The Beginners Guide to Deep Culture Joseph Shaules JII Publications

Transcription

THE BEGINNERS GUIDE TO DEEP CULTURE
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The Beginners Guide to Deep Culture
Joseph Shaules
JII Publications
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© 2008 Shaules
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This is a pre-publication manuscript. Do not cite.
© 2008 Joseph Shaules
All rights reserved
Published with the support of:
The Japan Intercultural Institute
3-46-12-602 Takadanobaba
Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo
Japan
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Contents
A deep culture guidebook
What is deep culture?
Looking for deep culture
The discovery of deep culture
Deep culture and cognition
The evolution of deep culture
Deep culture’s universal questions
Deep culture learning
Deep cultural empathy
The “practice” of deep culture learning
Deep culture, clash and cash
Deep culture adventures
Appendix
End notes
References
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A Deep Culture Guidebook
When we travel, we often look for what’s different,
exciting and exotic. But what’s exotic for the visitor is normal for the
locals. Feeling that some place is exotic means, by definition, that we are
outsiders. There’s a gap between visitor and resident.
I have felt this “traveler’s gap” in Hindu temples in
Kathmandu and on crowded subways in Tokyo. “Wow,” I think to myself,
“This is everyday life here!”
After a short time, of course, the obvious things—food,
streets, buildings, cease to be exotic. But understanding the people—their
language, customs, interaction, values, way of thinking—takes time. And
we never have enough.
We often turn to guidebooks to help us to explore a new
place. The writer lends us their eyes and alerts us to the terrain ahead,
pointing our attention towards certain things and away from others. A
good guidebook takes the impossible complexity of a new place and
provides us with a simplified way to make sense of things.
This book is a guidebook for travelers interested in
cultural exploration—trying to close the “travelers gap” in order to
understand the people in other places. It is for tourists, students abroad,
expatriates—anyone who leaves home and spends time abroad.
Unlike most guidebooks this book doesn’t give facts and
explanations about foreign places. It is concerned with culture and
cultural difference—the ways that people make sense of the world. Like
typical guidebooks, its goal is to help readers get the most out of their
travels. In addition, I will argue that our travels can teach us deep lessons
about ourselves.
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Deep culture
Travel gives us a unique opportunity to learn about the
hidden cultural programming of the mind that I call deep culture. Deep
culture (DC) influences our thinking and values in ways that we generally
aren’t aware of it. Or perhaps I should say DC is integrated into our
thinking at such a basic level that we take it for granted. It is like water to
a fish. When we share similar DC setting with others our interaction is
largely automatic. When abroad we must suddenly invest great energy in
trying to communicate and make sense of our new surroundings. In so
doing we must fiddle with our deep culture settings.
People who adapt deeply to life in a new
country—especially if they must learn a foreign language to do
so—often report that they gain important insights into how they’ve been
shaped unconsciously by culture. This is the fundamental assertion of
this book—that by spending time in new places, and with people we
don’t fully understand, we can free ourselves from some of the
limitations of our cultural programming.
What we can learn
Many books about culture make comparisons and
generalizations that help readers understand the people of particular
places. In country X do I kiss, bow or shake hands? Other books
theorize about culture and analyze the structure of societies, their
cosmologies, values, and so on. This book, on the other hand, takes a
brief look at the intercultural experience. It asks “How does culture shape
our way of thinking?” and “What happens when our cultural
programming has to be adjusted—in particular when we are abroad.”
This book tries not to moralize, idealize or exoticize.
Understanding DC is something like understanding art. There is no
definitive point of view or absolute truth. Rather, DC is part of how we
experience life. We can look at it from a variety of perspectives, we can
gain awareness of it, and this awareness may even transform how we
look at the world. But there’s no way to create a single set of instructions
for “getting” it.
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The subject of DC touches on some fundamental
questions such as: Can we ever go beyond our own cultural outlook?
How are humans different from animals? How does the brain construct
one’s social reality and consciousness? How can we make moral choices
in a relativistic world? Are we in control of our own actions and
reactions? Is cultural conflict an inevitable part of our evolutionary
biology? Does accepting the values of others mean giving up some of
my own?
Obviously, this book can’t answer these questions. But
looking into the subject of DC brings them up, so we can’t avoid them
entirely.
There are different ways to pursue an understanding of
DC. I believe, however, that intellectual understanding needs to be
combined with experiential insights. For example, we can learn about DC
by studying the structure of the brain, learning about evolutionary
biology, anthropology, world religions and so on. Yet this is no substitute
for traveling, learning languages, living abroad, and facing adaptive
challenges. We can also learn about DC through self-awareness. We can
become more observant of the workings of our minds. And we can
reflect on our gut reactions to people and situations that threaten our
personal and cultural self-importance.
My 25 years of living abroad and learning languages has
utterly transformed my understanding of the human experience. I
believe we have a lot to learn from cultural difference. But we need to
pay attention—to our own judgments, to our surroundings, to how our
mind works—because deep culture is, by its nature, hidden. The
challenge is to turn our travels into a sightseeing journey of the mind.
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What is deep culture?
When you hear the word culture what do you think of? African
drumming? Balinese shadow puppets? Taj Mahal? Oktoberfest? For
many people this word conjures up exotic yet somewhat vague things far
from our everyday life. The words cultural difference are, if anything, even
more vague. Perhaps you think of customs and ceremonies, or different
codes of etiquette abroad. We sometimes hear about taboos such as “In
Thailand don’t sit with your feet pointed towards the altar.”
This book, however, doesn’t focus on the exotic, artistic,
ceremonial and visible parts of culture. It discusses deep culture,
something both simple and profound. As a concept DC is simple. It
refers to the shared knowledge, values, norms, hidden assumptions and
cognitive styles that we learn as we grow up. You could call it the cultural
programming of the mind. And though the definition is simple, in terms
of how we experience the world DC has a profound impact on us.
DC’s influence on us usually goes unnoticed because it is taken
for granted. For example, if you are an American like me, when you go
to a wedding and see a woman in a flowing white dress, you know that
she is the bride. You know that white symbolizes purity, that sex before
marriage is traditionally considered “impure”, you understand the
traditional Christian view of God and sin, and so on.
In addition to this background knowledge, you have an ongoing
interpretive framework to make sense of what’s happening at the
wedding. You understand the vows being exchanged. You can judged
who is “dressed up” and who isn’t. You know the difference between
formal interaction and more casual social exchanges.
And this knowledge guides your behavior. You know, for
example, how far away to stand from someone when conversing at the
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reception. You don’t greet your high school buddy in the same way you
do the bride’s mother. And you share this knowledge with others at the
wedding. Together you engage in an ongoing dance of interaction and
meaning making. Your DC programming makes these things predictable
and manageable, without you ever needing to think about it consciously.
Our sense of what’s “normal” often has hidden layers of values
and assumptions underlying it. For
Visible behavior
example, Japanese norms related to
bowing rest on cultural values related to
norms and values
the importance of showing respect. These
hidden
values, in turn, rest on the even more
assumptions
hidden cultural assumption that hierarchy
is
a normal and potentially nurturing
element of human interaction. American
norms and values about, say, calling
The DC onion
people by their first name rest on a very
different hidden assumption—that hierarchy in human relations is often
best avoided. These layers of DC values, norms and assumptions can be
represented by a “cultural onion” with more hidden elements hidden
underneath more obvious layers.(ref)
Cultural programming
I’ve called DC “programming” but I don’t mean to say that we
don’t have free will or that DC controls us in some deterministic way.
We’re not robots. Yet much of our interaction and behavior throughout
the day is automatic and relies on an intuitive sense of what “normal” is.
