Modelling cultural embeddedness for colonised indigenous minorities: The implicit and explicit pathways to culturally valued behaviours

Abstract

Colonised indigenous minorities around the world are constantly navigating the complex space between their heritage culture and mainstream society. In this paper, we explore how embeddedness in heritage cultural values, beliefs, and practises influence the behaviours of indigenous minorities, particularly during intercultural contact with the post-colonial majority where values, beliefs, and practises often clash. To support our theorising, we introduce the concept of cultural embeddedness, relating to enculturation in one’s heritage cultural values, beliefs, and practises. We then introduce the Dual-Pathways Model of Embeddedness to Culturally Valued Behaviours for Indigenous Minorities (DPM), which seeks to outline the two separate but interrelated pathways through which cultural embeddedness leads to culturally valued behaviours. The dual pathways include an implicit pathway, which begins with cultural values, and an explicit pathway, which begins with cultural practises. We use an indigenous approach, drawing on the first author’s experiences as an indigenous Māori in New Zealand to illustrate the concepts of the DPM. The model attempts to integrate the various ways in which cultural identity has been defined by indigenous authors into a single theory. We invite future qualitative and quantitative research, especially by indigenous scholars, to challenge and/or validate the DPM.

Introducing ‘Ngaruroro’, a New Model for Understanding Māori Wellbeing

“…Taonga tuku iho is a valuable theme that explicates the utility of our cultural treasures as sources of wellbeing. This idea is not new and is consistent with well-established ideas of 'culture as a cure', where connection to ancestral language, knowledge, practices, and ways of being is linked to wellbeing [33][34][35][36]38,40,41]. This view has been researched extensively in the Aotearoa context and has sparked conversations and new lines of research into what it means to be culturally embedded [35][36][37].…”

“…The research endeavour described in this article is part of a new era of Māori scholarship that seeks to model and psychometrically measure Māori cultural capacities, concepts, connections, and identities related to wellbeing [35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42]. This surge of Māori quantitative research reflects a growing appetite for measurement tools that are grounded in both te ao Māori and quantitative scientific paradigms.…”

The Māori Cultural Embeddedness Scale (MaCES): Initial evidence of structural validity.

“…Because cultural embeddedness is a newly developed theory, the introduction of the MaCES provides the opportunity to further test, refine, and validate (or refute) the theory. For example, the introduction of cultural embeddedness (Fox et al, 2020) theorized that there would be two differentiable pathways from cultural embeddedness to culturally valued behaviors: the implicit pathway (via cultural values) and the explicit pathway (via cultural practices). Moreover, it was suggested that these relationships are moderated by other factors such as attitudes toward one’s own culture.…”

“…Ma ¯ori Cultural Embeddedness has been theorized as being composed of three important and interconnected facets of Ma ¯ori culture: cultural values, beliefs, and practices (Fox et al, 2020). In this study, we set out to create a quantitative self-report measure of Ma ¯ori Cultural Embeddedness measured by these three facets of culture.…”

“…Recently, the concept of Māori Cultural Embeddedness has been introduced to disentangle the conflation between Māori cultural identity as a reflexive evaluation of connection to the (ethno) cultural group and enculturation to the practices, values, and beliefs of Māori culture. Cultural embeddedness is defined as: “the degree to which individuals have utilised opportunities to learn, experience, engage with, and integrate the core beliefs, values, and practises of their culture” (Fox et al, 2020; p. 192). The two major components of this definition are: (a) that opportunities are important—not everyone has access to cultural learning opportunities and (b) that cultural embeddedness is composed of values, practices, and beliefs.…”