In order to fashion a theoretical framework several preliminary definitions are in order. First, I define culture as a system of symbols invested with meaning, along with narratives and norms that construct the world as an intelligible and orderly place.Footnote 1 Culture thus constitutes a common framework for social relations, by making imaginable – or precluding from imagination – a given action or utterance.Footnote 2 Moreover, in addition to its purely cognitive aspects, culture includes a shared affective component, or what Raymond Williams has termed a “structure of feeling.”Footnote 3 These combined cognitive and affective elements constitute intersubjectivity, or the mutual awareness of shared attitudes and perceptions.Footnote 4 The second definitional matter concerns identity. While members of society partake of numerous identities, the focus here will be on cultural identity, or that which “links an individual to a membership group that encompasses emotional ties, frameworks of thinking, and ways of behaving.”Footnote 5 Along with the content of identity this includes the active process of identification, whereby the self “knowingly commits itself to the shared values and practices of a particular cultural group.”Footnote 6
With these key concepts and terms in hand, it is possible to get down to productive theorizing. My contention is that understanding the social process of globalization requires investigating the subjective meanings and perceptions of actors who are directly engaged in encountering or introducing cultural change. It also involves coming to terms with shared meanings and their expression through discourse, social interaction, and informal accountability. To provide a satisfactory approach for this task, I draw extensively from two important bodies of work, one by Pierre Bourdieu and the other by Margaret Archer. Each provides pivotal insights for understanding cultural stability and change, despite the fact that they are substantially at loggerheads with each other. By critiquing and selectively drawing key elements from both of them, and by supplementing Archer’s work with that of other Critical Realists, I arrive at a synthesis informed by the work of Dave Elder-Vass. This lays the foundation for an empirical investigation of cultural and identity change, using the case of Kazakh return migrants from the United States.
Bourdieu: The normalcy of social and cultural reproduction
Bourdieu offers a particularly influential and lucid formulation of practice theory. This makes it a good starting point for thinking about intersubjectivity and its implications for social behavior, including the predominance of normalcy, appropriateness, and institutional as well as cultural stability. A key component of Bourdieu’s theory is the concept of field, defined as a set of possible “positions and position-takings” that are characterized by certain distributions of economic, social, and cultural capital.Footnote 7 Individuals acting within a given field (such as academia, sports, or the legal system) develop an associated habitus, or “system of dispositions which acts as a mediation between structure and practice.”Footnote 8 In parochial terms, the habitus determines what we normally attend to and how we do so, as well as what we feel comfortable with. Inasmuch as it provides a link between perceived possibility and intentional action, the habitus may also be conceptualized as an “acquired system of generative schemes”; that is, it includes an element of creativity, albeit a structurally delimited one.Footnote 9 One result is the generally unproblematic enactment of meaningful and socially acceptable conduct, including adaptation to situational change.Footnote 10
According to Bourdieu, it follows that ordinary social functioning, guided by the habitus, does not require a great deal of critical thought. Instead, as he argued, “The schemes of the habitus … owe their specific efficacy to the fact that they function below the level of consciousness and language.”Footnote 11 Bourdieu also insisted that any given habitus has an essentially shared or collective nature, which produces a “tacit, prereflexive agreement over the meaning of the world.”Footnote 12 This fosters a great deal of spontaneous conformity and synergy of individual actions, without requiring constant renegotiation of purpose and principle. Likewise on a personal level, equilibrium occurs when the habitus is compatible with field and circulating discourse. Under such (typical) conditions, both habit and calculation result in actions that reproduce the field along with its associated power configurations and social positions. As a consequence, such actions tend to evoke social acceptance along with subjective feelings of self-respect and well-being.
Bourdieu’s theory (like all practice theory) has enormous implications for social and cultural stability. Well-socialized individuals follow norms without even considering – much less rationally assessing the consequences of – breaching the generally held sense of appropriateness that characterizes each field of social and cultural activity: that is, analytical assumptions, status differentiations, quality standards, and so on. Even if everyday decision-making involves some degree of deliberate adjustment, only rarely does it include a willingness to problematize everyday reality or to challenge its normative underpinnings.
Of course, Bourdieu does not exclude the possibility of change. Yet when he does consider change, it is explained with reference to major shifts in material and institutional conditions, as a result of which “routine adjustment of subjective and objective structures is brutally disrupted.”Footnote 13 Only such a structural “crisis” is capable of creating dissonance between habitus and field, as a result of which “the social world loses its [perceived] character as a natural phenomenon.”Footnote 14 In other words, a dramatic departure from normalcy demands some sort of explanation and problem-solving intervention, which perforce leads to rational analysis – which, in turn, may foreground the existence of previously unquestioned assumptions. The implicit becomes explicit, and thus subject to scrutiny.
Archer and Critical Realism
All this is a far cry from the work of Margaret Archer, who remains the most important theorist of Critical Realism today. Archer distinguishes between three “ontological orders” that she refers to as the “natural,” “practical,” and “social” realms of experience. Each is characterized by a particular type of knowledge as well as subject–object relations. Thus the natural order pertains to physical reality; the practical order concerns accommodative and/or manipulative knowledge arising from objective features of the natural order; and the social order includes organizational forms plus culture.Footnote 15 What is important about Archer’s approach to these concepts is precisely their ontological distinctiveness: social relations and culture presuppose, and are influenced by, objective material realities as well as logical properties of the mind capable of appropriating them.Footnote 16 Archer also insists on drawing an ontological distinction between cultural systems, on the one hand, and “social structures” consisting of roles, organizations, and institutions. This allows her to examine their discrete effects in conditioning actors, as well as the specific acts whereby actors reproduce or modify them.
