My stomach is full, but my heart is hungry Understanding the processes of acculturation and remote enculturation in the diasporic Kurdish families in Norway

Abstract

This empirical research addresses two important issues related to the life of the diasporic Kurdish families having young children born in Norway. Considering the family here is meant the first-generation immigrants and the second one. To this end, three different concepts have been utilized to facilitate the research on the phenomena under study. The first is acculturation, how those parents maintain their own original culture's values and norms while approaching the host land culture and adapting to its cultural norms and behaviours. In other words, how this dual-functionality is characterized and carried out. While, the second concept is enculturation. It is referred to as a process of individuals’ learning about their group culture. However, those targeted families’ second-generation children were born in a varied context, not their original one. As a result, the ‘remote enculturation’ term has been employed as more inclusive of tackling the issue. Remote enculturation is a new concept that has been suggested to address the issue of children’s learning about their heritage culture from afar, utilizing modern communication and technological advances as modern avenues of learning. The third term is the ‘diaspora’ which has been used purposely to describe and categorize those families’ immigration experience, among other novelty patterns of immigration such as transnationalism