Re-interpreting cultural values: Tajikistani students abroad

Abstract

This article looks at the mobility of Tajikistani students and how they negotiate their place in an increasing globalised world, where national boundaries are becoming more navigable. It explores how structural and cultural factors intersect and influence young people’s choices as they re-shape their connections to their homeland, and re-negotiate cultural meanings in the new geographical and cultural contexts they find themselves in. This inquiry uses the concept of translocality which frames the negotiation of cultural meanings in a distant geographical and (host) cultural space by acknowledging the place of the “local connection” within international mobility. It does this by examining students’ perceptions of two cultural concepts: nomus or “keeping the family name high in the community” and kase shudan or “being the shaper of one’s own destiny.” Drawing on Stephen and Storey’s conceptualisation of culture (and the local notions of agency) the article explores how continuity and contestation are juxtaposed and brought to bear on the new meaning-making by the students, against the national and international agendas that define student mobility choices. Using qualitative methodology, the researchers engaged with Tajikistani research participants in England and Japan, and looked at what those decisions about mobility mean for the individual students, locating them in a translocal (as opposed to a transnational) space. The article finds that contrary to the usual expectations of immigrants adhering more closely to cultural values (for fear of diluting them) in a new setting, while the local cultures keep evolving, these students re-interpreted traditional values to take account of their new settings and their exposure to new cultures and spaces and sought to expand meanings rather than constrain them in traditional moulds.