University of Chicago doctoral student, Jacob Hickman, with the guidance of Dr. Richard A. Shweder, will investigate how immigrants' cultural models interact with both individual subjective experience and the competing models of the majority groups in resettlement contexts. The focus of the research will be beliefs of morality and personhood held by Laotian Hmong who have immigrated to Thailand and to the United States. The researcher will compare these different resettlement communities in order to understand how daily living, cultural practices, and interactions with institutions in Thailand and the United States shape immigrants' beliefs about morality and personhood. Morality and personhood were chosen as domains for this ethnographic comparison because of their fundamental importance for understanding oneself and one's relationships with others.
Taking advantage of the natural experiment afforded by having immigrants from one place settle in two different countries, the researcher will undertake nine months of fieldwork in Thailand and nine months in the United States. Using a person-centered research methodology, he will conduct person-centered interviews, undertake continuous ethnographic observation, and carry out a systematic survey of one community in each research site. Interviews and observations will focus on intra-familial intergenerational comparisons, in order to gauge how changes in personhood and morality differ across two generations that have entered the different resettlement contexts at different points in the life course.
This project is significant because it will illuminate the processes of change that migrants experience from resettling in different social contexts, including interactions with both formal and informal institutions. The analysis of a group that originated in one location and migrated to two distinct locations for more or less random reasons constitutes a unique comparative framework for investigating how people both react to and are shaped by their social and cultural milieu. This knowledge will offer a better understanding of the nature of "assimilation," a social, economic, and political concern for receiving countries. The research also supports the education of a social scientist.
