A Practitioner's Guide to Understanding Indigenous and Foreign Cultures

This book will help practitioners in various helping career fields to design and implement effective cross-cultural interventions, and to provide optimum assistance to clients from world cultures, through an understanding of both indigenous and foreign cultures. This revised edition includes additional information about peoples near and far, and more than one-third of this edition is new. The chapters in this book sharpen the focus on relationships between ethnicity, social class, and therapeutic practice. In so doing the authors explore answers to four interrelated questions: What do people want from their human services system? What do they actually get from them? How effective are various systems? When and under what conditions will people change to another system? The authors have carefully analyzed the data that have significant academic reliability and validity by drawing information from scholars in several fields of study that capture the essence of intrapersonal, interpersonal, intergroup, and organizational interactions. By identifying indigenous and foreign social values and practices, features of social systems that cause them to be similar and different from each other are discerned. Using two different approaches, the authors compare and contrast modern and traditional helping practices, which will help to identify and suggest alternative transcultural helping strategies when appropriate. It is written primarily for students interested in pursuing careers as professional helpers, but it should also be of value to experienced practitioners and reference librarians. The major foci are on multidisciplinary concepts pertaining to a potpourri of cultural groups, and special attention is paid to activities that will assist the reader to get in touch with his or her own beliefs about cross-cultural and cross-national helping.