Let’s imagine someone who doesn’t have a smoothly functioning
DC autopilot. It’s not necessary to imagine distant examples, such as
cases where a child was raised by animals. There are many biological
conditions which impair the smooth functioning of the DC autopilot.
One of the most common is schizophrenia.
If you’ve interacted with someone who suffers from this illness
(a disproportionately high percentage of homeless people do), you may
have felt them to be in a “world of their own”. That’s because an
inability to interpret one’s experiences in a way that “makes sense” to
others is a defining characteristic of the disease. This may be related to
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an inability to clearly distinguish internal states from the experiences of
the outside world. Thus, thoughts in their head may be interpreted as, for
example, voices from God.(ref)
I’m not arguing that schizophrenia is somehow a disease of DC.
I simply want to point out how important, and unnoticed, our ability to
maintain a “common sense” view of the world is. It underlies out ability
to communicate and interact. It also lies at the center of the meaning
that we assign to our experiences and interactions.
Deep culture and individuality
When I discuss DC with Westerners, I regularly hear objections
to the idea that our behavior is powerfully influenced by DC. After all,
every human has different values, personalities, tastes, talents, and so on.
(The non-Westerners I talk to seem to feel less need to defend the
importance of individual choice and autonomy.)
Yet DC doesn’t take away freedom of choice, nor does it make
us any less individual. Instead, it provides the background against which
we measure ourselves and give our actions meaning. In this sense, it
functions like language. Each person uses their native language to
express the richness of their individuality. No two people speak alike.
Nor is there any “average” or “normal” speaker. Yet we share a linguistic
framework that allows us to communicate smoothly in normal
circumstances, and we don’t hear our “accent” until we go to another
region.
In the same way, individuals from the same community may have
different opinions, personalities and individual values, but they share
larger cultural framework. For example, Americans may disagree whether
sex before marriage is immoral, but they share similar associations of the
white wedding dress. In addition, sometimes what we assume to simply
be “the way the world works” is a reflection of cultural values and
assumptions, not an absolute objective reality.
Often, attempts at self-understanding are centered on trying to
understand what’s special or distinct within us. We’re told to pursue our
dreams and uncover our hidden talents. The individual is celebrated. Yet
I will argue that there is another way to learn about ourselves. We can
search, instead, for what is predictable and unoriginal. We often make
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unconscious choices without realizing that there are other options. It can
be disappointing to realize that we are less special than we’d like to
believe, but it can be an equally liberating experience. New
choices—perhaps even new worlds—can open up to us.
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Looking for deep culture
Where is deep culture?
If we want to learn about DC, we need to know where to
look. I’ve talked about programming that’s in our brain and I’ve also
talked about how DC is shared with others in our community. Does that
mean that it’s both inside us and outside us at the same time? How can
that be?
Think of a soccer game. The game proceeds smoothly
because players share an understanding of the rules. They’ve learned the
rules by participating in previous soccer games. So the rules (or a version
of them) exists in the head of each player. There also exists a more
general, or communal understanding of the rules which is enforced by
the other if someone tries to cheat or doesn’t play fair. There are also
“official” rules that may differ from the informal rules and style of play.
DC works in the same way. We can look for it in the
circuitry of the brain—emotional responses, use of language,
unconscious cognitive processes, and so on. We can also look for it in
society at large. Our cultural programming is reflected in the societies we
create for ourselves, how we communicate with other, the ideas and
symbols we hold dear.
As people interact with each other, they contribute their
own understanding of shared cultural meanings and expectations. This
ongoing exchange, and the variety that individuals bring to these
interactions, makes culture dynamic. It evolves with the times, as we can
often see when a retiree attempts to communicate with a teenager. Yet at
the deepest levels, it evolves only very slowly, which is why we can find
historical continuity to DC over periods of thousands of years.
Both the inner and outer side of DC has been researched
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by a wide range of specialists. Reviewing some of their work can help us
understand some of the broad patterns of cultural norms and values we
find in society, as well as the internal responses we have when dealing
with DC difference.
What the experts have to say
At the micro level of brain function DC has been studied by
cognitive psychologists who try to understand the part of the brain, the
cognitive unconscious, that’s responsible for processing and making sense of
perceptual data. At the macro level of society DC is referred to in many
ways, including unconscious culture, software of the mind, cultural assumptions,
worldview, cultural imprinting.(ref) It is of direct interest to intercultural
communication specialists, sociologists, social psychologists, and
anthropologists because DC influences the social systems, institutions
and artistic output that communities create.
Language learners grapple with DC as they learn to function
socially in a new language. DC is of interest to historians because it
evolves through time and has historical roots. It’s of interest to
economists because deep cultural values can effect economic
development. Philosophers and religious scholars study systems of
thought which evolve in conjunction with DC. Even advertisers and
management specialists use research related to DC(ref) in order to better
influence consumer’s choices. For example, US beer companies have
shifted away from advertisements which feature attractive women to
those the focus on socializing and having fun. Research showed that
stimulating unconscious associations with beer-drinking situations was the
more effective strategy for increasing sales.
My interest in DC, however, is more personal. I am interested in
DC because learning about it has helped me grow as a human being.
When I first lived abroad in Mexico, I kept finding that often what I
thought of as “the world” was actually “the world as seen by Americans”.
What was “normal” for me was not normal for the Mexicans I met and
befriended. And while sometimes these discoveries were frustrating—I
had more than one argument about the meaning of lateness with my
Mexican girlfriend—for the most part I felt liberated. I discovered not
only new places but new ways of being.
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Unfortunately, unmasking DC’s influence on us is difficult. It’s
easier to study DC in a theoretical way—as scholars do—than to directly
experience the influence of deep culture in our own lives. Trying to
experience the influence of DC is like a fish trying to investigate water.
For a fish to study water it must jump into the air or try to swim
backwards.
In the same way, DC is kept invisible by the routines that give
continuity to our lives—routines of perception and behavior—so to
learn about it we need to experience new environments and break our
routines. And as we become more aware of DC we are more free to
make choices about how to live our lives.
Looking inside ourselves
It’s difficult to become aware of our own DC programming. To
understand why let’s imagine someone—let’s call him Bob—who lives
his life largely as the people around him expect. To ease social interaction
Bob regularly speaks in platitudes. Bob largely accepts the conventions
he has learned growing up—though he considers himself a bit of a rebel
in certain areas. When Bob’s view of the world is threatened he gets
bothered or indignant. When Bob travels to foreign lands, he tends to
judge people based on standards from back home. Sometimes, though,
Bob simply doesn’t notice the differences he encounters, finding instead
that “people are just people”.
We may find Bob dull, but he feels himself to be reasonable and
original. Bob feels attached to his choices. He has his own set of political
and moral convictions. He feels himself unique because he sees people
around him who disagree with him on these issues. But most of Bob’s
opinions are ideas that Bob has picked up from those around him. They
represent part of a dialogue that Bob’s community is having with itself.
When he watches the news from foreign countries he is struck by the
differences in what is reported.
Bob also feels original because he has his own personality. He
tends to be, let’s say, friendly and outgoing. But Bob expresses his
friendliness in much the same way that others in his community do. The
particular combination of traits that make up Bob’s personality is very
original, but the way that these qualities are expressed follow fairly
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predictable patterns. Bob doesn’t notice this, though, because he’s caught
up in being himself. And he doesn’t notice this because he’s never gotten
to know people who have a fundamentally different sense of these
things.
If Bob travels or lives abroad, especially if it involves
using a different language, he’ll experience the challenge of adjusting his
deep cultural settings. And the longer he is there, the more he “goes
local”, the more deeply he will need to adjust. If he goes deep enough,
he may change: his communication style, his values, his view of the
world, perhaps even his identity.
