Editor's Introduction J.D. Stahl (bio) "Culture" is a slippery term; consequently, so is "cross-cultural." The anthropologists A.L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn give the concept of culture 164 different definitions. It might be said to have evolved from worship (cult) to tillage of the soil (cultivation) to "systems of belief and behavior" (Garcia and Otheguy ix). Depending on your point of view, culture is synonymous with language or created by language. As de Saussure established, different languages are not just different sets of names for the same concepts. Cultural systems, contained or expressed in different languages, express different ways of perceiving and organizing the world. As Edward Sapir observed, "No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same worlds with different labels attached" (162). Therefore it is inevitable that translation will always be incomplete and partially inaccurate. Furthermore, it is inevitable that cultures will, like individuals, at least partially and often completely fail to comprehend each other. However, what happens when individuals, particularly children, who are still imprinting their cultural stencils, reach or move across cultural boundaries? Sociologist Ruth Hill Useem helped to coin the phrase "Third Culture" to designate the result when children of parents of one culture grow up in a second culture. The amalgam the children experience and create is a Third Culture, even when it is almost invisible to others. Children of diplomats, missionaries, refugees, and immigrants are children who grow up across cultures. Their distinctive, sometimes tormented, forcibly non-provincial ways of seeing the world are increasingly available to less uprooted groups through the mass media, travel, and an emergent "world culture." One of the indicators of the new "world culture" is to be found in popular music, where "World Beat" songs blend disparate influences into a new cultural mix. Consider Ofra Hazah, a Yemenite Jewish woman, whose participation in a rap soundtrack catapulted her onto U.S. music charts; or the South African anti-apartheid rock band Juluka (later called Savuka), whose white members have participated in and assimilated elements of Zulu culture. Band member and songwriter Johnny Clegg, who is white, writes, "After my son was born, I married my wife again in traditional Zulu custom. The ceremony took place at Mooi River in Misinga, Natal, and through this my wife was formally introduced to the Zulu community. The song [Moliva] is also a tribute to those people who taught me so much about Zulu culture when I was a boy" (Clegg 4). The conflict of cultures always has been and always will be political. British imperialism in India sought to create a Western-oriented elite that, in the words of British Indian administrator Thomas Babington Macauley, was to be "Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and intellect" (White 16:893). Children's literature, one of the most forceful means of acculturation, reflected the cultural aims of imperial policy, as Donald E. Hall's and Richard Flynn's essays on Juliana Horatia Ewing and Rudyard Kipling respectively demonstrate. Their articles perceptively analyze the ideological support children's writers provided for the imperialistic cultural and racial attitudes that enabled the British empire to rationalize its domination and exploitation of other cultures. But it would be a drastic mistake to imagine that with the end of colonialism economic motives for cultural domination have come to an end. I was dismayed but ought not to have been surprised when I visited a middle-class family in Bombay to find that what they were avidly watching on their television set was not Bharat Natyam, Indian classical dance, or even songs from Hindi musicals, but Prince and Madonna. If in the emergent "world culture" an amalgamation of cultures is occurring, we have to ask, on whose terms? To whose profit? To what ends? Cross-cultural encounters and their accompanying potential for assimilation and transformation pose economic, political, psychological, and ultimately spiritual issues. Virginia Walter explores some of these issues in her article about children coming to America from China. As she points out, for the authors of...