Archer’s formulation of Critical Realism therefore includes a number of objective structural components, while at the same time she argues that intentional agents are able to exert a reciprocal influence on social relations and culture. The result is a continuous cycle of conditioning, (inter)action, and concrete outcomes, which may lead to either change (“morphogenesis”) or reproduction (“morphostasis”).Footnote 17 By making this argument Archer departs rather fundamentally from Bourdieu (and for that matter, Giddens), who treats actors and structures as mutually constitutive and thus essentially inseparable ontologically. In contrast to Bourdieu and other practice theorists, she therefore places much greater emphasis on the individual actor, conceived as being socially conditioned yet also potentially capable of independent thought and intentionally transformational conduct. Hers is thus a far more agential notion of meaning construction than that allowed by Bourdieu’s concept of habitus.Footnote 18
For Archer, the crucial capacity that makes agency possible is “reflexivity,” or the “internal conversation” by means of which people actively make sense of the world. This is the conscious level of thought, through which individuals set goals, categorize, and evaluate the situations they encounter, and fashion suitable responses.Footnote 19 As she argues:
[O]ur personal powers are exercised through reflexive interior dialogue and are causally accountable for the delineation of our concerns, the definition of our projects, the diagnosis of our circumstances and, ultimately, the determination of our practices in society. Reflexive deliberations constitute the mediatory process between “structure and agency.”Footnote 20
The upshot is neither to nullify nor to privilege the importance of structural conditions, but rather to insist on their active negotiation by purposive agents.Footnote 21 On this point, she makes two specific claims:
First, since social life in an open system is always at the mercy of contingencies so, by definition, people’s responses cannot be entirely “routinized.” Second, the co-existence and interplay of plural generative mechanisms often shapes the empirical situations encountered by subjects in unpredictable ways, thus requiring creative responses from them.Footnote 22
Archer thus insists on the importance of critical reflexivity for opening up the possibility of truly creative and substantive agency.
Synthesis
The Critical Realist account is essential. Everyday existence – no matter how bounded by routine – typically requires at least some degree of conscious reflection about desirable ends, appropriate means. Yet Critical Realism (including Archer) also has shortcomings inasmuch as it tends somewhat to understate the importance of structure for shaping the social order. While structural influences are less powerful in the social than in the natural and practical orders, they nevertheless impart a deep coherence or patterning to everyday thought and action. After all, social environments require a significant degree of routinization – both institutional and intersubjective – in order to function normally.Footnote 23 Bourdieu and other practice theorists are therefore correct to an important extent: there is a severe limit to how deeply and critically aware most people are, most of the time, either about themselves or about the underpinnings of their social positions and cultural orientations within fields.Footnote 24
Confronted with two such powerful, well-substantiated yet seemingly contradictory models, a number of scholars have called for some form of reconciliation.Footnote 25 Indeed, this seems clearly desirable. But of course it is one thing to call for integration and quite another to accomplish it in an intellectually compelling way, especially in view of the ontological tensions between Critical Realism and Practice Theory. How, then, can we satisfactorily theorize the relationship between praxis and reflexivity?
Some scholars have attempted to supplement Bourdieu’s theory by grafting certain elements of Critical Realism onto it. One possibility is a straightforward combination, according to which reflexivity constitutes the generative element of the habitus.Footnote 26 This is hardly convincing, however, since (as Mouzelis and other critics have noted) efforts to imbue the habitus with higher levels of deliberative thought are fundamentally incompatible with Bourdieu’s conceptualization.Footnote 27 Nor is it persuasive to argue that the habitus is able to accommodate ambivalence, since it is precisely the absence of such conscious tension and potential instability that makes the habitus work.Footnote 28 For essentially the same reasons, critical reflexivity can never become habitual. That is, it may become normalized for a given individual, but it can never become habituated because critical reflexivity by its very essence is incompatible with, and even antithetical to, habitual thought and practice. Not only does it involve questioning and challenging, but it is also sufficiently discomfiting as to require at least some degree of conscious motivation. As a result, those who attempt to reconcile reflexivity and the habitus are heading into a blind alley, since the limits this would impose on analytical and introspective thought would effectively preclude criticality in any meaningful sense.Footnote 29
Another possibility is a more contingent accommodation, whereby structural instabilities may spawn reflexivity due to slippage between field requirements and subjective dispositions.Footnote 30 But this argument, much like Bourdieu’s original conception, suffers from two problems: short of true “crisis” there is no basis for inferring that the habitus can be fundamentally transformed, nor is there any reason to imagine that it would be permanently enhanced by some sort of critical faculty. The emergence of truly analytical and creative reflexivity therefore appears ad hoc; it is hard to reconcile with the more truncated conception of mind that holds central stage in Bourdieu’s theory.Footnote 31
Of all efforts to integrate habitus and reflexivity to date, in many ways the most successful is Dave Elder-Vass’s synthesis.Footnote 32 Drawing from Bourdieu, Elder-Vass avers the centrality of acquired dispositions for reproducing social structure, while at the same time he accommodates reflexivity as an intrinsic quality of mind, rather than an exogenous property that arises only in response to crisis. Elder-Vass thus regards habitus as both structurally conditioned and malleable. As he argues:
Our dispositions may sometimes be heavily and unconsciously affected by social factors, but none of us is ever completely at the mercy of our habitus. Nor is our habitus the unmediated product of social structures, but rather the result of a lifetime of critical reflection on our experiences, including our experiences of those structures.Footnote 33
In this way structure, reflexive deliberation, and the (evolving) habitus each contribute to producing purposive action.Footnote 34
Yet although this constitutes an important improvement in conceptualization, even in Elder-Vass’s account the role of reflexivity remains rather secondary. That is, reflexivity is limited to modification of the habitus, which, in turn, represents the sedimented outcome of structurally influenced reflections. But what keeps critical reflection within these bounds? If Archer is correct that reflexivity may involve fundamentally problematizing perceived reality, this would require a highly robust, creative, and potentially critical mode of thought. Why then does it not proceed to challenge the very foundations of the habitus? No theoretical account to date addresses these questions satisfactorily.Footnote 35 In what follows I attempt to do so by arguing that reflexivity must be understood as an innate capacity, but one subject to cultural, situational, and psychological pressures. As such it may remain externally oriented and adaptive to social norms, or – under different circumstances and for different individuals – it may become far more analytical, contestative, and internally focused.
