I am a third culture kid or TCK or 3CK, also sometimes referred to as a global nomad or existential migrant.
I didn't know I was a tck until I met up with my friend Kate on Paignton sea front a few weeks ago, and as we caught up on the last few months' news, she introduced me to this concept. She is a 3ck herself and so is her husband Per. There are thousands of us across the UK and the number is always growing.
So what are third culture kids? They are simply children who did their growing up in more than one country or culture and whose national and cultural identities are, therefore, rather more complicated than single culture children who did all their growing up in their culture of origin.
The term originates from the 1950s and was first used by American sociologist/anthropologist Ruth Hill Useem. Another American sociologist, David C Pollock, has given us a working definition of the third culture kid as "...a person who has spent a significant part of [their] developmental years outside the parents' culture. The TCK frequently builds relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership in any. Although elements from each culture may be assimilated into the TCK's life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar background."
In essence, third (or trans- or cross-) cultural kids take elements of all the different cultures they experience and create a unique personal identity which reflects that particular mix of influences.
I intend to revisit my own life experiences from time to time to throw some more light on this question of identity, of personal narrative, of the many different autobiographies I could write.
Friday, 14 October 2011
Imaginary Biographies
In Paul Auster's 1992 novel Leviathan one of the characters is a conceptual artist called Maria Turner, who throughout the novel engages in a series of art projects. Two of these projects engage with the idea of imaginary biographies.
In one, she follows random strangers as they move around New York and takes scores of photographs as she tails them on their journeys. She then uses the photographic record of these (non-)encounters to construct an imaginary identity for each person, creating a personality from a sequence of discrete objective visual images. There has been no contact or conversation with the subject, all is imagined from outside observation.
In the second, she takes a job as a chambermaid in a hotel and creates imaginary biographies of hotel guests purely from the random objects they leave in their hotel room. This time, the subject identities are constructed from physical things, but again, no contact, no conversation.
In the first instance, the subject is present as a series of snapshots; in the second, the subject is completely absent other than through the traces of their passing through that particular time and place by the things they have strewn around the room.
In a previous post, I discussed the notion of social media as autobiographies without a subject, a life chronicled from the inside out, from the author out towards the world. In Maria Turner's case, we are talking about biographies which are constructed from the outside in, from the observer in towards the subject.
Identity through our relationship with ourselves and identity through our relationship with things - two sides of the same coin. What is missing is our relationship with others - the core of any true record of our lives.
In one, she follows random strangers as they move around New York and takes scores of photographs as she tails them on their journeys. She then uses the photographic record of these (non-)encounters to construct an imaginary identity for each person, creating a personality from a sequence of discrete objective visual images. There has been no contact or conversation with the subject, all is imagined from outside observation.
In the second, she takes a job as a chambermaid in a hotel and creates imaginary biographies of hotel guests purely from the random objects they leave in their hotel room. This time, the subject identities are constructed from physical things, but again, no contact, no conversation.
In the first instance, the subject is present as a series of snapshots; in the second, the subject is completely absent other than through the traces of their passing through that particular time and place by the things they have strewn around the room.
In a previous post, I discussed the notion of social media as autobiographies without a subject, a life chronicled from the inside out, from the author out towards the world. In Maria Turner's case, we are talking about biographies which are constructed from the outside in, from the observer in towards the subject.
Identity through our relationship with ourselves and identity through our relationship with things - two sides of the same coin. What is missing is our relationship with others - the core of any true record of our lives.
Saturday, 8 October 2011
Stuff
Last weekend, we had a good clearout and took a lot of stuff to a car boot sale. It left me strangely unsettled to bag and box up the accumulated clutter of years, take it to a different place, unbag and unbox it again, put a totally arbitrary price on each item, and then see a part of your life slowly trickle away as each item is added to the clutter of other people's lives instead.
You spend the first half of your life acquiring, collecting and slowly accumulating all kinds of objects, shoring up your own corner of the universe of things with fragments to give yourself some solidity, substance, identity. Then, when you get to a stage of your life where you feel you have reached that state of independent personhood where you no longer need material possessions to bolster your sense of self (if you ever get there...), you can't wait to eject the detritus of the life you built up during all those years.
When my parents moved from their flat to an old people's home last year, my sister and I spent three hours inspecting and grading the stuff they had left behind so we could decide what to do with it. In the end, we kept almost none of it. My parents had already said goodbye to it all, had no further need for it in their new place. And even though some of it resonated with both of us because it had been with us when we were growing up, we also realised, with some sadness, that in the end it was all really a load of old tat.
I find books the hardest to get rid of. Like many readers, I experience a book to the full, I love the feel of it, the smell of the printed paper (each book subtly different from any other), but mostly the thoughts and feelings that each book evokes when reading it. I can often recall the whole feel of a holiday through remembering which book I was reading at the time. So to me a book captures a whole experience, a sense of time and place, as well as what story it has to tell. A book, and by extension, any other things that have such a keenly felt presence in our lives, becomes a repository to anchor a particular set of thoughts, emotions, perceptions, place, time, weather, whatever.
We must learn how to preserve those experiences whilst at the same time letting go of that physical shell that contains them, that book, that record, picture or object. That way we can fight the tyranny of things and keep our lives pure and simple. In the end, all things are just stuff...
You spend the first half of your life acquiring, collecting and slowly accumulating all kinds of objects, shoring up your own corner of the universe of things with fragments to give yourself some solidity, substance, identity. Then, when you get to a stage of your life where you feel you have reached that state of independent personhood where you no longer need material possessions to bolster your sense of self (if you ever get there...), you can't wait to eject the detritus of the life you built up during all those years.
When my parents moved from their flat to an old people's home last year, my sister and I spent three hours inspecting and grading the stuff they had left behind so we could decide what to do with it. In the end, we kept almost none of it. My parents had already said goodbye to it all, had no further need for it in their new place. And even though some of it resonated with both of us because it had been with us when we were growing up, we also realised, with some sadness, that in the end it was all really a load of old tat.
I find books the hardest to get rid of. Like many readers, I experience a book to the full, I love the feel of it, the smell of the printed paper (each book subtly different from any other), but mostly the thoughts and feelings that each book evokes when reading it. I can often recall the whole feel of a holiday through remembering which book I was reading at the time. So to me a book captures a whole experience, a sense of time and place, as well as what story it has to tell. A book, and by extension, any other things that have such a keenly felt presence in our lives, becomes a repository to anchor a particular set of thoughts, emotions, perceptions, place, time, weather, whatever.
We must learn how to preserve those experiences whilst at the same time letting go of that physical shell that contains them, that book, that record, picture or object. That way we can fight the tyranny of things and keep our lives pure and simple. In the end, all things are just stuff...
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