The Intercultural Glossary
Key Concepts on Expat Parenting and Identity
These are the ideas that run through everything I write.
If you are new here, start with these. Each one names something most people have been living without language for. If you have been here a while, this is where they all live together.
If you have ever stood somewhere, physically or otherwise, and felt like you did not know what game was being played, at least one of these is probably about you.
A
Alter-Globalisation
noun
The movement of communities actively organising around the protection of local identity, economy, and culture in response to the homogenising pressure of global capitalism. Not anti-globalisation exactly. More like: we want to be part of the world without losing what makes us specific.
Appears in the conversation about grief, nostalgia, and why low-rise jeans came back.
D
Demarketing
noun
The strategy of reaching fewer people more honestly rather than more people more loudly. In practice: pricing books so the person who most needs them can afford them, publishing real numbers including the ones that are not impressive, and trusting that the right reader will find the work without a campaign telling the algorithm to show it to her.
The opposite of a funnel. The opposite of urgency. The opposite of following you around the internet.
I have two marketing degrees. I am choosing not to use them the way I was taught. The demarketing experiment is documented in real time in the Marketing Underdog series.
Read the Demarketing experiment →
Distributed Mentorship
noun
The model of learning from a network of people who each contribute something different, from different fields, different contexts, different disciplines, rather than relying on a single mentor who holds the whole map. Named in a conversation with Rhoda Bangerter. Confirmed by a Swiss diplomat. Traced back to Homer, via a seventeenth century French novelist.
F
Familismo
noun
A core cultural value documented across Latin American communities, describing a strong sense of loyalty, reciprocity, responsibility, and emotional connection that extends well beyond the immediate family. The orientation toward the collective. The cousin who knows someone. The neighbour who brings food. The stranger who gives you the number you need before you know you need it.
Research suggests this is one reason why immigrant communities tend to build such strong informal support networks. The person who arrived before you remembers what it felt like not to know. So they tell you what they know.
Read the full essay on Familismo →
Family Capsule
noun
The portable version of your family's identity. The stories, the objects, the rituals, the language, the food, the specific way you do Sunday, that travels with you when everything else changes. It is what keeps a family coherent across countries, languages, and school systems.
Not nostalgia. Infrastructure. The child who has a family capsule arrives somewhere new already knowing who she is at home, which makes the work of learning who she is in the new place significantly more manageable.
I
Identity Migration
noun
The process of becoming someone different in a place that was not built for you, while still being measured by the old version of yourself. It does not announce itself. It just happens. Sometimes faster in your children than in you.
Not a breakdown. Not a failure to adapt. What happens when context changes faster than identity can keep up. The experience of almost every parent raising children across countries, cultures, or major life transitions.
The word mentor travelled three thousand years and changed meaning along the way. Identity migration is what that process looks like from the inside.
Read the full essay on Identity Migration →
Identity Preservation
noun
The active work of knowing who you are clearly enough that difference does not destabilise you. Not rigidity but security. The psychological infrastructure that makes pluralism possible.
The person who knows who they are can be in the room with someone who is visibly different without experiencing it as a threat. The person who does not know who they are cannot afford that openness because difference feels like an accusation.
This may be why the hostility toward migrants and outsiders visible in so many countries right now is less about economics and more about identity fragility in host populations. People who cannot tell you who they are can tell you very clearly who they are not.
Read the full essay on Identity Preservation →
Inherited Scorecard
noun
The set of expectations you absorbed before you were old enough to question them, still running in the background of a life that no longer fits them. It measures you against a version of yourself that made sense somewhere else, in a different country, before children, before everything changed shape.
It tells you who you were supposed to be. The professional. The competent one. The person people called when they needed something done. In the new country, in the new language, in the new role of parent without a village, the scorecard does not match the life you are actually living.
Naming it is the first step to stopping it from running unchecked. It does not disappear when you name it. But you can see it. And seeing it means you can stop being measured by it without your consent.
The Brazilian birthday superstition is a very small and very specific version of the inherited scorecard.
L
Loss of Felt Competence
noun
Not the loss of ability but the loss of the feeling of it. The invisible layer of knowing that tells you what to do next, which queue to join, which word to use, how loud is too loud in a pharmacy, disappears when you move to a place that was not built for you. You are still capable. You just cannot feel it anymore.
The shopping cart was the first place I felt it. I had bought groceries hundreds of times. In Switzerland I stood in the aisle and could not find what I was looking for and could not ask for help in a language I did not yet speak and the gap between what I was doing and what it felt like to do it was enormous.
That gap has a name. This is it.
It is not only for immigrants and expats. The new mother standing in her own kitchen not knowing what to cook for dinner. The person who changed careers and feels like a newcomer in their own field. The parent whose child has grown somewhere they cannot follow. Any major context change can produce it.
N
S
U
Negative Identity
noun
Defining yourself by exclusion rather than by content. Knowing what you are not before you know what you are. What happens when the positive version of identity has eroded or was never fully built.
The person operating from negative identity cannot accommodate difference because the only stable ground they have is the boundary between themselves and whoever they are not. They know exactly who does not belong because belonging elsewhere is the only identity they have left.
Social Mirrors
noun
The people and systems that reflect back a legible version of who you are. Your job title. Your professional reputation. The community that knows your name and your story. The language you do not have to translate before you speak it.
When you move countries, the mirrors disappear. The version of you that was visible and legible in one context becomes invisible in another. Rebuilding the mirrors is not vanity. It is the specific work of reconstructing a self that can be seen.
Concept developed by Renata Takacura, global career consultant, Chapter 16 of Parenting Unpacked.
Read the full essay on Social Mirrors →
Surface Area of Luck
noun
The idea that luck is not random. It is the product of doing multiplied by telling. The more you make and the more honestly you document making it, the more surface area you create for luck to land on.
Germany showing up three times without being asked. The United Kingdom pre-ordering before the book existed. The United States arriving with eleven copies in one IngramSpark report. Amazon Brasil bestseller without a single campaign targeting Brazil. None of that was planned. All of it was surface area.
Unspoken Rule
noun
The implicit pressure to dissolve into a new context rather than adapt to it. Nobody says it out loud. Nobody needs to. If you want to belong here, you need to become someone more like them.
There is a version of this that is right. Learning the local way, respecting the context, understanding the codes. But there is a version that goes too far. When it goes too far it starts to feel wobbly and not real, like wearing a version of yourself that fits the room but does not fit you.
The difference between adapting and dissolving is a thread. Knowing what you are adapting from, knowing what you are bringing into the room, knowing what belongs to you and what belongs to the context. When you have that thread, who someone else is does not bother you.