Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do People Navigate Multiple Cultural Worlds?
Follow the distinction between involvement in multiple traditions and treating each tradition as a sealed system.
Why you’re reading it. Keep longstanding multicultural lives and cultural exchange within the question.
A question to consider. How would you describe a multilingual community without assigning each resident to one culture?
Why this reading
Morris, Chiu and Liu propose that people draw on multiple cultural traditions and that traditions influence one another. Their framework questions the assumption that each person belongs to one self-contained culture.
Before you read
Partial involvement means that nobody participates in every part of a tradition. Plural involvement means that people engage with several. Cultural frame switching concerns context-sensitive responses, not necessarily a change of identity.
Read for
- Compare the claims about individuals’ cultural engagement with claims about connections among traditions.
- Separate empirical findings, historical illustrations and arguments for public policy.
Consider afterwards
- What could explain different responses from the same person across two cultural settings?
- When might emphasizing cultural mixing obscure unequal power or a community’s claim to recognition?
Editorial context
This 2015 narrative review proposes a research programme; it does not settle every mechanism it discusses. Its cited priming and adaptation studies need evaluation on their own designs and subsequent evidence. The authors do not propose that interculturalism should simply replace every other approach to diversity. A scientific framework and a preferred political policy require different arguments.