http://thevoiz.typepad.com/weblog/2006/12/we_dont_melt_we.html

Instead of the melting pot, some of us are more like lava lamps. Third culture was coined by a sociologist in Latin America, by the name of Ortiz. What’s interesting is I found third cultures can’t be manufactured or fabricated because the very meaning of a being in a third culture is “no assimilation, no loss of culture” When we manufacture or fabricate third cultures, we risk imposing or requiring other cultures to assimiliate into the other culture. This is contrary to genuine third cultures or transculturalism. In fact, it has more to do with multiculturalism than with transculturalism, where we naturally transcend and include our own cultures while including others. All third cultures ever created seem to have happened “accidentally” and not intentionally. We’ve played at length with this idea at Canvas as well, as we try to exist in another culture as both native and foreign.