Expat culture seems to have always slipped through the cracks of cultural study. While there is no shortage of mention about expat life in relevant media, it remains shallow and dismissive of the idea that there is a real cultural texture to be found surrounding the practice of expatriotism.

That may have been valid four or five decades ago, when expat culture was first considered by David and Ruth Hill Useem, the parents of the 'Third Culture' concept. Undeniably, we are a third culture—the experience of our lives being made up of neither completely the home (or 'first') culture that we come from, nor the host ('second') culture where we reside, but rather in some intersection of them.

While this concept remains inseparable from the idea of an expat culture, 'Third Culture' theory underestimates its subject. At the very least, it has failed to recognise the revolution that expatriotism has undergone in the last 20-30 years, and its effects.

Gone are the days when 'expat' usually meant 'military, diplomatic or missionary family moving in the line of duty'. Now is the day of the self-initiated and/or serial expat.

We start young, we're in any number of professions (or other activities that serve as an excuse to move somewhere), and we will live in several countries before we settle, if ever we do. We're not necessarily the result of mobility in developmental years; a substantial percentage of us never lived abroad before the age of 18 or 20. Surely within the forces that make these things true there are a host of things that we modern expats have in common to bind us together.

Yet, 'third culture' is technically considered an event; merely the intersection of cultures and a 'non-culture' itself since it is considered to be void of the necessary ingredients for the weaving of a true culture.

This is because the stale theory holds that the only thing expats have in common is the fact that we are 'foreigners living in a foreign land'. This is simply no longer true, if it ever was. Toss me in a room full of expats and I am just as sure, if not more so, to find things in common with them than if I were in a room full of random people from my home country.

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