Living abroad forced me to accept that I am more like Bob than
I want to admit. I think we all are. That’s not a failure on our part. It’s
how we humans are built—it’s a product of our evolutionary biology. We
evolved as social primates who live in groups and adapt to their
environment by creating a collective view of the world which is
perpetuated and defended. This ability has allowed us to inhabit nearly
every environmental niche on the planet.
Now, however, we are more frequently rubbing up against
difference. We live and work abroad, or work in multicultural workplaces.
Yet our parochial tendencies remain. Globalization has not brought
about an end to war or conflict. In many cases it has exacerbated it.
Living abroad and learning foreign languages is still not easy. We’re
mostly as ethnocentric as we’ve always been, even if the trappings of our
everyday life are more connected and cosmopolitan.
So how can we become aware of DC in our lives? I believe we
need leave the comforts of home. We have deep lessons to learn by
experiencing life in different places. Of course we can also learn from
foreigners we meet at home. But it’s even more powerful to travel, to live
and work abroad, because that gives us the chance to interact extensively
with people whose cultural operating systems have different default
settings.
Globalization has made it easy to travel abroad. But it’s also made
it easier to insulate ourselves from DC difference. We can comfort
ourselves with pizza, read our local newspaper online, drink our favorite
beer, and spend time with the foreigners (same age, same hobbies, same
profession) that are the most like us. But what a waste! For the first time
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in history, millions of people have the chance to explore the deepest
roots of the human experience. We have a chance to glimpse what life
can be like when we don’t limit ourselves to the thinking habits of the
local tribe.
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The discovery of DC
The World’s Fair in Paris in 1900 was a remarkable event.
50 million people attended more than 76,000 exhibits. It trumpeted the
accomplishments of a century of scientific accomplishment and
industrialization. The crowning glory was the Eiffel Tower, an
engineering tour de force (built in 1889) which transformed iron girders
and steel cables into a symbol of the dazzling beauty of industrial
progress.
But the intellectual certainty that marked the era was
soon to be swept away. Within a few years Newtonian physics was
obsolete, the old world order in Europe was smashed by a world war,
modern art challenged centuries of received wisdom about the nature of
beauty, a great depression halted economic development worldwide,
modern composers and jazz reshaped musical sensibilities.
In this tumultuous era, another intellectual shift was also
taking place. The Paris exhibit
included, among its symbols of
progress, a human zoo. People were
brought from exotic places and
displayed along with artifacts found
in the daily lives of “primitive
peoples”. This was not uncommon
at the time. The people exhibited
were often seen as being at a stage
of
development
somewhere
Exposition Universelle, 1900 Paris
between apes and Europeans.
Yet new transportation technology made it easier to visit
these far-off lands. Soon, anthropologists and linguists, in the spirit of
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scientific exploration, went to study these peoples where they lived. And
they made a startling discovery, though not one they expected. They
found that in the process of immersing themselves in far away
communities and attempting objective scientific descriptions of life there,
that their view of the world was
gradually yet profoundly transformed.
Immerse yourself deeply enough into a
community, and the worldview you find
there can envelop you in a new sense of
what’s normal and natural. You start to
value things differently, take on new
social roles, and so on. When you go
Ota Bunga – Bronx Zoo, 1906
home you experience a state of reverse
culture shock in which your view of your original home is transformed,
though nothing has changed there.
Many of these anthropologists started to see that their
goal of scientific objectiveness was built on cultural assumptions about
what constituted “development” and “progress”. It also gave them a
fresh perspective on their own society. They found many things of value
in the “exotic” customs of other places and shared their insights when
they returned home.
At times this led to heated debate. For example, in 1928,
Margaret Mead published a best-selling account of the life of
adolescents in Polynesia. It provoked controversy in the US because it
argued that what Americans considered to be universal stages of
development were in fact cultural conventions. She argued that
adolescent rebellion and sexual taboos were not biological, but norms
learned unconsciously from our culture. Mead and other anthropologists
argued that studying life in far-away places illuminates hidden aspects of
our own culture and provided the means to improve our own society.
At around the same time, linguistic anthropologists were
exploring the relationship between language and perception (ref). They
argued that language is not simply a set of labels which are affixed to an
unchanging world, but that people who speak different languages lived in
different perceptual worlds. It’s not so much that language affects our
perception of physical reality—though some researchers have found
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evidence for this—but that language is a symbolic world which exists as
an organic whole. To speak another language is to experience another
social reality—a different set of assumptions about what’s real, valuable
and important. Insights by philosophers (ref) and educators such as Jean
Piaget (ref) also contributed to this process by showing that our
understanding of reality is constructed by our mind, not just a
mechanical process of registering the qualities of an objective physical
world around us.
Another revolutionary intellectual insight in the early 20th
century was the concept of the unconscious
as
theorized by Freud, Jung and others. Their
work
was so influential that today it can be
difficult to imagine why these ideas were so
revolutionary. Yet at the time the notion
that
we aren’t in control of our own mental
processes was fascinating (and a bit
threatening). The 19th century idea of
humans as rational and perfectible was
increasingly challenged by a changing view
of
Sigmund Freud
how the mind works. These two trends—an
appreciation of cultural and linguistic relativism, and insights into the
importance of the unconscious mind—represent important milestones
in the inquiry into deep culture.
As the century progressed, air travel, advances in
communication technology, and another world war brought greatly
increased intercultural contact. In 1959, The Silent Language, was
published by Edward Hall. He was the first person to systematically
study out-of-awareness cultural differences and use the term
“intercultural communication”. Hall considered gaining an awareness of
DC a primary evolutionary challenge of the human race. In his words:
Man must now embark on the difficult journey beyond culture, because the greatest
separation feat of all is one manages to gradually free oneself from the grip of
unconscious culture. (ref)
Starting in 1961, the Peace Corps sent thousands of
volunteers to live in foreign countries. They often underestimated the
challenges of trying to adapt to life in vastly different cultural
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environments—so much so that even today many fail to complete their
assignments. But they also report profoundly transformational
experiences of culture shock, identity crisis and shifts in values and life
goals. Two such volunteers, Janet and Milton Bennett (they met in
Micronesia), founded the Intercultural Communication Institute, a
leading center of intercultural education in Portland, Oregon.
The end of the 20th century brought about great
advances in the study of the brain. Cognitive scientists gained a better
understanding of the evolutionary underpinnings of brain function, a
greater understanding of unconscious cognition (ref), social intelligence
(ref) and even consciousness (ref). The study of genetics has allowed us
to better trace human evolution, including the development of culture
and language (ref). Research by social psychologists have taken the
unconscious out of the realm of psychotherapy to focus on the
out-of-awareness processes that underpin human behavior.
The globalization of the 21st century is now providing
millions of people the chance to experience new places and interact with
people different from themselves. The knowledge gathered in the 20th
century by specialists must now be put into practice in the everyday lives
of 21st century travelers. A hundred years ago, a limited number of
wealthy travelers went abroad to learn about the world and develop
themselves. Today, with science as close as the internet, and other
cultural worlds as close as the airport, we can all take this journey.
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Cognitive scientists have made great progress in the last
30 years in understanding the brain as it’s related to thinking and
cognition. This has included extensive research into the unconscious
mind and the influence of culture on basic thinking processes. What
they’ve found is impressive.
