Abstract

Cultural diversity is an axiomatic part of American social life, and individual cultural diversity is widely pursued. Both are associated with practical goods such as creativity and variety and with moral goods, such as choice, tolerance, and justice. In the literature there are widespread claims of people who can be characterized in terms of a very distinctive identity and mode of being that arises from their multiple cultural placement. But a range of evidence from diverse disciplines indicates that people are not prone to change their organizing cultural frames. From the perspective of moral philosophy, cultural diversity ought also to cause problems since cultural frameworks are inextricably linked to our moral choices and serve as our moral sources. Moreover, research in cultural adaptation has been unable to confirm the claims for individuals with highly composite identities and skills to integrate cultural frames. This dissertation considers the paradox by showing how, at the deepest levels, individual cultural adaptation may not be the outcome of a particularly cultural sequence per se. Once the cultural is linked to the moral, it is possible to see why cultural boundary-crossing is a highly effortful process that includes, but goes beyond, cultural content and competencies. This study of thirty culturally complex respondents confirms that the deeper challenges of cross-cultural interaction are of a moral sort and occur predominantly in the intimate sphere of family life rather than at the public socio-cultural level. A second set of findings shows that of forty subjects, only two exhibit a process and sort of adaptation that may be characteristic of the deeply adapted third culture individual. These findings substantiate the argument that the cultural is inextricable from the moral and that cultural complexity is predominantly a task of moral-cultural inquiry and increasing moral intelligibility and orientation.