Modes of reflexivity
Before examining these propositions in empirical terms, it is extremely useful to unpack the concept of reflexivity, and to identify its specific and variable characteristics. Here again we return to Archer’s rich theoretical work. In addition to expounding the mediative and potentially creative role of reflexivity, Archer goes an important step further by categorizing its distinct types (“modes”). Particularly important for our purposes, she distinguishes between “communicative” and “critical” reflexivity.Footnote 36 It is necessary to grasp the essential elements of each, since they feature prominently in the following discussion.
First, communicative reflexivity involves an ongoing analytical conversation, but one that remains more external than internal. Communicative reflexives (i.e., individuals for whom communicative reflexivity is the dominant mode) tend to articulate their self-monitoring thought processes, and rely on others for adjudication and clarification. In this respect, their primary orientation is conformity or appropriateness; they depend on and continually reinvest in established social structures and norms. In contrast, critical reflexivity is characterized by “reflecting upon our own reflections.” Here the internal conversation remains just that: internal. Archer notes that critical reflexives strive to achieve personal and social change in accordance with principled commitments and tend to be highly self-critical when they encounter difficulties.Footnote 37 Critical reflexives also display a kind of analytical self-consciousness, including a tendency to recognize and problematize their own assumptions, behavior, and even the conditions under which these emerge.
Finally, Archer claims that the prevalence of either mode of reflexivity depends on cultural and structural conditions. Whereas communicative reflexivity was especially well suited to the relatively stable conditions of premodernity, critical reflexivity is selected for by the contingency and dynamism of globalization.Footnote 38 Globalization thus not only causes dissonance but also means that established practices and cultural orientations become increasingly counterproductive, and therefore inappropriate for socialization.Footnote 39 Accordingly, handinhand with the secular decline in social and contextual continuity goes a decline in communicative reflexivity and a rise in critical reflexivity.Footnote 40
Archer’s work is crucial for theorizing an expanded scope of agency. Nevertheless her understanding of reflexivity still requires some revision. One issue is that Archer conceives of “autonomous reflexivity” as constituting one of the three primary modes (along with communicative and critical reflexivity). Autonomous reflexives, in her account, emphasize personal responsibility and tend not to rely on others for affirmation or help in defining goals. In this sense they are also individualistic, engaging in their own deliberations and pursuing their own projects. As a result autonomous reflexives are predisposed to high degree of rational, strategic calculation, as opposed to passively accepting and adapting to social constraints. Yet two major problems arise here, one analytical and the other empirical.
First, even in the abstract it seems unlikely that many people focus primarily on such calculations; those who do would either be classified as having narcissistic personality disorder or would fall elsewhere along the spectrum of sociopathy. Indeed, a host of psychological and neuroscientific studies now demonstrate that normal social functioning, including empathy as well as ordinary prosocial conduct, has an innate cognitive foundation.Footnote 41 Perhaps even more damning is that – to briefly anticipate the results of my fieldwork – I find no empirical foundation for treating autonomous reflexivity as a distinct (and potentially dominant) mode. Instead, reflecting inwardly about one’s interests and goals is a pervasive characteristic; it is equally true of communicative reflexives, who are outwardly focused in general, and of critically inclined critical reflexives. Self-interested and rational calculation allows critical reflexives to manage their “deviant” inclinations, but it also helps communicative reflexives pursue their own agendas while staying within established normative boundaries. In short, there is nothing particularly unique or defining about instrumental rationality or strategic calculation, and engaging in them does not imply any distinctive intellectual autonomy, or distance, from others. I therefore dispense with autonomous reflexivity as an analytical category.