They can, for example, demonstrate in the laboratory the
influence of ancient Greek philosophers on the cognition of 21st century
Americans. Likewise they can find the elements originating in the
thinking of Confucius and Lao Tzu in the cognition of the Japanese and
Chinese.(ref) They claim to identify unconscious prejudice based on
things like race or body type—prejudice that we ourselves are not aware
of and can’t consciously control.(ref)
Unlike psychotherapists who are interested in mental
states and social adjustment, cognitive scientists and social psychologists
study the unconscious in terms of how the mind processes information,
learns, and influences behavior during everyday life—all without our
direct knowledge.(ref) For example, in one experiment, subjects who
were asked to play a negotiating game did so more aggressively when
there was a briefcase left lying nearby, as opposed to a backpack.(ref) The
mind responds to unconscious cues which influence how we act and feel.
At the core of this relatively new understanding of brain
functioning is research into the cognitive unconscious. Think of the cognitive
unconscious as the brain’s autopilot—complete with navigation
system—that manages our interactions with our environment. When you
drive, for example, your cognitive unconscious takes care of the routine
tasks. You accelerate, change lanes and make your way down the road
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automatically. If you take the same route home every day, it may even
choose your exit for you.
The cognitive unconscious is an information filter,
deciding what your conscious mind—which I refer to as the narrative
conscious—should attend to. If someone cuts you off suddenly in traffic,
your cognitive unconscious swerves the car out of the way reflexively
even as your narrative unconscious forms the thought “What a jerk!”
The cognitive unconscious is constantly scanning the environment,
recognizing patterns and responding accordingly. If you’ve ever heard
your name spoken in a low voice in an otherwise loud party you’ve
experienced the power of the cognitive unconscious to seek out
important patterns and send them to the narrative unconscious to be
dealt with. (Diagram ?)
Cognitive unconscious
pattern recognition
implicit learning
information filter
feeling evaluator
goal setting
Diagram ?
The cognitive unconscious is closely tied to our emotions and
instincts. The car swerving in front of us provokes the same adrenaline
rush and fear that the appearance of a dangerous animal did 100,000
years ago. These responses are so fundamental to our biology, in fact,
that they take place independently of activity in the cerebral cortex, the
part of the brain responsible for reasoning and abstract thought. This
means that your cognitive unconscious started to swerve your car even
before your conscious mind had access to the knowledge of what was
happening. That’s why even if we want to it’s hard to stifle these “gut
responses”.
Cognitive scientists have figured out how to measure
these “gut responses” as related to fundamental emotions like fear and
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pleasure. Using a technique called implicit association testing, they measure
the time that it takes to categorize words and associated images. (ref)
Associations that are already established in the cognitive unconscious are
made quickly, where those that require conscious association are slower.
Thus, we categorize images such as snakes and monsters with the word
“scary” faster than when we are instructed to associate (by pushing a
button, for example) all flying things with the same word.
This explains how researchers can measure unconscious
prejudice. Using photos of, for example, a series of black and white faces,
researchers can measure the length of time it takes to categorize them
using positive and negative adjectives. If the cognitive unconscious has
negative or fearful associations with faces of a particular race, it takes us
longer so associate positive words with them. When the cognitive
unconscious is trained to recognize certain things as positive or negative,
this conditioning becomes an automatic part of our bodily response to
our environment.
Racial or ethnic prejudice is sometimes seen simply as
feelings of superiority learned through exposure to prejudice as we grow
up. At times, this is certainly true. But ethnocentrism, fear of the
unknown and negative unconscious associations are more subtle and
harder to uncover than political correctness might imply. It’s not enough
to declare a commitment to equality or respect. Our cognitive
unconscious often influences our feelings and behavior “under the
radar”. To go beyond ethnocentrism requires a deep process of cultural
learning and reprogramming of our cognitive unconscious.
Social reality
I have talked about the cognitive unconscious in terms of
emotion and “instinctive” reactions to our environment. But our
autopilot does much more than identify threats and produce emotional
responses. The world we navigate in our everyday lives is social, symbolic
and abstract. Our lives are constructed with ideas and concepts and
communicated with language. We negotiate the meaning of things with
others and share a common understanding of things with others in our
community.
Our cognitive unconscious plays an integral role in all of
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this. As children, it is imprinted with our native language and the broad
outlines of a worldview that is shared with those in the community
around us. This creates a conceptual map that we use to navigate our
social universe. In the brain, this imprinting involves the development of
neural pathways which form patterns of thought interconnected with
social interactions and emotional responses.
When you greet your children in the morning, your
choice of language, non-verbal communication, and tone of voice are
very different from when you greet your colleagues at work (who might
be surprised if the first thing you said at the office was “How you doin’
sleepy-head?”). But thanks to the cognitive unconscious, this routine
social interaction and all the choices needed to carry them out are
handled automatically. If your boss is in a bad mood you may sense it
from his tone of voice, choice of words, and so on. This can trigger a
stress response just as a smile from your child can trigger affection.
The cognitive unconscious manages our interaction with the
world by using a mental map of the world. This map includes not only
the physical properties of objects, but also the conceptual, social and
emotional meanings that we share with the people we interact with. It
acts as the navigation system for our autopilot.
The cognitive unconscious is not just a passive set of things we
know. It is in constantly reading
our environment and adjusting our
internal states accordingly. It also
provides
motivation
and
inhibitions. Have you ever gotten
Cognitive
up and gone to the refrigerator
unconsciou
s
without thinking, and only then
“autopilot”
had the thought “Oh, I’m hungry”
pop into your mind? That’s
because
as
our
cognitive
unconscious is shaping our behavior, our narrative conscious is carrying
on a monologue in our mind which, in effect, explains our experiences to
ourselves. One way to picture this is in diagram (?)
The DC patterns inside us (here represented by the
bracket at the bottom of the circle) correspond to the patterns that
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we’ve learned from our environment (the larger bracket). Our perception
and behavior involves an ongoing interaction between our autopilot and
the world around us (represented by the arrows).
Although we can call our mental universe within our
cognitive unconscious a “symbolic representation” of the world, for all
practical purposes, it is the world we live in. We are attached emotionally
to it and react to a threat to our worldview with a fight or flight response.
It’s not hard to find people who are ready to fight for a bigger paycheck
(though money exists primarily as a shared idea) or even die for ideals.
The symbolic world is our “real” world and our survival instinct is intent
on protecting and perpetuating it. Think of the outrage that can be
provoked by the desecration of sacred objects.
Given that our symbolic world is shared by our cultural
community and represented by language, it’s perhaps not so surprising
that cognitive scientists can identify cultural differences in basic
processes of cognition. More impressive perhaps is that these differences
are connected at the macro level to cultural values and social practices.
To understand what I mean by this, take a look at figure A:
If you are forced to choose, would you say that the cow belongs more
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naturally in a category together with the chicken or with the grass? It
turns out that Westerners (Western Europe and the US) more often have
preference for associating the cow with the chicken (based on them
sharing a category—animals) while Asians have a preference for
associating the cow with the grass (based on them sharing a
relationship—cows eat grass). This is one of many experiments which
have investigated how deep culture differences in cognition form the
underpinnings of differing cultural world views.
The results of this research have shown that Westerners
have been fundamentally influenced in their cognitive processing and
view of the world by the type of thinking originating in ancient
Greece—subject-object thinking, categorizing in terms of essential
qualities, while East Asians have been influenced by the more context,
relationship and process oriented thinking associated with Confucian and
Taoist approach to viewing the world.
These differences aren’t just apparent in the laboratory,
but in the “real world” of legal systems, medical practice, contracts,
social relations and so on. The world is a different place when viewed
from the cognitive perspective of someone raised speaking Chinese in
Chinese society, and from someone speaking German in Germany. And
these differences mean that we construct societies based on different
ways of making sense of things.
