Thwarting family values: American culture vs. Cambodian refugee families in the United States

1994 ◽  
Author(s):  
MaryCarol Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Family Values ◽  
Refugee Families ◽  
Cambodian Refugee

Types, meanings and ambivalence in intergenerational exchanges among Cambodian refugee families in the United States

2008 ◽  
Vol 28 (5) ◽  
pp. 693-715 ◽  
Author(s):  
DENISE C. LEWIS
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Filial Piety ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
The United States ◽  
Refugee Families ◽  
Behavioural Patterns ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
Cambodian Refugee ◽  
Intergenerational Exchanges ◽  
Mexico Coast

ABSTRACTThis article aims to answer the following question: how have refugee families in the United States (US) modified attitudes and behaviours surrounding intergenerational exchanges within the context of filial piety? This research reports on one 31-member extended family in a community of Cambodian refugee families living along the Gulf of Mexico coast. The family members in this study have changed types, found new meanings in, and are often ambivalent about, intergenerational exchanges. Moreover, they have held onto those aspects of Cambodian culture that were considered essential, such as filial piety and elder reverence, while adapting and redefining types and meanings of intergenerational exchanges the better to reflect their current lives in the United States. These findings illuminate ways in which changed life circumstances and cultural transitions shaped attitudes, preferences and behavioural patterns associated with intergenerational exchanges. The findings also show how and why refugee families have negotiated and modified their beliefs and behaviours surrounding intergenerational exchanges in the context of massive social and cultural disruption.

Mahjong

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annelise Heinz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Women's Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Heritage ◽  
Cultural Origins ◽  
Definition Of

Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture illustrates how the spaces between tiles and the moments between games have fostered distinct social cultures in the United States. When this mass-produced game crossed the Pacific it created waves of popularity over the twentieth century. Mahjong narrates the history of this game to show how it has created a variety of meanings, among them American modernity, Chinese American heritage, and Jewish American women’s culture. As it traveled from China to the United States and caught on with Hollywood starlets, high society, middle-class housewives, and immigrants alike, mahjong became a quintessentially American pastime. This book also reveals the ways in which women leveraged a game for a variety of economic and cultural purposes, including entrepreneurship, self-expression, philanthropy, and ethnic community building. One result was the forging of friendships within mahjong groups that lasted decades. This study unfolds in two parts. The first half is focused on mahjong’s history as related to consumerism, with a close examination of its economic and cultural origins. The second half explores how mahjong interwove with the experiences of racial inclusion and exclusion in the evolving definition of what it means to be American. Mahjong players, promoters, entrepreneurs, and critics tell a broad story of American modernity. The apparent contradictions of the game—as both American and foreign, modern and supposedly ancient, domestic and disruptive of domesticity—reveal the tensions that lie at the heart of modern American culture.

Sex Panic and Denial

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 458-482
Author(s):  
Corey Rayburn Yung
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Sex Offenders ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Goal ◽  
Residency Restrictions

The American criminal justice system regarding sex is not just logically incoherent, it is also often morally bankrupt because it remains unexamined and poorly understood. This Article contends that there are actually common roots underlying the seemingly oppositional forces of social panic and denial, which explain why the United States has an endemic sexual violence problem. Both panic and denial reinforce the implicit, and sometimes explicit, desire to avoid substantive engagement with socially contentious issues related to sex. The use of residency restrictions and civil commitment fit the modern social goal of putting sex offenders out-of-sight and out-of-mind. Yet, those same desires also explain America’s unwillingness to believe victims of sexual violence and police failure to properly investigate criminal complaints. In this way, sex panic dovetails with sex denial—in both instances, American culture only permits a limited discussion and understanding of sex and sexual violence. The result is that our nation fails to take sex crime complaints seriously while overreacting to the few convictions that emerge from the hostile criminal justice system.

Teaching globalisation in the social sciences

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 20-33
Author(s):  
Stacy Keogh George
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
The United States ◽  
Application Process ◽  
Refugee Families ◽  
The Social ◽  
Liberal Arts Institution ◽  
Social Empathy ◽  
Student Reactions ◽  
Refugee Experience

Abstract This article describes the incorporation of a refugee simulation into an upper-division sociology course on globalisation at a liberal arts institution in the United States. The simulation is designed to inform students of the refugee process in the United States by inviting participants to immerse themselves in refugee experiences by adopting identities of actual refugee families as they complete four stages of the refugee application process. Student reactions to the refugee simulation suggest that it is an effective tool for demonstrating the complexities of the refugee experience in the United States and for evoking social empathy.

The Paleoconservative Critique of Global Capitalism

2017 ◽  
pp. 167-189
Author(s):  
Peter Kolozi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigrant Population ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
National Interests ◽  
Capitalist Economy ◽  
Corporate Profits ◽  
The U.S

The paleoconservative critique of capitalism offered by Patrick Buchanan and Samuel Francis focuses on the threat to national independence and the nation’s culture and values by free trade. For paleoconservatives, the United States’ independence is undermined by a business class that prioritizes corporate profits over national interests. Likewise, the global capitalist economy has opened the U.S. to an immigrant population that has gradually eroded the values of white “middle Americans,” the population that is the repository of a unique American culture.

Four

2020 ◽  
pp. 75-102
Author(s):  
Bruno Maçães
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Political Correctness ◽  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Love Affair ◽  
American Life ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Traditional Structures

This chapter assesses whether America deserves to be placed alongside those Asian societies which, for all their progress, remain more or less shackled by tradition. The United States has been for more than a hundred years the very image of modernity. In the postwar decades, it appealed to European intellectuals such as Sartre on account of its deracinated life. The music, the literature, the architecture of those years were an extravaganza of countercultural passion, breaking with every convention. If people now feel that Americans are after all too conventional, there is reason to suspect that something else is happening and that their love affair with religion, guns, and the death penalty is to be explained from sources other than the persistence of traditional structures. The chapter offers an alternative explanation, looking in turn at these three peculiarities of American culture. It also considers an element of contemporary American life where differences with an older European sensibility seem clear enough: political correctness. Ultimately, one can see that a distinctive mark cuts across American experience as a whole, becoming more visible in those areas where it breaks away from its European past. One may call it the marker of a new civilization.

Beyond the Iconoclastic Republic

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Brown
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
Compulsory Military Service

This introduction traces antebellum American skepticism about public monuments to the distrust of standing armies that was central to the ideology of the American Revolution. The popularity of Independence Day illustrates the iconoclasm of the early republic, which paralleled a widespread resistance to compulsory military service. Remembrance of the Civil War vastly increased the number of public monuments in the United States. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, these memorials became a vehicle for the militarization of American culture.

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