Immigrant Academics and Cultural Challenges in a Global Environment
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Immigrant Academics and Cultural Challenges in a Global Environme ...

Chapter 1:  Introduction Stranger Scholars Abroad*
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Research on Acculturation

The previously mentioned definition of culture does not imply that culture can be essentialized for all time. Culture changes, or evolves, over time, and in the global world today, because of increasing interactions among cultural elements across diverse ethnic, religious, material, national, and other boundaries, many aspects of culture are kept in flux. However, it is also clear from the literature on globalization that there are equally potent forces that respond to and against homogenization and the intermixture of cultures. Huntington (1998) and others actually believe that the world is at a stage where the clash of cultures is more serious than before and that this is a clash borne out of ever-increasing and deeper levels of cultural interaction and fiercer and fiercer attempts to clarify cultural boundaries. While postmodern questioning of essentialisms and eternal categories has opened up a world of possibilities and trajectories of human agency, it would be myopic to deny that social institutions and structures work in the conservation of relatively stable cores of culture. It would be equally difficult to deny that context-bound norms and rules of social engagement and expectation differ from place to place and that human beings order and classify each other and act on the basis of such categories.

Hence, in very practical ways, all immigrants are likely to go through experiences similar to those described by Sussman (2002), in which there is

daily recognition that there are many, many, many differences between home country and host country…Members of the host country stand too close or too far away when having a conversation; they touch too much or not enough; they gesture all the time or too little; they show too much emotion or not enough; they say “yes” but act “no”; they are too friendly or not friendly enough; they speak too loudly or not loud enough; they get up too early or go to bed too late; the stores are never open when the sojourner needs them; the buildings are too cold or too hot; the people smell like people or they smell like flowers and trees; dating practices are too restrictive or too permissive; education involves too much self-initiative or is too paternalistic; the host members are too frugal