Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

What factors predict whether we perceive rejection from our heritage culture? Few studies have examined the antecedents and outcomes of intragroup marginalisation – perceived rejection due to not conforming to the expectations of one’s heritage culture – in spite of its implications for the psychological functioning of bicultural individuals. The broad aims of this thesis are twofold: to provide a holistic insight into the predictors of intragroup marginalisation and, in turn, to investigate its impact on psychological adjustment and functioning. The General Introduction reviews existing acculturation and marginalisation research and situates intragroup marginalisation within the Social Identity Theory framework. It is noted that previous research on the marginalised experiences of bicultural individuals has centred on either their choice of dis-identifying with their heritage culture, or being prevented from identifying with the heritage culture by the mainstream culture. The role of the heritage culture in-group in rejecting non-conforming members has largely been neglected. The predictors of this perceived rejection from one’s heritage culture were chosen because of their importance in shaping interpersonal interactions and goals: attachment orientations, selfconstrual, and conservation values. In addition, perceived cultural distance between the heritage and mainstream cultures was included as a factor which may heighten the tension between one’s cultural identities. To provide broad insight into the detrimental impact of intragroup marginalisation, outcome variables were chosen that represent general psychological functioning: psychological adjustment (conceptualised as acculturative stress, subjective well-being, and flourishing), an integrated bicultural identity, and extreme progroup behaviour. Study 1 found that anxious and avoidant attachment orientations were associated with greater intragroup marginalisation and, in turn, with lower psychological adjustment. Study 2 experimentally primed attachment representations; results further supported the link between chronic attachment orientations and decreased intragroup marginalisation. Study 3 further supported the link between attachment avoidance and anxiety and increased intragroup marginalisation. Furthermore, support was found for the indirect effects of avoidant attachment through intragroup marginalisation on greater endorsement of extreme pro-group behaviours. Study 4 increased the cognitive accessibility of independent and interdependent self-construals through a priming manipulation. Primed interdependent self-construal exerted a protective effect against the link between intragroup marginalisation and poor psychological adjustment and a conflicted bicultural identity, whilst primed independent self-construal was linked with increased intragroup marginalisation, and, in turn, decreased psychological adjustment. Study 5 indicated that valuing security and perceiving cultural distance decreased intragroup marginalisation, whilst valuing tradition marginally increased perceptions of intragroup marginalisation. Study 6 examined intragroup marginalisation experiences longitudinally. Results indicated that an increase in intragroup marginalisation from Time 1 to Time 2 was associated with an increase in acculturative stress. The General Discussion reviews the general findings, discusses implications for bicultural individuals, and sets further directions for research.

In the interconnected world of today more and more people get on the move. We go abroad for vacations, visits or business trips and we change countries of residence as we pursue new opportunities. Cross-border mobility is becoming part of our life. In recent years consumer researchers have been showing an increasing interest in particularities of consumption in condition of global mobility. Although previous studies have acknowledged the importance of economic capital in enabling global consumer mobility, existing research could be enriched by a deeper understanding of how globally mobile consumers manage their financial consumption across borders. The aim of this dissertation is to is to contribute to the uncovering of the particularities of consumption of financial services in global mobility by documenting globally mobile consumers’ financial consumption patterns, the ways they build and maintain relationships with their financial service providers and the ways in which they navigate cultural norms of service consumption and financial consumption across borders. The study is based on four research articles that develop an understanding of the dimensions of financial consumption and uncover purchasing, relational and acculturative aspects of consumption of financial services in mobility. The overarching chapter further develops the insights from the articles, bringing forward the concept of the cephalopodic consumption mode – a particular way in which globally mobile consumers organize their financial consumption. This work contributes to the domain of research on serially relocating consumers by showing how globally mobile professionals engage in cephalopodic consumption mode (CCM), using their economic capital in order to navigate their international movement. The multipresence, multi-acculturation, instrumentality and camouflage of CCM emerge as an answer to challenges of mobility – the need to reacquaint with new countries every time upon relocation, the future need to leave again and the necessity to organize consumption across borders. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: Manuscript. Paper 4: Manuscript.</p>

Over the past decades, the pronounced increase of international migration has led many nations to confront themselves with the pressing issue of how to ameliorate and make more harmonious the engagement among people with different cultural backgrounds. The present thesis enters this debate focusing on the mutual relations between Italians and Moroccan immigrants living in Turin (North-West Italy). By means of this case study, this research demonstrates that the support and valorisation of cultural diversity do not damage social cohesion, as some scholars believe, but rather they may contribute to positive intergroup relations if they are well balanced by the adaptation of immigrants to the host country’s culture and by the development of a sense of belonging with the new country. In order to test my assumption I analyzed the impact of a preference for the integration strategy of acculturation (rather than assimilation or segregation) and the extent to which Moroccans and Italians share this preference. These analyses build on the distinction between acculturation in the public and in the private domain and between the concepts of culture and identity. A total of 281 respondents, of whom 136 were Moroccans and 145 Italians, participated in a questionnaire study. Both groups clearly expressed their preference for the integration strategy in the public and in the private domain, and for a dual identity, where migrants identified with both their own ethnic group and with Italy. In addition, these findings revealed that both acculturation strategies and identity patterns were predictive of intergroup relations, with the latter having the strongest impact. These findings were deepened through qualitative interviews, which aimed to explore whether for the specific context of this study the conditions were such that the dual identity could realistically develop. Results indicated that while culture diversity is encouraged and supported, Moroccans still experience a degree of discrimination. Such situation delineates a reality characterised by a ‘segmented pluralism’, that is, a reality where the recognition of cultural and ethnic differences coexist with the persistence of structural inequalities.

