mining towns, the Chinese in the Boise Basin managed to stay there for more than half century. Like other pioneers, the Chinese immigrants in this unique Rocky Mountain mining region had equal access to the pursuit of happiness. Their basic material needs were guaranteed, and many individuals were able to accumulate considerable amount of wealth and climb up the economic ladder. Chinese equality was also seen in frontier justice. To settle disputes, they frequently challenged white opponents in the various courts as well as in gun battles. Thus, the Chinese played all the stereotypical frontier roles -- victors, victims, and villains. Despite occasional conflicts and personal rivalries, race relations between the Chinese and Euroamericans were relatively good; cultural accommodation, not confrontation, was the predominant theme. The Idaho Chinese actually received opportunities far beyond what has previously been assumed. Interesting and provocative, A Chinaman'sChance: The Chinese on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier not only offers general readers narrative account of the Rocky Mountain mining frontier, but also introduces to scholars fresh interpretation of the Asian experience in nineteenth-century America.

Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany

The setting is 1920s Berlin, cultural heart of Europe and the era's only serious cinematic rival to Hollywood. In his engaging study, Thomas Saunders explores an outstanding example of one of the most important cultural developments of this century: global Americanization through the motion picture. The invasion of Germany by American films, which began in 1921 with overlapping waves of sensationalist serials, slapstick shorts, society pictures, and historical epics, initiated a decade of cultural collision and accommodation. On the one hand it fueled an impassioned debate about the properties of cinema and the specter of wholesale Americanization. On the other hand it spawned unprecedented levels of cooperation and exchange. In Berlin, American motion pictures not only entertained all social classes and film tastes but also served as a vehicle for American values and a source of sharp economic competition. Hollywood in Berlin correlates the changing forms of Hollywood's contributions to Weimar culture and the discourses that framed and interpreted them, restoring historical contours to a leading aspect of cultural interchange in this century. At the same time, the book successfully embeds Weimar cinema in its contemporary international setting.

The Missionary Movement in American Catholic History by Angelyn Dries, O.S.F.

book reviews327 all primary source materials were either lost or destroyed. As a result, he had to depend largely upon a vast array of American Polish newspapers, journals, articles , pamphlets, and books. His treatment of even the most sensitive of topics has been unbiased. His portrayal of Bishop Hodur's life has been objective throughout. Neither friend nor foe has been given preferential status. As a result , he has made a significant contribution to the understanding of a very controversial prelate. If there are any reservations, it would be that the author's eleven essays are simply individuaUy pubUshed articles. In turn, they offer only glimpses into the Ufe of a prominent reUgious figure. While many gaps have been fiUed in and a new foundation has been laid, it is to be hoped that Wieczerzak will continue his task until a final portrait has been produced. John R Gallagher Scranton, Pennsylvania The Missionary Movement in American Catholic History. By Angelyn Dries, O.S.F. [American Society of Missiology Series, No. 26.] (MaryknoU, New York: Orbis Books. 1998. Pp. xvüi, 398. $20.00 paperback.) Missionaries are foreign no more! Angelyn Dries moves them from anciUary status in American Catholic history to their rightful position as gospel evangelizers possessing their own story and purpose. Drawing upon archival sources, secondary literature, and interviews, Dries establishes a narrative which successfully "outlines the main contours of the mission movement" (p. 1). Dries correctly argues that foUowing the colonial period (1492-1775), immigrant , frontier, and overseas evangeUcal zeal predated American Catholicism 's own 1908 independence as a mission land. Thus the nineteenth century "is not a bleak picture in terms of overseas missions as is popularly believed" (p. 58). From the Spanish-American War (1898) through World War I (1918) American missionaries moved onto the international stage. Missionaries' relationship to the Modernist controversy in the United States, German anthropology and grace, and the romance of the martyr-hero myth receives Dries's attention, as does the significance of Mission Congresses and the Society for the Propagation of the Faith of the late nineteenth century, and the founding of MaryknoU (1911) and the American Board of Catholic Missions (1919). The CathoUc Student Mission Crusade, the Bishops' Committee on Latin America, and the influence of women in medical missions help shape the 1920's. A skillful narrative which uses weU dates, facts, statistics, biographical sketches of missionaries, analysis of missionary meetings and organizations,and examination of varied cultures invites a larger polemic. Who are the animators 328BOOK REVIEWS of twentieth-century American Catholic missionary impulse—individuals (men and women), reUgious orders or lay missioners, bishops, or sponsoring organizations ? Likewise, what inspires missionary impulse—gospel, political realities, evangelical competition, finances, education, or theology? Though specificaUy unstated or unresolved by Dries, these issues serve as her invitation to historians and scholars to integrate missionaries within American Catholic history, missiology, and world history. Twentieth-century China missions reveal questions of missionaries' cultural accommodation, relief work, service of men and women in mission, death, internment and expulsion of missionaries throughout the NationaUst, Japanese, and Communist periods. Missionaries of the post-WorldWar II era (1946-1959) faced a world of freedom vs. communism. Opinions of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and Father John J. Considine, M.M., shaped the period. The genesis of the mission impulse to Latin and South America and the conflictual dynamics surrounding liberation theology and the re-emergence of the martyr myth in 1980 is weU done. The conclusion is a synthetic summary of the "themes and threads" in the book. Helpful would have been Dries's addressing the attraction of the missionary vocation itself. Why were some interested in the missions never sent whUe those having no interest were? Enriching as well would have been comparing the American Catholic missionary movement in relationship to other regional impulses such as that described in Edmund H. Hogan's The Irish Missionary Movement (1990). Noteworthy are valuable appendices, excellent footnotes, listing of mission periodicals and archival and Ubrary deposits, a rich bibliography, and a thorough index. This book wiU serve as a standard work on the American Catholic missionary experience. Robert E. Carbonneau, CR Passionist Community, Catholic Theological Union Chicago The...

About God, Demons, and Miracles: the Jesuit Discourse On the Supernatural in Late Ming China

AbstractThis paper proposes an alternative to the conventional paradigm of "cultural accommodation" as a key to the understanding of the Jesuit scheme of conversion in late Ming China. It challenges one of the corollaries of that paradigm, which holds that because of the paramount rationalist sensibilities of the Confucian élite, the Jesuit missionaries refrained from speaking about the mysteries and supernatural truths of Christianity. In this paper, it is instead argued that the Jesuits, rather than trying to cultivate a rational spirit in China, were primarily engaged in fashioning a new religious cult(ure) which centered upon the supreme efficacy of the Christian faith in exorcising demons and performing miracles and was of central importance to the religious conquest of territories formerly held by their indigenous rivals. It is further shown that it is this preoccupation at the same time motivated and delimited the Jesuits' campaign against Chinese religions and the introduction of Western science and learning and resulted in the application of double standards and in ambiguities and contradictions in their scientific writings.

Language of Response and the Spontaneous Self-Concept

Responses to the Twenty Statements Test were obtained from 166 Filipino secondary school children asked to respond either in English or Cebuano, their local language. Contrary to the cultural accommodation hypothesis, the respondents did not provide more independent self-references in the English language condition. Examination of responses indicated that when responding in English, the participants, particularly the males, were influenced by the school context. The females tended to provide more relational self-references.