Instead of autonomous reflexivity, a different mode that deserves inclusion – despite being overlooked by Archer – is what I refer to as discordant reflexivity. This manifests itself in the form of dual (in fact, dueling) internal conversations and analytical properties, including communicative reflexivity (with its external focus and emphasis on compliance) and critical reflexivity (with its generally questioning bent and internal focus). Scholars of migration and diaspora have long pointed to the tendency for dual identities to emerge, often accompanied by major ambivalence.Footnote 42 The concept of discordant reflexivity captures the underlying cognitive dynamics, as individuals wrestle with opposing values, norms, and identities, and oscillate between corresponding modes of thought.Footnote 43
Finally, while communicative, critical, and discordant reflexivity represent the only potentially dominant modes, they do not exhaust the full range of reflexive capacities. Other scholars (building on Archer’s work) have explored additional forms of reflexivity as well as the interrelations among them, of which two are especially relevant for our purposes: relational and emotional reflexivity. The concept of relational reflexivity has been developed by Pierpaolo Donati, who defines it as the condition of reflecting on the content and quality of relations, including one’s relations to various structures as well as with other people.Footnote 44 Relational reflexivity thus presupposes an active awareness of one’s social interconnectedness.Footnote 45 A relationally reflexive individual’s sense of self is inseparably intertwined with his/her understanding of personal as well as structural relations with others, coupled with conscious reflection about those very relations.Footnote 46 As for emotional reflexivity, it should first be acknowledged that Archer does recognize the importance of emotion, calling it “the fuel of our internal conversation” that serves to inform actors’ projects.Footnote 47 Nevertheless the role of emotion in her approach remains somewhat truncated, due to its rather paradoxical location largely outside the bounds of reflection. Ian Burkitt (building on Mary Holmes) therefore offers an important supplement to Archer’s account by conceptualizing emotional reflexivity, defined as a “relational understanding of emotions in terms of the relation with others in the social world, as well as in terms of the subjective relation we have to our own self.”Footnote 48 The key here is how others feel about us – or how we imagine others feel about us – and how we in turn conceptualize, feel about, and incorporate that understanding into our own sense of self.Footnote 49
Building on the above observations, we can profitably resort to the omnibus term critical reflexivity. Although employed in a variety of different ways by other authors, “critical” as used here refers to probing and problematizing forms of reflection, with regard to established practices, cultural assumptions, and feelings, and also with regard to oneself. With regard to the categories reviewed above, critical reflexivity thus denotes a combination of critical reflexivity as well as overtly critical manifestations of emotional and relational reflexivity.
In sum, our theoretical and analytical approach can be substantially improved by setting aside Archer’s autonomous reflexivity and instead including discordant reflexivity, as well as by consistently attending to the roles played by relational and emotional reflexivity. This leaves us with three broad tendencies for cultural identity and enactment, each based on a particular mode of reflexivity: communicative, discordant, and critical. The essential attributes of each may be illustrated in the three following portraits.
Communicative reflexivity
Olzhas A. grew up in the big city of Almaty. Although born into the middleclass, by the time he traveled to America on a government grant, his father had become an executive, and the family had risen to the ranks of the upper class. He planned to follow in his father’s footsteps. In the United States, he studied business, and back in Almaty was able to land a well-paying management job in a large firm.
For Olzhas, being in the United States amounted to a revelation of “seeing what Kazakhstan could be.” He became a fervent devotee of the market and of the competitive individualism it fostered. “Competition,” he enthused, “is in the blood of American people. People in the US force themselves to become better than the people around them.” This in turn was due to a culture of individualism, which “unintentionally forms a competitive environment” and thereby “makes people better, stronger, smarter, and more persevering.” The net result, in his view, was a “state of continuous improvement.” Olzhas’s conclusion was thus straight out of the neoliberal textbook: “Competition … is good, whether at schools, work-places, or parties.” This perspective even affected his political views in favor of democracy, which for him was part and parcel of the same competitive structure. As he exclaimed, “Arguing is good!” In these ways his experience abroad had been thoroughly worthwhile: he had embraced the American vision of progress and the relevant practical knowledge.
Socially, however, his experience had been a difficult one. Partly this was a matter of being shy and “afraid of new cultures”; partly it was also a case of estrangement due to American students’ lack of knowledge about, or interest in, foreigners. But by far the main obstacle was the debauchery he encountered on campus. As a practicing Muslim, Olzhas found such behavior repugnant. “I respect my culture more,” he said, compared to “teenagers doing drugs and alcohol.” He therefore socialized with other Central Asian students (there were a number at his university). As he explained, “We hung out together to prevent the influence of extremes.”
The result was that Olzhas hardly changed in terms of his social attitudes and values, as his conventional Kazakh views withstood virtually all challenges. The latter were plentiful. For example, homosexuals in America were uninhibited and unsanctioned. This was disturbing to him: “We don’t like it [in Kazakhstan]. I haven’t changed my mind that I don’t like them. But they have an illness. No other mammals do it.” Students also wandered around, and even attended classes, in the most casual attire. Olzhas was aware of his failure to conform in this regard, commenting, “In the US there is pressure to dress down.” But he refused to let that stop him from wearing appropriate clothing.
There was one area of significant change in his social attitudes, however, and that had to do with gender equality. As he noted, “I am more able to accept women as equal if they can demonstrate it.” The example he gave, however, was of a female classmate who excelled in math – that is, such equality was limited to professional or practical matters. To Olzhas this represented a significant step. “Our generation,” he suggested, “is changing.” Still, it in no way undermined male dominance in the private sphere, as his subsequent comments revealed: “If I fight with my girlfriend, maybe a couple of hours later I’ll think, ‘Maybe she has a point.’ It is partially due to being in the West. Also, they aren’t stupid … But [ultimately] I make the call.”
In short, Olzhas emerged essentially unscathed from his ordeal in the United States; there was no effect on his mode of reflexivity, and any shifts in his outlook pertained overwhelmingly to practical matters.
