Cultural Construction and Cultural Retention in Three Welsh Diaspora Groups

Douglas Caulkins & Carol Trosset

Overview

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that has collected directly comparable systematic data appropriate for consensus analysis from both a parent culture, several of its emigrant ethnic communities, and several host communities. Diaspora communities are usually assumed to exhibit hybrid or “third space” cultures—unlike either the mother or the host cultures. While plausible, this assumption should be tested with comparative empirical evidence. Our research focused on Wales as the mother country and Welsh diaspora populations in the U.S., Argentina, and Australia. In a previous NSF-funded project we carried out the fundamental work in Wales; in this grant we carried out research in three diaspora populations. Our original grant proposed only two diaspora populations, but we have managed, through a grant supplement and additional funding from Grinnell College, to include the third diaspora population.

With the assistance of our eight student researchers we interviewed approximately 300 consultants to construct data about five Welsh concepts of personhood (egalitarianism, martyrdom, emotionalism, nostalgia, performance orientation), and three American concepts of personhood (Individualism/collectivism, achievement, and competition). We constructed and validated a series of narrative scenarios as indicators of each of these concepts. Usually the scenarios were drawn from lived experience in Wales or the U.S. We then asked consultants to rate each scenario for (1) “Welshness” (2) “Americanness,” “Australianness” or “Argentineness,” depending on the host country, and (3) the “goodness” or “desirability” of the action taken or attitude demonstrated in the scenario (eg. “A university professor has tea in his kitchen with the workers repairing his garage.”) In each population (2 locations in Wales, 3 locations in the U.S, 2 locations in Argentina, and two locations in Australia), then, we used consensus analysis to determine whether there was agreement within each population on the construction of Welshness, the description of the host country culture, and the ideal as represented in the scenarios. We always found consensus on Welshness and the ideal, and often on the description of the host country.

Next, using the output of the consensus analysis, we correlated the profiles of Welshness obtained from the “cultural key,” or culturally correct answer, from the mother country and each of the diaspora populations:

Table 1: Pearsonian Correlations Between Constructions of Welshness in Mother and Diaspora Populations

Of the diaspora populations, the version of “Welsh” culture constructed in the three American communities is most similar to “Welshness” in Wales. The Australian community’s construction of Welshness is relatively similar to that in Wales (+0.89), but not quite at the same high level as the American populations. In the Argentine community, the local version of “Welshness” is relatively distant from that of the mother country (+0.70).

These differences are relative: With correlations ranging between +0.69 and +0.95, we assert that “Welshness” in the mother country and in diaspora populations shows a strong family resemblance. This finding provides an empirical challenge to the most radical of the postmodernist theorists who question the possibility of cultural continuity across diasporas.

Among the American diaspora populations there is less agreement on the construction of American culture than Welsh culture (Table 2). Given the greater diversity of American culture, this outcome is not only expected, but gives reassurance that our instrument taps into that cultural diversity.

Table 2: Correlations between Constructions of Host Country Culture by Diaspora Populations

The table shows that the three U.S. populations entertain relatively different constructions of American culture (as profiled by the scenarios), with the greatest difference between the Vermont and Ohio populations and the smallest between the Vermont and Iowa populations.

The similarities between the constructions of American and Argentinian cultures range between +0.86 and +0.48. The similarities between American and Australian cultural constructions are narrower, between +0.69 and +0.55. We can be confident that the host cultures of America, Australia, and Argentina are differently constructed or differently understood by their resident members of the Welsh diaspora. The exact nature of the differences—which concepts of personhood are rejected or embraced by each population--remains for further analysis.

Table 3 reflects on the “third space” (or hybridity) hypothesis by showing the similarities and differences between the diaspora cultures, the mother culture and the host culture, as understood or constructed by members of the diaspora populations. Briefly stated, the Welsh-American communities construct Welshness in a very similar way to the populations in Wales, the mother country, but to varying degrees, and see Welshness as different than their version of “American” culture.

