Rooster in the Rice

An Ecological View of Life, Study, and Citizenship along Culture's Edges

Rooster in the Rice captures the excitement of living, studying, and working in a foreign culture. Based on the view that there is a nether world between the edges of interacting cultures where the rules of neither culture dominate, it presents over sixty incidents where cross-cultural collisions resulted in either problems or insights that changed the experience of life abroad. It identifies immediate causes of the collisions and places those incidents in an ecological framework to understand deeper global changes that affect us all. This book also examines the nature of global citizenship, describes the shock of re-entering one’s home culture after an extended period overseas, shows how natural environments mold cultural practices, and offers suggestions for strengthening global education to meet the environmental, population, and socio-economic challenges of the twenty-first century.