Culture in the Blender

A visualization popped into my head late last night of the culture networks I wrote about in my previous post, and it wants to get out. So here it is.

Two culture networks within a bicultural person

Blue circles are cultural ideas from the blue culture. They are connected to each other to make a network of knowledge of how to behave and how to make sense of the world. Red triangles are cultural ideas from the red culture. They are also connected to each other to create a system of how things are. Depending on the situation, the person can use either the blue or the red network.

A third culture network created from red and blue cultures

Blue circles are cultural ideas from the blue culture. Red triangles are cultural ideas from the red culture. The blue ideas are mostly connected to other blue ideas, and red ideas are mostly connected to other red ideas. However, to avoid convoluted and messy connections, some blue ideas are connected to red ideas and vice versa. Some connections between ideas from the same culture are missing, because it’s simpler to connect through an idea from another culture.

In my previous post, I argued that the difference between third culture kids/global nomads and bicultural people of various kinds lies in that third culture kids and gobal nomads connect their cultural networks into one single network, whereas cross-cultural kids, immigrants, and other international people keep their cultural knowledge separated. It was suggested on TCKID that third culture kids also discard pieces of cultural knowledge that they don’t like from their cultural network. That sounds familiar to me as well. We may know a cultural idea, but we decide we don’t want it in our network because we already have a better one in there. I’ve heard some criticism of the third culture kid concept from people who obviously don’t have an emotional resonance with it. This could be a simple way, kind of like the story of Ms. Roundhead, to explain to non-TCKs what makes third culture kids different and what the third culture is, without having to give a long historical background.