One simple example of this is the Western tendency to
see social relations in terms of individuals who negotiate their place in
society with other individuals. In Asia, on the others hand, society tends
to be perceived in more organic terms, with individuals seen as forming
part of a greater whole, in the same way that a hand and foot are
different yet equally important parts of the same body. Soft drugs may
be tolerated in the Netherlands where people are seen as independent
and responsible for themselves (as long as they don’t hurt other
individuals) whereas use of the same substances may seen as more of a
threat in Asia because they are seen as anti-social—they may lead to the
hand no longer wanting to be part of the body.
As we come into contact with and learn more about the
worldview of people who have different deep culture settings, we can
start to become aware of these deeper elements of cognition within
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ourselves. This allows us not only to better understand others, but to free
ourselves from the need to operate mindlessly using an autopilot
navigation system that we ourselves don’t fully understand.
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The Evolution of Deep Culture
It’s hard to look at the world through someone else’s
eyes—even if we know that person well. It’s even harder to imagine the
experience of growing up in a different time or place. While spending
time in a tropical rainforest I was struck by the difficulty of knowing
how life might have been experienced by people who spent their whole
lives in such a place. When visiting isolated indigenous communities in
Mexico I took part in ceremonies directly connected to pre-Hispanic
religious rites. I was struck by the difficulty of deeply understanding the
life experiences and worldview of those I met, much less their ancestors
who lived before the Spanish conquest.
How much more difficult, then, for us to understand the
life experiences of stone-age humans—bands of hunter gatherers who
for tens of thousands of years lived lives with bodies and brain
capacities that are fundamentally the same as our own. And our journey
of imaginative empathy becomes all the more difficult if we try to trace
the human experience back to the transition from other social primates.
The evolutionary roots of culture is studied with interest
by archeologists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, ethologists and
others. These are experts we can turn to when trying to understand how
DC evolved and what biological and evolutionary imperatives underlie
the human experience. And perhaps it can shed light on the instincts and
emotional response that form the base of deep culture.
Deep culture and the brain
We can trace human evolution in the structure of the
human brain. It consists of three interconnected yet distinct parts which
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correspond with stages of our biological evolution. It’s as though we
have three brains in one, each one adding newly developed functions
onto previously developed ones. The reptilian
brain, located at the base of the skull and the
oldest in evolutionary terms, handles bodily
functions such as breathing and heart rate, and is
relatively rigid in its functioning. The limbic system
can be thought of as the mammalian brain
because it evolved in early mammals. It’s located
on top of the reptilian brain and is much more
flexible in its functioning. It remembers
experiences that were pleasurable, painful or important. It produces
emotion and is the seat of our value judgments. And while we feel the
effects of the limbic system, it usually operates out of awareness. To my
mind, the limbic system is the platform on which DC is built. It’s where
our experiences are turned into systematic responses to our
environment.
The neocortex could be called the primate brain. It handles
complex tasks and in humans has developed two large cerebral
hemispheres that handle abstract thought, language and imagination. It
is interconnected with other parts of the brain and participates in
making sense of sensory data, controlling voluntary movements and
creating a meaningful perceptual experience of the world. The neocortex
is extremely plastic and has a nearly infinite capacity to learn.
Somehow the neocortex also produces consciousness. It
assembles the images, sensations and perceptual data into a grand theatre
of reality where the “I” exists and makes choices.
This theatre of reality constructed by our brain is a
remarkable achievement. But this theatre doesn’t exist simply inside the
brain as a mental projection. It is created in an ongoing interaction with
our environment. We share a sense of other people’s social realities and
have the ability to empathize—to imagine the social world of others. We
are able to do this because we have a shared worldview connected to the
mental categories we learned growing up. When we interact with people
who don’t share these things, we can’t “get into their head” or easily
interpret their behavior. Imagine how difficult it was for the first
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Europeans to understand the lives of Polynesian islanders that they
encountered. And vice-versa.
The evolution of deep culture
The human brain achieved its current form perhaps
250,000 years ago. At first, the cultural
evolution of human behavior was—by
today’s standards at least—agonizingly
slow. Once an advance was made in
the technology of stone tools, for
example, it spread without variation
and remained stable for tens of
Bifacial points, engraved ochre and
bone tools from 75 -80 000 years ago
thousands of years. Imagine 500
generations living in the same area in the same way, using the same stone
tools, without apparent innovation or expression of community identity.
You made your stone cutter in the same way as others had for millennia.
About 50,000 years ago, however, there was a sudden
shift. Human behavior evolved much more quickly. We started paying
attention to burying the dead, developed sophisticated hunting
techniques, began wearing clothes and painting caves. For the first time
in history, human communities that lived in different places showed
variation at the local level. The buttons or fish hooks of my community
were different from those in those on the other side of the mountain.
Some have called this shift “the great leap forward”
(Jared) or the “big bang of consciousness”. What caused this
shift, and precisely how fast it happened, is not clear. It may
well have been related to the development of language. It’s
possible that a genetic variation which improved some key
cognitive capacity swept through human populations. In any
case, we can say that from at least 50,000 years ago humans
communicated with each other and did their best to make
Neolithic
fish hook
sense of the world in fundamentally the same way that we do
today.
It’s likely that DC, in terms of how you can I experience
it, dates at least to this time. I would imagine that it also corresponds
with the human ability to identify an “us” based on those who share not
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only physical characteristics, but a way of explaining things. As humans
gained the ability to think abstractly, they could imagine future events,
tell stories and find personal ways to explain life’s important events: birth,
death, rivalry, natural phenomena and so on. Perhaps for the first time,
humans could be physically present, but mentally somewhere else. They
started to live in their heads as much as they were living in the physical
world.
Living in a conceptual world as much as a physical world
allowed for an explosion of creativity which vastly changed human
communities in the relatively short time. Every niche of the globe was
colonized by these innovative human communities as they developed
intricate technologies adapted to life in every climate. They met not only
their survival needs but also expressed a creative sense of communal self.
Another way to picture this shift is to compare
chimpanzees to the humans of 50,000 years ago. A trained primatologist
can decipher the gestures, vocalizations and interactions of chimpanzees
in any troupe found anywhere in the world. There may be some
behavioral differences depending on the group, but fundamentally
chimpanzee interaction is decipherable using a single interpretive
framework.
At some point more than 50,000 years ago this stopped
being true of humans. The meaning of sounds and symbols developed
differently depending on the group—different languages, worldviews,
values and so on. No longer was there a single template to interpret
human interaction.
Deep culture and social organization
A friend of mine claims that running a small business is
as difficult, if not more, than running a multinational corporation. I see
her point. The president of a large corporation doesn’t manage every
detail of the business—it functions based on hierarchy, divisions of
labor, shared goals, formal agreements, and so on within the
organization. Any large group of people working towards similar goals
need these things in order to get things done.
Up until 10,000 years ago, humans never lived in groups
large enough to need this kind of systematic organization. For more than
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200,000 years we lived exclusively as hunters and gatherers—we owned
only what we could carry and followed the resources we needed to
survive. We interacted almost exclusively with people we knew and there
was little formal hierarchy. Then, around 10,000 years ago some humans
settled down. They developed agriculture, domesticated animals and
created larger settlements.
Living in larger groups—think villages and kingdoms as
opposed to small tribes—required humans to learn to collaborate to an
unprecedented degree. Some scholars have suggested that genetic
changes made people less aggressive (human domestication?)(ref). In any
case, living in larger groups led to a form of cultural evolution. Successful
technologies spread, groups that developed social cohesion were able to
outcompete those that didn’t. Cosmologies were elaborated, social
systems were created, value systems were developed and passed on, and
so on. This wasn’t an explicit, planned process. Societies, values, customs
and so on evolved and emerged from the interaction of the people.
The natural environment affected cultural evolution.
