Peanut butter, phones, and photos: The (re)creation of home and identity abroad

Despite many psychological studies of travelers' cross-cultural adaptation and ethnographies of diasporic enclaves, there are few descriptive accounts of sojourner 'home' creation abroad. Looking specifically at the student sojourner (study abroad) experience, this project will explore how students enact and understand their home culture identity while they are abroad for a specific length of time. Through unstructured interviews with student sojourners and sojourner responses to an open-ended, online questionnaire, two separate and divergent concepts of home emerged: home as a place of origin, and home as a sense of comfort and familiarity. Sojourners use both to add depth to stereotypes of their home culture and to create a sense of home around them. Through their ritual enactments of home while abroad, such as the American student peanut butter pilgrimage, they reinforce their membership in their home culture and their home culture becomes salient in their experience of their identity.