Why’d You Bring a Salad?: A Multimodal Analysis of Cultural Referencing in Third Culture Individual Interactions
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2025-08-25
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en
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This study explores how Third Culture Individuals (TCIs), individuals who lived outside of their home countries during (a section of) their formative years, reference culture and cultural experiences in conversation and what these references accomplish in interaction. Audio and video recordings were made of three sessions of conversation between Dutch TCIs. Six cultural references from these conversations were placed along a continuum of cultural alignment and analyzed using Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis (MIA) in order to identify their purposes in the conversation. The analysis reveals that references aligned with us primarily generate affirmation and remembering, we references encourage sharing and mutual recognition, and them references most often result in distancing, occasionally through admiration. These findings suggest that culture for TCIs is not a fixed allegiance to any national culture but an adaptable resource for conversational purposes, enabling affirmation, recognition, and differentiation depending on context.
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