Living in an area with seasonal typhoons and growing rice required
different technology and social organization than living in a desert and
growing dates. In the 15,000 years since modern humans left Africa has
seen an explosion of cultural diversity, with humans developing
communities that ranged from small groups living in isolation to the
teeming empires of millions.
This diversity peaked, perhaps, in the 19th century.
Technology ranged from boomerangs to kayaks made from animal skins
and inflated seal bladders to steam trains and telegraphs. The
cosmologies, values, beliefs, customs, taboos, social practices also varied
widely—from voodoo to vedas, from polygamy to polyandry, from
Bushmen to bankers. Since then, of course, the technology of everyday
life has converged even as the social practices of different communities
continue to evolve on their separate paths.
Many cultural communities have been destroyed or
absorbed into others in the last several hundred years. In spite of this,
there is still a stunning amount of cultural diversity in the world. There
are more than 5000 languages and something like 5000 different ethnic
groups. (ref). To simply spend a month in each country of the world
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would require an odyssey of more than 15 years. Ziad Fazah, considered
by some to be the world’s greatest polyglot speaks an incredible, yet
paltry 58 languages. (ref http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziad_Fazah).
To my mind, however, the most remarkable thing about
cultural diversity is not its range or complsity. It’s that deeply
experiencing even a single new cultural community can fundamentally
alter one’s view of the world. I am less interested in quantity and more
interested in the quality of intercultural experiences. I believe we learn
more about cultural diversity and shared humanity by deeply exploring a
smaller number of new cultural worlds than by traipsing through airports
all over the world. To do this, however, we need to engage more than the
abstract thinking of our primate brain. We must explore the hidden
assumptions and associations of our DC settings.
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Deep Culture’s Universal Questions
We can learn a lot about cultural diversity by studying
geography, politics, world religions, history, art and so on. (Let’s admit,
however, that even in the internet age most of us have only the
sketchiest knowledge of other countries.) To gain a deeper insider’s view of
another place requires even more commitment and time.
Fortunately, there are shortcuts to DC learning. Humans
everywhere have the same biology and communities everywhere face
similar challenges of social organization. Understanding these universal
elements of the human experience can give us an valuable lens for
examining our experiences when abroad.
But be forewarned. Sharing something does not
automatically create understanding. And assuming that we understand
something that we don’t is a trap we can easily fall into. Beware of those
who insist too vehemently that they can get along with anyone in any
country since “People are just people.”
Simple universals
Some commonalities across cultures are easy to spot.
People everywhere love their children, for example, or understand that a
smile denotes happiness. Specialists have even created long lists of
elements common to all societies. Here are just a few: gossip, lying,
verbal humor, words for past, present and future, giving, lending, kinship
categories, crying, expressions of affection, sexual jealousy, adornment,
fear of snakes, use of tools, drugs and shelter, status and prestige, gender
distinctions, sanctions against violence, rape and murder, etiquette,
mourning the dead, and a taste for sweets!
But these simple universals are only marginally helpful
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when we experience cultural difference. They tell us the what but not the
how of life in another place. For example, all societies make gender
distinctions, but expectations about gender roles vary widely. People
everywhere express affection, but how and when they do it depends on
community standards. There are a very limited number of things which
have little or no variation. Even incest, which is sanctioned in all societies,
is defined differently depending on the community. While everyone may
have an instinctive fear of snakes, some peoples feel it immoral to kill
them while others don’t.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that we can’t have
meaningful interactions based on these similarities. A smile really can go a
long way and simple gestures of kindness to strangers can be deeply
moving. There is great value in appreciating the intrinsic worth of each
human being regardless of cultural background. But this is just the
beginning. As we go beyond the obvious similarities and explore
difference, we uncover deeper points of common interest and
understanding that can form the basis of more involved relationships
and better communication.
Universal dilemmas
Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden Turner are two
intercultural management specialists who have spent a career helping
people in business work across cultures. They have developed an
approach to understanding how people from different communities
think about some universal dilemmas of social organization. They
include cultural patterns about how people get along with each other,
how they relate to their environment, and how they relate to time. (ref)
Their work is based on the insight that there is a core set
of universal dilemmas that communities need to solve in order to create
cohesive social standards. They revolve around things such as: the role
of the individual versus the group, systems to insure fairness,
expectations about status, ways to divide up our life spaces, assumptions
about fate and control, how we conceptualize time, and so on. Using
their work as a starting point I have created a list of questions that we
can ask ourselves when trying to understand the cultural differences we
find abroad.
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Who are people loyal to?
Perhaps the most important universal dilemma revolves
around the individual’s relationship with others in one’s community. Ask
Americans this question and they will often say “myself ” or “my beliefs”.
In China you will find a powerful loyalty towards the family. Ethnic,
tribal and religious loyalties are powerful in other places. This distinction
between an emphasis on the one’s personal priorities and one on the
larger community is sometimes referred to as individualism versus
collectivism.
These words are not intended as descriptive labels. Rather,
they represent two opposing approaches to a community’s sense of how
best to provide for the wellbeing of its members. An individualist
approach emphasizes independent development—each person is
responsible for developing his or herself and thus more effectively
contributing to the community. A collectivist approach emphasizes the
role that the community has in nurturing the individual and developing
that person’s full potential.
If people seem egocentric and self-centered when you
are abroad, it may be because you don’t understand their individualist
values. If they seem overly dependent on their family, tribe, religious
community and so on, remember that these groups nurture them as
individuals.
Who gets respect?
Status markers are another human universal. There are
two fundamental categories: achieved status (based on actions or
performance) and ascribed status (official status based on titles, age,
diplomas and so on). Communities that emphasize achieved status will
more often answer this question by saying “People that can do
something well.” An emphasis on ascribed status may produce the
answer “elders” or “the boss” or “religious leaders”.
If your DC settings orient you towards achieved status,
you may find people in some places too hung up on titles, formality or
etiquette. Remember that these status markers not only act as rewards,
but also as standards that people live up to. If your DC settings orient
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you towards ascribed status, you may find people in some places to be
full of overly confident self-promoters. Remember that in such
communities people must do so to be taken seriously.
How do we insure fairness and efficiency?
Fairness and efficiency require predictability (everyone
follows the same rules) and flexibility (sometimes exceptions must be
made). Some communities emphasize universalism (an emphasis on
systems and rules) while others particularism (a case-by-case approach). If
a pedestrian waits for the green light to cross the street even though
there are no cars coming, he is following the universalistic logic that rules
and systems should be followed for the good of everyone. If the
pedestrian crosses, she is following the particularist logic that every
situation requires prudent judgment to provide for reasonable outcomes
for everyone.
The Italian in Switzerland may find Zurich efficient yet
overly organized and predictable. The Swiss in Italy may find Rome
charming but chaotic. McDonalds succeeds with a highly universalistic
approach to systematic efficiency while French wine producers succeed
by taking advantage of the particular qualities of each region and
vineyard.
How should we manage our emotions?
Human emotion must be controlled to prevent
unnecessary conflict. Human emotion must be expressed to allow for
open relationships. These two truisms represent the opposing poles of a
neutral approach to feelings and an expressive one. The neutral approach
guards against the excesses of emotion, while the expressive one sees
emotion as fundamentally healthy.
If you find people abroad to be hiding behind a mask of
self-control, remind yourself that their feelings are expressed in more
subtle ways. If people seem to you overly emotional, expressive or
aggressive, remind yourself that a raised voice or expansive gestures
don’t necessarily signify extreme emotion.
Who’s in control?
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In Muslim countries, when you say “See you tomorrow!”
in anticipation of an appointment, you may hear the reply inshallah or
literally: “if Allah wills”. This expression is more than a turn of phrase.
