ABSTRACT
This chapter is Lise M. Sparrow’s challenge to Peter Adler’s model of “multicultural man,” which describes an intercultural person as someone who lives on the boundary with fluid and mobile identity and embraces marginality as the most desirable stage of identity development. This form of multicultural identity, according to her, typically reflects the experience of White men and does not resonate with many women and ethnic minorities. In her analysis of student writings and in-depth interviews with 20 people, she discovers that the multicultural women identity reported by her respondents is strikingly different from Adler’s conceptualization. Whereas the multicultural White man spoke of marginality as the mental capacity to detach from social realities, the multicultural women expressed that the socio-cultural context is equally important, if not more, than the cognitive capacity for self-reflection in its influence on their personal experiences and social identities. Although the “multicultural man” identity is achieved through transcending cultural identities, the multicultural female interviewees verbalized their identities as rootedness and belonging and their desires to reconnect to the religions, languages, and ethnic traditions with which they had grown up. Sparrow visualizes multicultural women’s identity in the image of a tree, that is, deeply rooted in community while adjusting their growth to the environment and expanding connections with others. Through her analysis of the narratives of the multicultural women, she invites communication scholars and students to reconsider the issues of marginality, in-betweeness, uniqueness, commitment to community action in the conceptualization of intercultural identity development.