This dissertation plots the myriad connections between Southern France and the multicultural Iberian Peninsula during the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, the people to people contacts which effectively connected Southern France with the Islamic world. The example of courtly culture demonstrates the pattern of informal cultural absorption that resulted from these contacts, as aspects of Andalusian courtly culture were adopted and adapted to Occitan court settings, fitting within a pattern of Pan-Mediterranean courtly culture. This courtly culture absorption was a result of the long-term and broad-based people to people connections and acculturation between Occcitania and the multi-cultural Iberian world. First, using charter evidence, the interaction between the two Iberias, one Islamic and Arabic, the other Christian and Latin, is traced through the people, institutions, and infrastructure that passed from one Iberia to the other. By the early twelfth century, major Islamic medinas with large Arabic-speaking populations had been incorporated into the Christian kingdoms. In the close confines of these medina/urbs,day-to-day life brought different religious and ethnic groups together. Properties bought, sold, and exchanged involved people of different faiths and backgrounds. Women, like the nuns at Sigena outside Huesca, or the Islamic and Jewish brides of French settlers, often had a unique role to play intercultural interaction. On the other side of the Pyrenees, several types of cross border relationships occurred: family ties through marriages and alliances, institutional ties through monastic and church affiliation, and travel ties through legates, bishop and abbot appointments, and pilgrimage. Roads to the Spanish shrine of Saint-James of Compostela blanketed southern France, bringing pilgrims to stops along the way at Sainte-Foy de Conques, Saint-Sernin de Toulouse, the Cathedral of Bayonne, and La-Sauve-Majeure. The archival and published charters of these towns and monasteries of Occitania show how these relationships created the means for acculturation, interaction and communication between Occitan and Iberia. As a consequence of these trans-Pyrenean relationships, people with Iberian, Arabic-language origins, interacted with Occitan peoples bringing greater awareness of the intellectual and material culture of Iberia with its cosmopolitan sensibilities. My dissertation demonstrates the cultural reverberations resulting from cross-cultural contact. While most agree that there was some Arabic influence on medieval Europe, it is generally limited to instances where there is a clear paper trail, such as translated scientific, medical and philosophical texts. There is still significant scholarly resistance to the idea of a more generalized cultural influence due to the theory that connections between Arabic-speaking populations and Europeans were limited and inhibited by language and cultural barriers. we accept that people absorb cultural influence in many ways, including orally, visually, and in what are termed 'low culture' registers, often imperfectly understanding what they scavenge, contact and communication become key to understanding acculaturation. My methodology, using names, ethnicity, and information on captured in charters to identify cross-cultural interaction and evidence of cultural influence, focuses on the pathway from the Arabophone world to Occitania. Since charter evidence shows that cross-cultural interaction was long-term, rapidly increasing over the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and broad-based, involving many areas of Occitania and many types of people. acculturation would be the expected outcome.

The purpose of this study is to examine the cultural and social integration process among Syrian refugees in the United States, and to what extent the direct and indirect challenges have played a role in the process of their social and cultural integration. The challenges include, but are not limited to, cultural conflicts, religious values, stereotypes, and English language proficiency. In order to investigate my research questions, interviews as a research methodology were used as a theoretical framework for this project to collect and analyze data. I conducted semi-structured interviews with ten Syrian refugees who currently live in the United States. These interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed in full in both Arabic and English by me. My data analysis investigated what the interviewees indicated about their processes of social and cultural integration in the United States’ society as refugees. Specific extracts were chosen because they served as rich materials to analyze and provide answers to questions in this paper. Findings indicated that Syrian refugees needed to overcome significant personal, social, linguistic, and psychological barriers and challenges in order to integrate socially and culturally in the United States’ society. Results showed that participants in this study adopted various “acculturation strategies”. Only three out of ten were socially and culturally integrated. However, acculturation strategies adopted by participants are dynamic and changeable overtime, so further longitudinal study is needed to examine their integration processes over a longer time.

The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of parents' perceptions of their role in helping their children acculturate to a new cultural and social environment. Specifically, this study used qualitative methods to interview Black families who moved from large urban communities to a smaller Midwestern college town. The sample consisted of ten Black parents who had moved to this college town from a United States (U.S) urban community with a population size of at least 100,000 persons. The results indicated that parents perceived their role in helping their children adapt to this new environment as important. However, they all described their role differently. Furthermore, the results suggested that all parents in the study moved out of their home towns to escape violence and crime and to pursue an overall better quality of life for themselves and their families. Data gathered from this study will assist administrators, teachers, school counselors, community leaders and parents to better understand geographic mobility and ways to successfully assist with such transitions.

