SEMINAR: Anthropology and Sociology Seminar Series 2015 - Multiculturalism at home: Negotiating European/Asian/Australian interculturality within the family: Maki Meyer, PhD Candidate Anthropology and Sociology School of Social Sciences, UWA

One consequence of globalization is the mixing of people of different cultures and races through migration, tourism, study abroad, and trade and business relations. One of the results of global population mobility is a rise in intermarriage, forming partnerships among people from different nationalities, races, ethnicities and cultures. In migrant nations such as Australia, there has been a steady increase in the population of mixed cultural/racial heritage. My thesis explores various ways in which migrant families of mixed backgrounds engage in the acculturation and socialisation processes, negotiate multiple cultures and develop identities to integrate into Australia. It investigates various aspects of family life, which emerged from the semi-structured interviews with all family members. These include negotiations in parenting practice in education, food and language practice at home, school life for children and children's perceptions of 'mixedness' (bi-cultural/tri-cultural/intercultural/interracial). In this presentation, I focus on food and education, examining them through the lens of the concept of "habitus" and "cultural capital" by Bourdieu, and the "acculturation theory" by Berry. The research findings demonstrate the complexity of the relationships between interactions within the family and the social/political environment in which they occur, suggesting such families reflect, in miniature, broader processes of cosmopolitanisation. As such, they offer evidence of the structuration processes that translate macro-level multiculturalism into 'multiculturalism at home'.