Well, I do not feel different, yet in some cases I do think differently. It could be a result of me getting older and smarter because of the university. Also, I do not feel differently about other people, yet in some cases I see things that could be done differently, maybe because I saw them being done differently or even better in the US.
Just as before he left, Olzhas remained fully conscious of social expectations and did his best to live up to them. Asked how he was perceived by others since his return, he replied, “I have never been considered different. I have always tried to be appropriate to the particular company and not to appear different.” Nor was anything new in his relations with old friends and family members. As he concluded, “It is mostly the same. I do not think anyone can change that much in 4 years.”
Like Olzhas, many returnees continue to be guided largely by preexisting habitus, with reflexivity producing only a degree of modification. They readily incorporate American-style practical knowledge along with its closely related values, such as discipline and efficiency. Yet their dominant mode of reflexivity remains communicative, and their key internal question continues to be: “What is appropriate?” These travelers display relatively little introspection or critical self-awareness. This is not to suggest that their overall orientation is objectively inferior, but rather that theirs is simply a different way of being in the world. Such individuals inhabit densely interactive spaces in which they typically verbalize uncertainties, and seek clarity and guidance from others about how to proceed. Their identities and cultural repertoires remain fairly closely bounded by social expectation, habit, and internalized norms, while the essential rightness of such expectations and norms is not seriously challenged.Footnote 50 As a result, too, they rarely question their own basic assumptions or reasons for behaving as they do.
Critical reflexivity
Indira D. spent her childhood in Pavlodar, the daughter of middle class, educated parents who worked in health care and mining. Like Olzhas, she went to the United States to study on a Bolashak grant. Her initial adjustment was rocky. She spent much of her time holed up with fellow foreigners and feeling negative about America: the people, the way of life – everything was just too alien. But her outlook began to change after taking courses in philosophy and political ideology, which directly challenged many of her most basic assumptions. “It was about questioning and doubting your core values, beliefs, ideas,” she explained. “It threatened my identity. To put it simply, I had a full-blown identity crisis. My heart was full of anger, frustration, disbelief.” The end result, though, was thoroughly transformational: “I cracked open my shell and let myself come out.”
Among other things, this meant abandoning her previous respect for traditions. “I find some local traditions redundant at best,” she declared. “They are not set in stone and will inevitably wither away.” She pointed to same-sex or interracial marriages as practices inconsistent with established Kazakh values, but which she now considered to be morally equivalent; neither better nor worse. “I find it silly,” she remarked, “to support only certain cultural practices out of respect for traditions.” Indeed, on the topic of her own marriage – that most hallowed institution and dream of every proper Kazakh girl – she commented blithely, “If I don’t get married it’s not a big tragedy. If I live with someone it’s not a big tragedy either … Marriage should not be a goal in itself.” For Indira the purpose of life was now about defining and pursuing one’s own, subjective truths. As she put it, “Whatever people choose to do in their own lives, let them do it.”
She also cared far less about social expectations than she had in the past. Her conclusion about conformity was simple: “OK, I can be different.” People were welcome to think what they wanted. Yet this in no way implied that she was unconcerned with others. On the contrary, Indira characterized herself as having become less self-absorbed and more socially conscious with regard to the general welfare, noting, “You want to do something useful – less about leisure and less about oneself.” Upon her return she joined a regional branch of the UN. She also became highly sensitive to social relations, including the quality of interpersonal dynamics. This caused her to change her perception of everyday rudeness in Kazakhstan, something she had scarcely noticed before. “Now it upsets me the way people treat each other,” she commented. “Pushing and shoving on the bus, venting their anger.” Indira’s take-away lesson epitomized relational reflexivity: “You need to be self-aware,” she observed. “How you treat others affects them.”
Another dramatic change was heightened self-awareness, including awareness of the emotional content of her interactions. As a result, although she was initially blunt in expressing her new opinions, she soon adjusted her conduct.
My ideas traumatize people. I try not to hurt people’s feelings … If they are not at ease with what I am saying, I will not insist. I have to be cautious with my old friends who haven’t seen me change, who haven’t walked this path with me. They remember the old me, and often their faces stiffen if I crash one of their favorite stereotypes. I don’t do it too often, or I’ll lose friends. They think that I’m Americanized.
Eventually Indira found a new crowd, including a majority who had worked or studied abroad. “With people I know, or who are close to me, I can be rather frank and outspoken,” she explained. “I can speak my mind without any inhibitions.” While a blessed relief, this compartmentalization of her social life was also a source of great disappointment. As she concluded, “Life is not that interesting here. People here are guarding themselves. They are not really open. I miss it. I wish things here were more diverse.”
Indira exemplifies a second tendency: pronounced critical reflexivity, with correspondingly less scope for the habitus. Such returnees approximate Archer’s meta-reflexives, often with a major additional role played by emotional and relational reflexivity – since to the extent that individuals adopt unorthodox practices they may need to manage resulting relational and emotional strains.Footnote 51 Although doubtless even the most critically inclined individuals are still unreflexive in much of their everyday conduct, they are also quite capable of problematizing social reality. This leads to questioning shared values and conventions, perhaps dislodging them from their established positions.