It reflects the DC assumption that humans are not ultimately in control
of their fate. Communities that emphasize the importance of destiny,
magic and adapting to circumstance share a similar orientation towards
outer control.
This kind of thinking may strike Americans or Western
Europeans as superstitious or passive. Their DC assumption of inner
control emphasizes humans as agents of their own development and
change. This can create the impression of ego-centrism or godlessness
for those oriented more towards outer control. Who can presume, after all,
to know the future or to control the larger forces that govern our lives.
What time is it?
Why do people from some communities seem so
unconcerned with precise scheduling? Why do others let themselves
become slaves to the clock and their day planner?
Time can be conceived of as absolute (ref
monochromic/polychromic), as an objective part of physical reality. This
implies that humans should use it as any other limited resource (in
English we spend, waste, and give of our time.) This implies that its use
should be as predictable as possible (to avoid wasting it!). But time can
also be thought of as situational, with important events and people
allotted more time as circumstances dictate.
These differing attitudes can lead towards the impression
of chronic tardiness on the one hand, or that of someone who is
machine-like in planning and interacting. If you have the former
impression when you travel, don’t waste your emotional energy resenting
meetings that start late or people who don’t arrive when you expect.
Learn local expectations and take advantage of the spare moments this
creates. And if, on the other hand, you find that everyone is rushed and
obsessed with scheduling, remember that in some places predictability is
sacred and that sometimes (in business, for example) squeezing activities
carefully into a limited time frame can be advantageous for everyone.
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How can we judge goodness and truth?
If you disappoint people who are dear to you do you feel
guilty or ashamed? Guilt comes from having an inner reference for truth
and goodness—we look inside ourselves to our conscious and
connection with our God and our ideals. Shame comes from an outer
reference—we look outside ourselves to our relationships and influence on
others to judge our behavior.
Christianity, Islam and Judaism share a DC orientation
towards inner referencing. Parents scold their children by saying “You
know better than that!” hoping to develop this inner voice of conscious.
In Asia children may be told “You’re bothering people!” by parents who
hope to develop an outer-referenced sense of responsibility to others.
Inner referenced thinking is not necessarily associated
with individualistic thinking. Arab communities, for example, are
influenced by the inner referenced thinking of personal faith found in
Islam, yet also have strongly collectivist expectations towards the family
and one’s religious community. One is expected to live up to one’s
personal moral responsibilities in public so as not to bring shame onto
your family, religion, etc.
And others . . .
These questions have just been a brief sampler of some
fundamental elements of DC difference. There are others, including
issues such as public space versus private space, orientations towards the past
or future, valuing doing or being, being focused on task or relationships, and
so on. And while there may be an infinite number of possible
dichotomies that can help us decipher the underlying patterns of deep
culture when abroad, the ones listed here represent a good starting point
since they are so fundamental. If you are interested in learning more
about the DC dilemma approach to understanding cultural difference,
see the appendix for further reading.
The pitfalls of labeling and measuring
Some intercultural specialists focus on culture as a form
of psycho-emotional conditioning. (ref) They also use labels such as
individualism and collectivism and others that I haven’t included here, such
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as power distance(en), and uncertainty avoidance(en). This approach sees
enculturation as an imprinting of certain emotional responses to the
world. This imprinting is seen as one influence on human behavior.
Unfortunately, this focus on drawing cause and effect connections
between internal states and visible behavior can lead to claims and
counter claims about the ability (or inability) to accurately define and
measure cultural difference in an objective, quantifiable way.
While it’s certainly true that enculturation imprints us
emotionally, I have found this approach to understanding DC difference
less useful in terms of dealing with the day-to-day challenges of
intercultural experiences. For me, understanding DC is more about how
we make sense of things rather than what our affective responses to
particular phenomena are. Also, attempting to quantify cultural
difference in psycho-emotional terms can lead to criticism of
stereotyping, overgeneralization, and determinism.
If the distinction I am trying to make here is not clear,
don’t worry. Even intercultural specialists have trouble clearly
conceptualizing what precisely is meant by culture and cultural difference.
My point for DC learning is: don’t take the labels and categories of
cultural difference too seriously. They are best used as hints for making
sense of how things work in another place. They aren’t meant to
describe absolute qualities.
In the same way, I wouldn’t say that culture influences
behavior, so much as it gives us standards to judge behavior by. To say
that culture influences behavior makes little sense to me. It’s like saying
that language influences communication. Just as language is an integral
part of communicating, culture and the interpretation of behavior are
part of an organic whole.
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Deep Culture Learning
Travel changes us—if we let it—by forcing us to learn
new things. This can be fun. I love the feeling of setting out on a
journey—the breaking free of routine. Even taking the train to the
airport I feel myself reawakening to my surroundings. Arriving in a new
city I see differently—things catch my eye, I notice new smells, and the
rhythm on the street feels fresh. And when I return home I have new
eyes for my neighborhood too, at least until I lose myself back in the
habits of daily life.
But cultural learning isn’t always pleasurable. I remember
times—when in Mexico studying Spanish, during a year spent in France,
when first living in Tokyo—that I felt depressed (or at least distinctly
un-curious) about the new world I was living in. The internal changes
were taking place at a deeper level and I needed time to absorb it all into
my way of being. At times like this, my mind feels numb. Some would
call this state “culture shock”. Yet when I emerge, my DC settings have
been fiddled with and I am somehow a different person.
I
have
always
been
interested
in
going
“local”—experiencing life close to the ground. But I’ve also gotten to
know innumerable tourists, travelers, expatriates, immigrants and
internationalists. I’m always curious to see how they respond to the
challenges of adapting to new places. Reactions vary. While some seem
transformed or rejuvenated others seem indifferent or even stubbornly
oblivious. I have friends who’ve lived abroad for years isolated in an
expatriate cocoon. I’ve known a select few who seemed to have gained
something profound. I even did doctoral research trying to understand
these differing reactions.
One lesson I’ve learned is that some intercultural
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experiences are deeper than others. The experiences that most affect our
DC settings require a lot of time and involvement in a new home. But
simply spending a lot of time abroad doesn’t guarantee some magical
deep transformation.
Talking about cultural experiences
If you want a new conversation opener at a party, ask
someone who has been traveling or living abroad: So what did you learn
while you were there? If that person has been through a process of deep
culture learning, your question may well prompt a gush of emotion. You
may hear statements of insights gained, connectedness to the host
community, sadness at having return home, and a sense that the
experience has been transformational—the person that came back was
different than the one who left.
Not uncommonly, however, the question will provoke a
less profound response. For those who have had a positive, yet more
surface experience, the lessons learned are more concrete and easily
expressed, such as “Well, we found that the southern coast was
magnificent” or “The Picasso museum was marvelous.” Sometimes
surface experiences resonate deeply and even short trips result in
experiences that are highly meaningful. You may hear “Oh, the poverty
there was horrible. You know, there’s so much that we don’t appreciate in
life.” Simply being abroad can open a traveler’s mind to the immensity of
the world.
Surface and deep experiences
By surface experience I don’t mean a superficial experience.
Surface refers to the visible side of culture. If we spend only a few weeks
away, or spend our time in sheltered expatriate communities, we deal
with only the most explicit elements of a place: the food, transportation
systems, architecture, greetings and so on. Our interaction with people is
more limited—and often not in the local language. We are the outsider
looking at the surface of things. We can’t be sure if our perceptions
match that of the locals. As I once heard Milton Bennett say, “An
American tourist in Japan isn’t having a Japanese experience. He’s having
a American experience in Japan!”(ref)
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Surface experiences can be extremely meaningful and may
impact our lives in important ways. We may have wonderful interactions
and feel deeply moved by how we’re received. We may see sacred places
and be greatly inspired. But these experiences are different from deep
culture learning. Short-term travel inspires us by reinforcing things that,
at some level, we knew already. Deep culture learning, on the other hand,
involves grappling with the unknown, allowing oneself to adapt, and
slowly constructing an expanded sense of the world.
