Cultural Homelessness

Considering the increase in mobility, travel, and so-called global citizenship, for many individuals in contemporary American society, little attention has been paid to the return trip. As stated by Debra Bruno (2015) in her Wall Street Journal blog post concerning the experience of returning expatriates, “Nobody tells you about this part” (www.wsj.com). Though repatriation has long been examined by researchers interested in the acculturation processes of refugee and immigrant communities, there is a current and decided expansion in scope of how this research can be applied more broadly given current trends in globalization and transnationalism. For example, the disparate communities that constitute religious missionaries, corporate employees
Instead, Navarette and Jenkins (2011) define cultural homelessness as a “construct developed to explain the experiences of some individuals having early-life immersion in more than one culture. Culturally homeless individuals report pervasive experiences of ‘being different’: mixed racial, ethnic, and/or cultural heritages within their families of origin … and the surrounding sociocultural context, resulting in structural marginality” (p. 791). This view is similar to Hattway’s (2016) concept of the triangle person, with key emphasis placed on being different, and shifts repatriation towards a close alignment with fields concerning psychocultural development and its manifestation through distress, discomfort, and ambivalence. In concluding their study, which reveals that cultural homelessness is significantly related to multicultural status as it pertains to biracial or multilingual identity, Navarette and Jenkins (2011) state that “culture encompasses all of the individual’s social group identifications, including those associated with race, ethnicity, social class, religion,