This thesis has three primary objectives: to deconstruct the genealogical representation of Maori as a physical, unintelligent and savage people, to examine the role that education, and particularly physical education has played in perpetuating these representations by channelling Maori into physical curriculum areas, and to provide a functional kaupapa Maori philosophy of health and physical education. Postmodern theory underpins this theses because it encourages the search for multiple truths. In the colonial context, specifically, it provides an ideal tool by which to deconstruct the supposedly objective and preordained single truths of the colonisers. As I demonstrate, these single truths proved to be politically motivated and false. I also employ a Foucauldian understanding of European history to describe how European bourgeois nationalism and normalisation mutated into biopower, where the normalised Self was able to control, limit, describe and kill the Other. Travellers, missionaries and settlers transposed biopower from Europe to colonial New Zealand. Later, descriptions of the Other - or rather the juxtapositioning of the Self next to depictions of the primitive/anti Other - by anthropologists and historians aided this process. For the benefit of enlightened liberals, colonisation in New Zealand required a specific rhetoric to recast ruthless aspects of the process as mere anomalies on the road to Utopia. The modernist Western world validated colonisation under the guises of humanism and progress: the savage, primitive, pre-philosophical Maori provided the perfect contrast against the civilised, mature, philosophical Self. This genealogical representation formed the basis for Pakeha and Maori relations - and continues to do so. Representations of Maori as intrinsically unintelligent and physical, framed politically motivated educational policy. Initially, racist educational directives channelled Maori into physical vocations to provide labour for untamed rural New Zealand. In the 1960�s and �70�s, racially biased intelligence test were employed to debiltate Maori students by streaming them into non-academic classes. Later, the so-called empowering rhetoric of the neo-colonial era informed curricula by promoting diluted and sanitised versions of tikanga Maori such as Taha Maori, its physical education offshoot Te Reo Kori, and the current New Zealand Health and Physical Education Curriculum. Promoted under the liberal banner of biculturalism, these initiatives primarily benefited Pakeha and further misrepresented Maori culture as simplistic and irrelevent to contemporary society. Deconstructing grand narratives encourages researchers to construct knowledge outside such totalising truths. Thus, the theoretical approach and historical disseminations outlined above provide the foundations for part two of this thesis, which is a contribution towards Maori knowledge. Employing an interpretivist, indepth interviewing and collaborative narrative epistemology, I constructed korero with kaumatua and pakeke. These focus on health and physical education from a Maori position. Subsequent discussion examines certain aspects of each korero, to form a functional Maori philosophy of physical activity delineated by hauora, a Maori notion of holistic health. The discussion also outlines a number of issues surrounding the incorporation of tikanga Maori into mainstream education.

La problématique de l'identité des personnes déplacées d'une culture vers une autre se trouve au centre de cette étude. Les migrants, libres ou forcés, emmènent avec eux leurs pratiques culturelles diverses : la langue, les coutumes, les habitudes, leurs manières de faire, leurs manières d'être et de penser, leurs rituels dansés. Que se passe-t-il dans cette situation d'évolution en dehors du contexte originel qui donne sens et signification ? Les résultats présentés sont le fruit d'un long travail de terrain effectué au sein de la communauté de Barundi de Belgique, combinant observations, participation observante et entretiens semi-directifs. Au Burundi, les rituels dansés rythment la vie quotidienne ; ils sont « labeur, ré-jouissance, convivialité et fête communautaire ». Cependant, la danse est perçue comme « subalterne » dans la vie -du moins pour la plupart des Barundi instruits. A l'étranger, les migrants utilisent la culture d'origine pour gérer des conflits identitaires qu'ils vivent. Ils dansent pour retrouver leurs racines, combler un vide nostalgique, se ré-identifier ; ils dansent pour contribuer à la culture de la différence et préparer la jeunesse à intégrer la société de la multi-appartenance. Ils dansent pour oublier momentanément les contradictions que suscite la situation de réfugié. L'activité aide à écouler des frustrations liées aux difficultés d'intégration socioprofessionnelle. La pratique des danses d'origine est une des réponses de la communauté immigrée et minoritaire au désir de se reconnaître elle-même et de se faire (re)connaître dans la société d'accueil.

Color-blindness and color-consciousness are two ideologies aiming at prejudice and negative intergroup behavior reduction. Whereas color-blindness emphasizes the importance of breaking down group differences and considering everybody as an individal similar and equal to each other, color-consciousness emphasizes the recognition and appreciation of group differences. This dissertation is about the positive and negative aspects of both ideologies, as well as about their differential effects on emotions, behavior, and prejudice. Furthermore, a longitudinal study between 4 different countries analyzes the differences between minority groups and majority groups in matters of ideology preferences and of their links to prejudice. Finally, some variables are tested as useful predictors of the color-blind and color-conscious ideologies.