Portable Roots

Book excerpt: Bicultural individuals often articulate the themes of rootlessness, identity formation, cultural dissolution, and “home”, and reframe them into theological questions. Bicultural individuals who have spent their formative childhood years living in, and interacting with, two or more cultures can be found in immigrant, refugee, transnational, missionary, borderland, and hybrid communities. This book challenges the traditional understanding of human development. In particular, Portable Roots: Transplanting the Bicultural Child underscores the contextual and religious nature of development. By focusing on identity formation in children and adolescents who have grown up in more than one culture, the parameters of stage theorists such as Erik Erikson are expanded. Three samples of children of missionaries formed the initial research population. The children were raised in boarding schools, mission schools, and international schools – settings which have been likened to a hybrid or third culture or interstitial space. These original three samples first articulated a phenomenon of “rootlessness” that sent the author on an investigative journey spanning three decades. After interviewing many persons with portable roots, the study’s last sampling in Princeton, New Jersey, in 2012, articulated what was needed for the end of this quest: how transplanted roots thrive in terra firma.