Table 3: Third Space? Correlation between Diaspora, Mother and Host Cultures.

The Ohio Welsh-Americans see the greatest differences between their culture and that of “Americans.” Similarly, the Welsh Australian’s version of Welshness is quite similar to Welshness in Wales and is rather different than Australian culture. The Argentine Welsh, however, claim to be Argentinia first, rather than Welsh, as reported in a later ethnographic section, and the correlations underscore this assertion. Their version of Welshness is most distant from the mother culture and closest to the host culture, a striking +0.97 correlation.

The "Third space" and hybridity relationships can be represented in a Multidimensional Scaling diagram of the correlation matrix of the diaspora, host and mother cultures.

Diagram 1. MDS of correlation matrix of diapora, host, and mother culture profiles.

Key : O= Ohio, I= Iowa, V= Vermont; A= Australia, Ar= Argentina, W=Welshness

Stress in 2 dimensions is 0.007

In diagram 1 the more similar cultures are, the closer they are to each other; the more different they are from each other, the greater the distance between them. The diaspora populations, except for Argentina, are clustered near Wales, the mother culture (highlighted in green). The host cultures are all distributed at some distance from Wales, with the three versions of American culture relatively close together (highlighted in red) and distant from Australia and Argentina. For Australia and the U.S., the “third spaces” of the Welsh diaspora populations are near neighbors of Welsh identity. For Argentina, however, the third space is anchored near Argentinian identity. Our comparative perspective allows us to see that “third spaces” can be differently constructed, more or less similar to the host or mother culture.

Acknowledgement:

This report is part of a larger study of identity in the Welsh diaspora, growing out of the research by Caulkins and Trosset on personhood in Wales (Trosset 1993; Caulkins et al. 2000; Trosset and Caulkins, 2002). The field research for this project was carried out with the support of National Science Foundation grant BCS-0217156, Douglas Caulkins and Carol Trosset, co-PIs.

Field Research in Wales

Jason Reynold, Kendra Hillman, and Jennifer Paine presented papers in a panel session on "Welshness Re-examined: The Construction of Identity in Wales" at the Central States Anthropological Society Meetings, Kansas City, March 19, 1994. They and three other students were research assistants on a project in Wales during the summer of 1993.

Papers on Cross-Cultural Research and Welsh-Americans

Kathleen A. Munley (left) and Douglas Caulkins: "A Cross-Cultural Test of Mary Douglas's Theory of Cultural Bias."

Victoria E. Schlegel (right: "How Welsh are the Iowa Welsh? Identity and Cultural Continuity between Wales and Welsh-Americans." )

Tina N. Popson and Douglas Caulkins: "To be or not to be Welsh: Dilemmas in Claiming Ethnic Heritage as an Important Part of Identity."

Further Field Research on Welsh-Americans

Tina N. Popson (right) and Douglas Caulkins: "Cultural Transmission of Welsh Values in Diaspora Populations" given on March 23, 1997, in LaCrosse, WI. Tina is developing a different version of this paper for presentation at the Third Annual Conference of the North American Association for the Study of Welsh Culture and History, at Rio Grande University, Ohio. A summary description of Welsh-American culture can be found in: Douglas Caulkins 1997 "Welsh Americans" in The Encyclopedia of American Immigrant Cultures: Builders of a Nation. David Levinson and Melvin Ember, editors. Macmillan. (Pp 935-941)

Additional publications from research in Wales:

Douglas Caulkins and Elaine Weiner, Forthcoming 1998: "An Entrepreneurial Culture for Wales? The Role of Mentor a Busnes in Culture Change." Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference on Welsh Studies, Rio Grande, Ohio, North American Society for the Study of Welsh Culture and History.

Douglas Caulkins and Carol Trosset 1996 "The Ethnography of Contemporary Welsh and Welsh-American Identity and Values" Proceedings of the First North American Conference on Welsh Studies, Rio Grande University, Rio Grande, Ohio, June 1995 (pp 9-16).

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