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Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 ([personal profile] azurelunatic) wrote2004-07-27 01:39 am
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Psych thoughts: bicultural/dissociation

I wonder if anyone's ever done a study on the incidence of dissociative coping mechanisms in people identifying as bicultural, especially when the two cultures in question are distinctly separated, say one culture in the home, and the other culture in the school or workplace.

I might be really interested in that study and the results.
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[identity profile] rusty-boscoes.livejournal.com 2004-07-27 01:40 am (UTC)(link)
Depends on which one was learned first.
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[personal profile] azurelunatic 2004-07-27 01:50 am (UTC)(link)
Which one which? Which culture? Which coping mechanism?

[identity profile] rusty-boscoes.livejournal.com 2004-07-27 02:03 am (UTC)(link)
Which culture, I assume by "dissociatve coping mechanism" you mean regressing to the first acquired culture (behavior) to cope with problems. Then, the first culture (behvaior) is dependent on which was learned first. I think it is a fallacy to consider these cultures wholly seperate or even significantly distinct from one another.

[identity profile] rusty-boscoes.livejournal.com 2004-07-27 02:10 am (UTC)(link)
I am, by the way, familiar with the concept of the dissociative state. I merely mean that the dissociate state would be the regression to previous behvaiors associated with the old culture. I still hold that the word "culture" is being mis-used by most people.
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[personal profile] azurelunatic 2004-07-27 08:54 am (UTC)(link)
I'm thinking mostly about people who are living in more than one culture at once, rather than people who live fully absorbed in one culture for a time and then live fully absorbed in another culture for a while.

Younger children who are moved from Japan, say, to the US at a young age adapt to the new culture very well. But (taking an example from my friends list) if an adult moves from Canada to Japan, they have to learn distinctly different rules for personal space and interaction and the like, even if they already know the language and have studied the society's rules of interaction theoretically. And they may find that they have to deal with culture shock yet again upon returning to Canada, if they've been gone a while and integrated more than they thought they had into the Japanese culture.

[identity profile] mnfiddledragon.livejournal.com 2004-07-27 06:50 am (UTC)(link)
what about situations where your "home culture" is distinctly Hispanic, (Spanish only spoken at home, etc), while school is distinctly not? There you *do* have wholly separate and significantly distinct cultures that a person has to deal with and cope with.

Actually I'm pretty sure we're going to be dealing with a bunch of it here in the Twin Cities fairly soon as we're getting an influx of about 5000 Hmong from Thailand. They're doing the best they can to ease culture shock and help people into the system - including setting up a temporary school just for the children to teach them English and keep them together so they're less isolated while they're getting used to being here. And from what I remember there's a fair bit of cultural tension in Hmong children who were either born in Laos or Thailand, but raised here with Hmong parents in an American environment (read LOTS of cultural tension - particularly among girls), or amongst 1st or 2nd generation American born Hmong.

It's something fairly common in immigrant families, but certain cultures see it more prevalent - the Hmong and Hispanic (believe it or not, the Irish as well in the 19th century) being a few examples.

[livejournal.com profile] azurelunatic, I'm pretty sure that there have been such studies - I forget the name of the index, but there's a social science index that universities tend to have copies of. Otherwise, I would be surprised if a study like this was not published in American Anthropologist.

[identity profile] thette.livejournal.com 2004-07-27 06:57 am (UTC)(link)
Scopus have social science as well. One of the journals they're searching is American Anthropologist.

[identity profile] mnfiddledragon.livejournal.com 2004-07-27 08:29 am (UTC)(link)
sweet!
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[personal profile] azurelunatic 2004-07-27 08:49 am (UTC)(link)
That was the exact situation I was thinking of as an example, given that I live in Arizona. There are Hispanic households & communities, and (depending on the demographics of the entire area) mainstream US culture school/work.

[identity profile] mnfiddledragon.livejournal.com 2004-07-27 11:22 am (UTC)(link)
*nod* well - I'm not sure about any psychological studies, but I *know* there are anthropological studies, I just can't remember any off the top of my head. You could also look up old ethnographic studies on immigrant populations in the US - I'd look up Irish ones if you can't find any Hispanic ones - there may even be Hmong - and possibly Somali - those IIRC are in my opinion hot spot type cultures where you're more likely to see some interesting things going on because the parents are less likely to want to break away from their primary culture.

There are some other interesting things done with children of immigrants on down to 3rd and 4th generation.
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[personal profile] azurelunatic 2004-07-27 11:29 am (UTC)(link)
I was thinking, specifically: my own dissociative identity condition was caused by the difference in home vs. school, and the fact that I was addressed by different names at home and at school. Home and school were really not all that different, both being different flavors of US culture. I'm wondering if my experience is really all that uncommon, in dissociating to deal with the culture shock. It's dissociated identities to function in the different environments, rather than dissociated identities as the result of abuse, which is the sort that gets most of the attention.

I feel, paradoxically, very lonely, though I suspect that there are any number of people in a similar mental situation.
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[personal profile] azurelunatic 2004-07-27 08:59 am (UTC)(link)
By "culture", I do not mean one distinct behaviour. I mean all of the distinct behaviours one has to learn in order to survive/deal with things while immersed completely in a culture. How to deal with personal space. What the politeness rules are (and there are generally a lot that unless you learn them from the cradle, just don't come without a lot of study). How to effectively deal with a person who is sad. How to effectively deal with a person who is upset.

[identity profile] rusty-boscoes.livejournal.com 2004-07-30 02:12 am (UTC)(link)
Really my only point was that the schism couldn't really be a clean clefting of the two cultures as we perceive them. In fact, I think that separating the cultures would be an artifical separation. That being said, I think bi-lingualism would have a huge impact on it; actually, the originator of the concept of the dissociative-state was studying a woman with a severe psychotic disorder; she spoke multiple languages, but would find moments where she could only speak one.
I'm sorry if I appear stupid--I've given a lot of thought to these concepts.
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[personal profile] azurelunatic 2004-07-30 02:31 am (UTC)(link)
I was thinking about what a huge impact being at home and being called by one name, and being at school, and being called by another, had on me, and I was thinking that if something as simple as that did what it did to me, what interesting high-function dissociative coping methods there might be for people with more of a difference between their home lives and school lives.
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