Ambivalence: Discordant reflexivity
Assel R. had a typical small-town upbringing heavily structured by custom and family ties. An excellent student, she went to Almaty for university and after graduating at the top of her class, was rewarded with a trip to America to study English and work as an intern. Much like Indira, living in the United States unsettled many of her basic assumptions, as a result of which she began reflecting on her life in a searching, highly critical manner. In particular, the freedom she encountered was stunningly unlike anything she had experienced before, and in many ways she found it an incredibly liberating to be unburdened by social conventions. “I was so happy,” she recalled. “I did not have to pretend to be someone else. People love and appreciate you for who you are. They respect your opinion, they respect your personality. People are equal.”
But Assel’s sense of excitement and discovery evaporated when she returned to Kazakhstan, where the pressure of social expectations weighed on her constantly. From that point on she became the very embodiment of ambivalence. Powerfully drawn to many American practices, she also harbored misgivings about them and struggled mightily over whether to implement them in her everyday life. For example, although she still rhapsodized about personal freedom in the United States, she also decried the fact that Americans were “too individualistic,” overly focused on themselves instead of on familial obligations. A similar tension characterized her attitudes about gender roles.
I told my relatives, “[Americans] are so individualistic – everyone does things for themselves. People clean up after themselves, not simply women cleaning for men.” My aunt was making manty, and she finished putting down the stuffing, and I was supposed to wrap them and serve everyone, but instead I just made it for myself! Unintentionally! They all laughed at me. My aunt said, “Please, here we do it for everyone. You are not in America.”
Assel laughed at the memory. Yet the very fact that the incident not only occurred, but also stuck so clearly in her mind, revealed her desires as well as her shame for having (and even acting on!) them.
Much the same could be said of her stormy relationship with two suitors. One was thoroughly old-fashioned, constantly seeking to monitor her movements and call all of the shots in their relationship. Sometimes she loved that. As she once declared, “I want a real man.” At other times though, the same behavior and mentality irritated her immensely, and she appreciated the other suitor for his precisely opposite views.
I have to choose what kind of man I want. Na. is more European and Nu. is traditional. I like both of them and I have to decide what kind of life I want. It’s so hard and it hurts! I have been happy with both of them. I like Nu. more but he is too controlling. But when I was with Na., even when I was happy I would think about Nu.
Figure 3.1 Reflexivity and personal trajectory
With one close friend she was able to go out, have a glass of wine, and commiserate about Kazakh society. The rest of the time she was indistinguishable from any ordinary Kazakh woman her age. In a moment of somber contemplation, she admitted, “I have no idea what’s going on with me. It’s like a different Assels are struggling inside. One of them is really traditional and the other one is very Americanized. I am trying to figure out what I want.”
Assel typifies a third group that returns home in a still more complex and even precarious state: that is, with a disjointed habitus and alternating modes of reflexivity. Such individuals regard traditional norms (which they previously took for granted) as artificial constructs, yet constructs for which they continue to feel some attachment and even an obligation to observe. Moreover, they are uncomfortably aware of the tensions and contradictions within their worldview.
Return migration and identity enactment
At this point, we can begin to explore cultural globalization as a social process. Return migration affords a perfect setting in which to do so, applying the theoretical approach outlined above. After all, to the extent that individuals engage with the host society (rather than sequestering themselves with other outsiders), experience abroad is likely to disrupt the habitus. This is true even for those who have already been exposed to foreign culture by the media: experiencing it as a lived reality is vastly more vivid and affecting.Footnote 52 Many sojourners have at least some novel experiences that evoke powerful and lasting responses, whether positive or negative. Even if the changes are not dramatic – perhaps only gradual and almost unnoticed – upon arrival back in the homeland the contrast is glaring, and return migrants typically undergo “reverse culture shock.”Footnote 53 Although they still share common knowledge they no longer reproduce it automatically; instead compliance with cultural norms becomes a conscious and calculated decision. This includes deciding whether to introduce alien practices – thereby revealing themselves as culturally anomalous.Footnote 54 For these reasons returnees often become acutely aware of the fragile and contingent nature of social acceptance.Footnote 55
Before launching our empirical analysis, therefore, one last theoretical step remains: we need a way to link reflexivity and habitus to outcomes regarding cultural change. Doing so requires highlighting the existence of external pressures and constraints, while at the same time exploring the significance of individual deliberation and social mechanisms, as each bears on observed patterns of behavior.Footnote 56 Here again Critical Realism is invaluable in demonstrating how reflexive actors craft meaning using available semiotic resources.Footnote 57 Performances and negotiations take place through conscious and often quite creative interventions, as cultural system and social structure present “constraints and enablements which supply reasons for different courses of action.”Footnote 58 That is, in order to understand actors’ choices and conduct we need to be analytically attentive to what Sperling calls the “socio-cultural opportunity structure,” and how this factors into actors’ private calculations and public performances.Footnote 59
The sociocultural opportunity structure
The notion of constraint may be conceptualized in terms of “cultural distance,” or the degree of incompatibility between the cultural-normative base and a particular practice.Footnote 60 Such incompatibility typically generates social resistance to change, which is perceived as a departure from legitimate standards of conduct.Footnote 61 In contrast, enablements consist of norms, standards, and beliefs that can be used to facilitate change. If there is sufficient cultural match an innovation may be “localized,” that is, framed as being essentially consonant with existing norms.Footnote 62 Alternatively, it may be legitimated with reference to an external standard, such as influential global ideas and practices. Yet another potent source of enablement is the provision of concrete material gain, especially for achieving state and/or socially sanctioned goals. This obviously applies to individuals who travel to the United States in order to acquire skills needed for modernization. Constraints and enablements thereby combine to form what Haugaard calls “local perceptions of reasonableness,” which in turn constitute “conditions of possibility” for successful negotiation.Footnote 63 As such they yield a rough calculus of cultural transgression, which determines whether individuals are likely to be shunned or respected, and whether their eccentricities can easily be overlooked or indulged.
