A Community in Limbo: Negotiating Notions of ‘Home’ and Belonging amongst Third Culture Kids (original) (raw)

A Third Culture Kid (TCK) is a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside the parents’ culture. Although elements from each culture are assimilated into the TCK’s life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar background. As a TCK, the author has allowed her familiarity with the subject to lead the semi-formal conversations that conformed the ethnographic data. In an effort to develop some concepts that will permit a productive analysis of the TCK ‘community in limbo’, some intersecting points are identified at which ambiguities necessarily arise: notions of place, ‘home’, belonging, and identity. The interpretation of the ethnographic data is thus largely couched in the discourse on personal narrative, focusing on how the informants accommodate conceptualizations of such analytical nodes.