Damp Rooms and Saying ‘Please’: Mimesis and Alterity in the Host Family Space in Study-Abroad Experiences

Abstract

Study-abroad programs are a ‘globalizing project’ developed at the intersection of educational institutions seeking new income sources and the ideologies that the world is comprised of a mosaic of cultures and that ‘intercultural experience’ is valuable. While research on study-abroad programs often focuses on their effect on the students’ ‘global competence’ and language proficiency, this article focuses on the space, the space of host family in particular, produced in study-abroad programs. Study-abroad programs here are perceived in a wide sense to include various programs for students to go to another country to study.

Study-abroad guidebooks and researchers portray the host family's life as constituting a quintessential ‘native life’, in which study-abroad students should be immersed. However, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Aotearoa/New Zealand, this article argues that the distinction between ‘cultural difference’ and ‘cultural sameness’ is a construction, resulting in mutual accommodation and intolerant judgments, respectively. That is, when host parents recognised the ‘cultural difference’ of the foreign students’ behaviour, they often sought to understand meanings behind the behaviour, resulting in mutual accommodation. It turned the space into what Michael Taussig calls the ‘space between’, in which it is unclear who is imitating whom. When the host parents recognised ‘cultural sameness’ based on superficial similarity, however, their efforts to understand meanings behind behaviour was halted and, when the behaviour was considered problematic, led to the student being asked to move out. This article details an ironic space of study abroad where alterity inspired tolerance and similarity inspired intolerance.

Keywords:

• Construction of Difference and Sameness
• Construction of Space
• Globalism
• Study Abroad
• International Education
• Host Family

Notes

This article derives from my PhD dissertation for Cornell University, USA. I thank the members of my dissertation committee, John Borneman, Benedict Anderson and Jane Fajans; the people in Waikaraka and researchers in Aotearoa/New Zealand, especially Jill Bevan-Brown, Michael Goldsmith, Paul Spoonley and Pania Te Maro; the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program and Cornell University's Sage Fellowship, which funded my fieldwork and write-up of the dissertation, respectively; the audience of the panel at the American Anthropological Association meetings in 2011 where I presented an earlier version; Kiri Lee and Yuniko Terasaki for their assistance with Korean language; the editor and anonymous reviewers of Anthropological Forum for their constructive comments; and Christopher Doerr for proofreading the drafts. The text's deficiencies are my responsibility.

While supportive of the study-abroad students’ immersion in the life of host society, Woolf (2007) argues against immersion in the sense of taking classes designed for local students in the host society with the local students, because it does not focus on specific comparative experiences of the study-abroad students.

http://www.educationnz.org.nz/about.html#bg (accessed 20 October 2011).

This does not mean there will not be communication about cultural difference, because the student and host family can discuss such difference while the student copies the host family's routine.

This differs from the case of Iranian student's misogynistic behaviour because it was viewed to reflect cultural difference.