Making Canadian culture visible: acculturation as a co-construction of culture

• Main Author: Colling, Lisa Michelle
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2012
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/43078

This dissertation research explored the acculturation phenomenon while considering the reciprocal, interminable, polycontextual, multivoiced and multiscripted nature of this complex process, and the impact that residence in a culture contact zone has upon this culture change process. In exploring the visual and written texts captured by persons living within the culture contact zone of the Vancouver Lower Mainland through a collaborative visual ethnographic approach, the process of acculturation was explored as a co-construction of culture as participants’ collaboratively defined Canadian culture. The Vancouver Lower Mainland’s cultural plurality provided a promising culture contact zone in which to examine the complexities of an acculturation process for all acculturating members, both newcomers to the culture contact zone and old-timers of the culture contact zone (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rudmin, 2003), and to interrogate the complexities that these intensified intercultural contacts present. While critiquing the fourfold approach of assimilation, integration, separation and marginalization, this dissertation drew on a sociocultural theoretical framework in conceptualizing culture contact zones as third space, and the acculturation process as a co-construction of culture within this third space. Third spaces can be disharmonious and hybrid spaces and it is proposed, in this third space, that cultural practices are contested, created and shared — co-constructed by its members. Participants’ captured images, artist statements and interview texts were analyzed (1) thematically; in identifying, analyzing and reporting patterns observed within the data pertaining to participant conceptualizations of Canadian culture and, (2) interpretatively; where data were further analyzed employing Bakhtinian text mapping (Tobin, 2000), a strategy developed to glean a text’s potential deeper and/or multiple meanings in exploring the polycontextuality, multivocality and multiscriptedness inherent in a co-constructed acculturation process. Findings suggested that for the participants in this study, both newcomers and old-timers, the culture contact zone of the Vancouver Lower Mainland presented itself as third space as its diverse cultural members were confronted with alternating and competing cultural discourses and positionings within the intercultural contact situations that they were presented with; situations that created new cultural tensions that must be negotiated and managed at some level. Implications to Canada’s multiculturalism policy are discussed.