Eliana Gil and Athena A. Drewes (Eds), Cultural Issues in Play Therapy. The Guilford Press, New York, 2005

Excerpt

“When I first started taking courses on ‘cultural issues’ in the 1970’s, there was a predictable and exclusionary focus on ethnicity. Most conferences and workshops I attended utilized a panel format in which individuals from different ethnicities would speak about their particular ethnic groups. I clearly remember that the speakers would offer similar introductory statements and emphasize the limitations of their presentations. In fact, it was made resoundingly clear that each individual could only speak to his or her experience within a specific ethnic group or culture, and all speakers took great caution not to generalize. Inevitably, audience members left with a perception that they had been trained in cross-cultural sensitivity, when in fact they had been exposed to an extraordinarily narrow view of culture” (p. 4). …