Performance, accountability, and negotiation
The final issue has to do with social mechanisms and their connection to reflexivity. At least for the purposes of this study, which seeks to understand the social process of cultural globalization, the crucial mechanisms are performance, accountability, and negotiation.
With regard to performance, the seminal work remains Erving Goffman’s.Footnote 64 As Goffman so persuasively argued, identity has an inherently performative quality, as individuals attempt to cultivate various impressions in others. Yet Goffman’s account requires supplementation inasmuch as it focuses on socialized repertoires used in rather ordinary and predictable (“ritualized”) situations, as a result of which the self is conceived as a product of conventional performances. Instead, or in addition, it is essential to recognize that individuals are capable of stepping outside of established frames. This is certainly true of return migrants who have undergone reflexively driven identity change, and who face the necessity of integrating their new identities within coherent and persuasive narratives of belonging – as much for themselves as for those with whom they interact.Footnote 65 With these caveats in mind, however, the image of performance remains quite apt, including efforts to signal a greater or lesser degree of cultural citizenship. While returnees may dissimulate in many or even most social contexts, they also tend to seek out others with whom they can safely enact difference.Footnote 66 This requires auditioning before select audiences.
Together with performance, another crucial aspect of cultural and identity (re)production is accountability. Marked departures from normalcy often provoke overt or at least tacit challenges, in which case it is incumbent upon the apparent transgressor to (if I may extend the metaphor) provide a sort of encore, as a way of justifying themselves. Bottero rightly notes that justifying one’s actions requires giving plausible accounts, whose “intelligibility and reasonability rests in their continuing reference back to shared practices, not least because such accounts are part of how we constitute practices as what they are and, through calls to order, establish what is acceptable and what ‘one can get away with’.”Footnote 67 Here it is helpful to revisit Dave Elder-Vass’s synthesis of reflexivity and the habitus, in which he emphasizes the importance of social networks for explaining how structures arise and persist.Footnote 68 For Elder-Vass the key social network is a “norm circle,” or “the group of people who are committed to endorsing and enforcing a norm.”Footnote 69 Enforcement may cause relevant norms to be incorporated into the habitus and thereby to enter the internal conversation, but (as with identity in general) this is never an entirely settled issue; norms may repeatedly be queried or challenged in the wake of dissonance. Ongoing accountability is therefore essential, for both cultural change and stabilization, since only through such interactions can norms acquire and maintain their causal effects.
This ties into a final aspect of identity performance: negotiation. Performances elicit acceptance or challenge, or perhaps an uncertain absence of either, which the actor must interpret and to which he/she may respond.Footnote 70 Such negotiation involves successive performances, or what Sawyer refers to as “interactional mechanisms” through which change and/or continuity unfold.Footnote 71 At the same time actors must choose either to continue or change their behavior and justifications – all of which requires considerable reflexivity.Footnote 72 In these respects legitimacy – like identity and closely connected to it – comprises not only a social fact but also a social process involving explanation, justification, and symbolic formation, so as to root social beliefs within a broader narrative of meaning and order.Footnote 73 By attending to actors’ choices as well as the modes of reflexivity associated with them, it is possible to gain important insights into the social dimension of globalization.
Methodology
My starting assumption is that it is essential to understand actors’ perceptions and justifications for behavior, while at the same time maintaining analytical distance.Footnote 74 I therefore employ a “double hermeneutic” approach for comprehending actors’ behavior from within as well as from without, by attending not only to discourses and practices but also to the institutional and material conditions in which they occur.Footnote 75 In doing so I am persuaded by what Dan Little calls “methodological localism,” which emphasizes “the socially constructed and socially situated individual, who lives, acts, and develops within a set of locally social relationships, institutions, norms, and rules.”Footnote 76 In other words, I wish to grasp the interconnections between such relationships, institutions, norms, and rules as they are actively engaged by individuals.
My approach to methodological localism involves focusing on the microfoundational mechanisms that produce cultural and social structural outcomes. For this purpose, I borrow Rob Stones’s three part method of “retroduction,” which includes (1) identifying the actor’s general disposition/habitus; (2) the actor’s perceptions of possibilities and constraints; and (3) the objective existence of possibilities and constraints arising from sociocultural structure.Footnote 77 Adopting this approach makes it possible to understand how and why individuals interact as they do with regard to new practices, and thereby to gauge the effects of such interaction.
In coming to terms with actors’ subjectivities, I proceed by attempting to understand how an individual’s life-world offers a delimited range of imaginable options – not only logically, but also emotionally and intersubjectively. The goal here is not to derive and test falsifiable hypotheses, but instead to offer a compelling and empirically substantiated interpretation of actions and interactions. As a result the main question I ask is not “why?” in any crisp positivist sense, but rather, “how possible?” and “for what reasons?” Arriving at such a judgment requires comprehending pertinent social facts and the interconnections among them: that is, the social and cultural context within which various actions come to seem meaningful and appropriate.Footnote 78
I do so in part by drawing independent analytical judgments based on interviews and personal observations, in order to posit specific causal mechanisms and emergent properties – regardless of whether they are perceived by subjects.Footnote 79 And in part, I rely on the interpretations of participants themselves, thus including them to an extent as “peer researchers.”Footnote 80 This is absolutely crucial, since otherwise it is all too easy for the analyst to impute intentions and/or infer intersubjective changes that may not exist.Footnote 81 For example, someone who doggedly persists in going against the grain may or may not intend to make a larger statement thereby, such as challenging the validity of prevailing attitudes. Likewise, nonmigrants who observe this individual’s behavior may or may not draw such conclusions. Only by drawing on both complementary methods, therefore, is it possible to make reasonably confident inferences.
