Betwixt and Between

1. By way of introduction

This blog is about global culture seen from a global nomad perspective. What I hope to do here is help explain some of the ways that this perspective is important, what a global nomad perspective affords us. I am an academic, a scholar of communication and cultural studies. I grew up in Asia and the Middle East but now live and teach in Arizona. My writings are usually about the cultural dimensions of technology, the globalization of culture, and the nature of media.

Briefly, what I consider a global nomad perspective is one of ethics, of care for the other now that, to cite an overused phrase from Marshall McLuhan, we’re in each other’s backyards. McLuhan thought that once global electronic communication made us all neighbors that we’d recognize a responsibility for each other. Ha! McLuhan apparently didn’t realize that there are no politics like neighborhood politics (especially when it comes to neighbors cutting across your yard or borrowing your stuff or throwing loud parties to which you are not invited). Responsibility and respect do not come automatically, following contact and close quarters. They require work. This is the work I think global nomads are best suited for.

2. Movement and rest

There are any number of ways to become a global nomad. Some come to it as adults through career, a call to service, a need for a vacation, or political or economic exile. Others have it thrust upon them, like the kids in the tow of the voluntary global nomads. I am one of these latter ones, a Third Culture Kid. Third Culture Kid (or TCK) is a term coined by sociologist Ruth Hill Useem to refer to children who spend a year or more of their formative years in a country that is not their parents’ country, and who then return to that home country. They find themselves a part of neither their parents’ country nor the country or countries in which they grew up, but rather form a third culture, betwixt and between.

In 1960, following a mutually shared wanderlust and a call to global service, my parents, both Americans who grew up in California, went overseas. They joined the American Friends Service Committee and ended up in East Pakistan (as it was at the time). They enjoyed the ex-pat community, and the work. My Dad went to work for CARE and, after the birth of my sister, ended up in Sri Lanka. I was born in California in 1966 but at age three months was on a plane to Pakistan. From there we moved to Turkey, then Jordan (briefly—a matter of a civil war aborted our stay), India, and Korea (where my Dad served as Director). He switched firms again, moving from the non-profit sector to work as foreign representative for a US-based milling company selling high nutritional grain mixes to aid agencies. We were based in the Philippines for four years. The reasons for our return stateside are complicated, but we ended up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I attended High School. My life since has consisted of primarily domestic moves: San Antonio, Urbana, Clemson, Atlanta, and now Phoenix. Early on in there I managed a year abroad in the UK, and since becoming a full time academic I’ve gotten to travel to Finland, Russia, Denmark, Mexico, Hong Kong, China, and Korea.

As a TCK I often feel in but not of the places I live. I know some fellow TCK’s and global nomads who are eternally restless, always looking for something new, finding that it’s time to move on. I know others who have planted themselves firmly after an itinerant upbringing and almost refuse to budge. I find myself in the middle. I love to travel when I can, but I found a respect if not a need for roots and habits. For example, though I have moved many times in my adult life, I always cherish being a “regular,” and find myself seeking out places (coffee shops, restaurants, a couple waffle restaurants in South Carolina) which become part of my routine. I have written about the idea of home. But home for me is less a place than it is a process. Home is the continuous process of the creation of a space of comfort, of arranging spaces and the feelings of spaces, the personal habits, idiosyncrasies, and repetitions that shape a space into a space of comfort. While we express our habits, affect, and culture on the spaces we create, the spaces we move through also in turn press back and shape us. The global nomad is the one who recognizes when one’s habits aren’t matching with the habits of the spaces outside our doors, but we go out seeking ways for our rhythms and spaces to mesh and resonate.

I’ll talk more about home and culture in future blogs (and ideas about difference, cosmopolitanism, nomadism, global flows of media, youth culture, and music). I’m looking forward to the conversation.


J. Macgregor Wise teaches at Arizona State University and is author of, most recently, Cultural Globalization: A User’s Guide (2008, Blackwell).