Because understanding discourse remains such a key part of the analytical process, I also use a number of other constructivist methodological tools. Perhaps most important among them, I attend to how actors deploy cultural lessons in the form of narratives, thereby weaving their separate experiences, reflections, and concerns into stories that link actions and events into a coherent whole.Footnote 82 At the same time, I attempt to remain sensitive to “intertextuality,” or the prevalence and consistency of constructions across actors and settings. Here again the goal is to locate individual narratives within a broader intersubjective framework, thereby making it possible to gauge the significance and resonance of particular claims.Footnote 83 Finally, along the way I try to identify the sources of various ideas and practices, so as to avoid ascribing too much significance to either local or global influences.Footnote 84 This is indispensable in coming to terms with the social process of globalization.
Interviews and interviewees
Because my major interest is in exploring change rather than reproduction, I focus on the most likely agents of cultural change. Research suggests that young people are characterized by particularly high levels of openness, malleability, and sensitivity to outside influences.Footnote 85 For interviews, therefore, I selected subjects who had spent at least three months in the United States in order to study, work, and/or receive professional training (almost all spent far longer than three months), and who were between the ages of seventeen and twenty-seven at the time of their stay.
In recent years, Kazakhstan has seen a substantial increase in young people going abroad for study or professional internships at foreign firms. Some of this has taken place through the state-funded “Bolashak” program, but thousands of other grants are provided by public and private foundations around the world (such as the Islamic Development Bank or Erasmus Mundus). Russia has long been the most common destination for students from Kazakhstan, and quite a number also go to Europe, but roughly 1,900 were studying in America during the academic year 2011–2012.Footnote 86 An increasing number of US-based training programs and internships have become available through international and/or state-based organizations like the OSCE and USAID, private foundations such as Fulbright, Gates, AIESEC, and private firms (both national and multinational). It is this last cohort of return migrants – that is, students and young professionals who visit the United States – whose ideas, identities, and cultural lessons are relevant here.
Examining only short-term migrants who go to the United States allows me to impose at least some degree of control over cultural context (as opposed to also including return migrants from Europe or elsewhere). Of course cultural attitudes in the United States vary enormously depending on location; rural South Carolina is a vastly different place than Manhattan or San Francisco. Nevertheless, especially on college campuses or in large metropolitan firms, visitors are likely to encounter a combination of socially liberal views and intense media exposure, and this potentially constitutes a powerful challenge to established beliefs. As a result there is a reasonably high likelihood of social mixing and cultural borrowing.Footnote 87 (In contrast, migrant laborers – most of whom go to Russia and remain relatively isolated within ethnic communities – do not tend to transfer new cultural values extensively.Footnote 88)
In order to find appropriate interview subjects I contacted administrators at key international organizations that provide funding for exchange students and professional interns, such as IREX and CIEE, and requested referral information for students/interns who had spent time in the United States. Considerable information about many grant recipients is also available online in the public domain, including the Bolashak Association. I also contacted former students of mine from Kazakh National University, where I taught briefly in 2006. Finally, I perused social media sites (Facebook and VKontakte) as well as Internet blog postings in which young people discuss their travel to the United States, and made contact with authors. After initial meetings I requested follow-on (“snowball”) referrals. All interviewees were ethnic Kazakhs with the exception of two Russians and one Tatar (the latter’s comments were evaluated with this difference in mind). Finally, I based my fieldwork in Almaty and Astana: these are by far the most globally connected and modern cities in Kazakhstan today, and a high percentage of return migrants repatriate to one or the other.
I conducted ninety-two semi-structured personal interviews between 2011 and 2012. Besides return migrants, this included fifteen individuals who had not traveled abroad, but who had interacted extensively with friends or coworkers that spent time in the United States. Interviews were conducted in Russian and/or English, depending on the preference and fluency of interviewees. In addition to interviews, I corresponded with another fifteen people who had participated in an online discussion about cultural globalization and identity change in Kazakhstan. I also conducted three group discussions with returnees, and drew innumerable observations from participating in a wide variety of everyday settings.
At the outset of each interview I asked return migrants about their impressions of Americans and of life in America. I emphasized that it made absolutely no difference to me whether they loved or hated the United States, but that I simply wanted to understand what they thought. Depending on a subject’s responses, I then attempted to explore the meanings of particular ideas or practices that he/she had experienced, both for the individual and with respect to prevailing social norms in Kazakhstan. Similarly, when interviewing nonmigrants I inquired about their perceptions of returnees: were any changes in attitudes and behavior noticed; and if so, how were these interpreted and evaluated? I was well aware of the importance of managing my own self-presentation; I tried to come across as friendly, nonjudgmental, and full of genuine curiosity.Footnote 89 My dress and manner were informal, and I attempted to establish a personal rapport.Footnote 90