Deep culture learning often involves inner conflict as we
strive to resolve conflicting ways of looking at things. This happens in
the background as you learn the subtleties of the host language, form
deeper friendships, adapt yourself to a new working style, sense of time,
way of solving problems, and so on. Our attention isn’t focused on
personal insights, it’s focused on gaining entry into the world as it’s
experienced by the people that live in another place.
The dirty little secret – negative attitudes
Intercultural experts seldom talk about how intercultural
experiences can reinforce negative attitudes. In response to our party
question you’ll hear: “Well, I learned that you can’t trust the tour guides.”
or “I learned that I am lucky that I was born here.” I’ve talked to plenty
of expatriates who regularly run down the country they are living in.
Often this takes the form of “horror stories”, or the “tales of my
travails”. These stories, often quite interesting, seem designed to show
how the traveler has suffered at the hands of the bizarre or unreasonable
behavior of the locals.
Of course we all react negatively sometimes. Sometimes
we simply dislike what we find without passing judgment. I may not like
eating curry with my fingers. At other times we are more condemnatory.
We find locals inefficient, dishonest, ignorant, and so on. I see this
resistance often. Resistance seems to be a mechanism of psychological
protection. If I condemn the differences I find, I can insulate myself
from the need to change and learn. I reinforce my world view and my
self-importance. I attempt to negate the subversive idea that what I find
abroad is, in fact, normal.
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Adaptation
Another lesson I’ve learned is that we can’t not be
affected by travel. Our bodies and autopilot are so finely tuned to our
surroundings that we can’t help but respond—even if our response if
avoidance of anything unpleasant and insulating ourselves with
familiarity. What I call adaptation is simply the changes that bring us into
closer alignment with our new environment. This can be as simple as
learning to use a subway system, or as deep as becoming bicultural.
Forced adaptation
Sometimes we’re forced to adapt—think of immigrants
who must learn a language or take an unpleasant job out of economic
necessity. Forced adaptation is psychologically difficult. It may push us into
insulated expatriate or immigrant communities, or make us bitter towards
the host community. And it’s not an issue of class or education. I’ve seen
highly privileged expatriates embittered by their cultural isolation in a
country whose values they can’t accept, all because they don’t want to
give up the high-status/high-income lifestyle they’ve found there.
A guide to intercultural listening - Resistance
Listen carefully to how travelers describe the differences
they have experienced. Watch for resistance—negative judgments which
contain a cultural critique. This can be about surface experiences (“The
streets are dirty and the food was greasy”) or deeper ones (“The local
staff has been brainwashed to just follow orders.”) Take these statements
with a grain of salt and ask yourself whether the local hosts would
agree.(ref me article!)
Acceptance
Some people show a lot of acceptance, the ability to
experience difference—even unpleasant difference—without feeling the
need to pass judgment. There’s a fundamental recognition that one’s own
tastes and habits are conditioned by our background—what’s not normal
for me may be normal for others. There’s often a statement about local
standards which qualifies one’s personal reactions, such as: “Well the
food was too spicy for me, but everybody eats it there.” Or “They really
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respect authority there so I had to change my management style.”
You’ll also hear statements of adaptation. “I know all the
best restaurants in Bangkok” shows surface adaptation, while “Learning the
language has really helped me feel like I belong there.” shows deep
adaptation. Deep adaptation experiences don’t happen overnight and
usually involve learning a local language, forming deeper personal
relations with hosts, and having to get things done without depending on
the special status of being a tourist or high-status expat. When this
process continues long enough, it may lead to biculturalism and/or
questions of where home is. People who’ve adapted deeply often have
reverse culture shock when they return home.
Mixed reactions
Most travelers have mixed reactions to their
experiences—a combination of these things. I remember hearing “I love
France. It’s just the French that I can’t stand!”. This was meant as a joke,
but we can see the surface adaptation (I enjoy French food and love the
Musee d’Orsay”) together with deeper resistance (“French
communication styles and values bother me.”) Of course these reactions
and attitudes aren’t fixed in stone. Our feelings change as time goes by.
But it seems that plenty of people reach an adaptive limit and entrench
certain negative attitudes. Fewer take full advantage of their learning
opportunities.
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Deep Cultural Empathy
A research project
Recently, more and more universities encourage students
to do a portion of their studies abroad (ref) There is an assumption that
this experience will broaden their minds and make them more tolerant,
culturally sensitive, and so on. But is this necessarily true? One intriguing
study done in Australia raised questions about this assumption. It also
contains lessons about the challenges of DC learning.
An example of deep culture difference - context
Researchers were interested in finding out if Australian
students who were sent to study at a French university were learning
deep cultural lessons in their time abroad. In particular, it looked at how
students dealt with DC differences in information gathering strategies. In
Australia, people often value a low context (ref) communication style
(explicit, unambiguous, “say what you mean”) whereas in France
communication is often more high context (implicit, subtle, “read between
the lines”).
At Australian universities, gathering information is quite
systematic—you find out regulations and requirements from the course
catalogue, you find course offerings and schedules on the website, and so
on. It’s very transparent, but tends to be impersonal. It can also be quite
rigid if you miss a deadline or need an exception to the rules.
At French universities, information gathering is often a
more personalized process. The official policies are only the starting
point. Administrators often have more authority to waive rules and make
special exceptions. On the other hand, the system is less transparent, so
you need to ask around, find the right person to speak to, and perhaps
spend time cultivating good relationships with those “in the know”.
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This is a good example of DC culture difference hidden
in plain sight. Australian students dealt regularly with the university and
had opportunities to uncover, bit by bit, hidden cultural patterns.
Research results
So how did they do?
By some measures very well. Overwhelmingly, they
described their experiences in France in positive terms. On the other
hand, when asked what they learned about information gathering at the
French university, results were much more mixed. Many of them
expressed deep frustration and were highly critical about the French
administration, finding it disorderly and inefficient. Even the students
who discovered effective strategies (get to know administrators, for
example) couched their lessons in terms of dealing with the
“inefficiency” of the French system.
It should be pointed out that French students at
Australian universities can also find information gathering highly
inefficient. It can be difficult, for example, to find someone to answer
your questions or give personalized advice. You may simply be told
“Look it up in the course catalogue.” French students also need to learn
a different way of “working the system” to get the information that they
need.
Deep culture lessons
This example provides us with a good snapshot of some
of the challenges and possible rewards of DC learning.
Deep culture learning takes time
One challenge is that DC learning takes time. It would
have been impossible for the Australian students to discover the hidden
patterns of DC in France by making a single attempt at getting
information. Hidden patterns emerge only by using a trial and error
approach to getting things done and understanding our situation. And
even then, we may miss patterns unless we are specifically paying
attention.
DC learning also takes patience. As soon as we judge the
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differences we find to be unreasonable (in this case “inefficient”), we
may give up trying, or find that our negative experiences reinforce our
prejudice. The ability to accept—recognize difference without making
negative value judgments—is important. Whether we like or dislike what
we find, the first goal is to simply try and understand things as they are.
DC learning is more than whether you judge your own
experience to be a success. The Australian students did learn a lot, and
felt their experiences to be a success. And of course they are right to
look at it that way. But they often failed to gain an insider view of the
situation. To that extent, their DC learning stopped. Many of them had
negative judgments reinforced. They failed to learn about their own
cultural programming—how they naturally expected efficient
information gathering to be systematic.
The goal of deep culture learning
We can chart DC learning using a learning model
developed by Milton Bennett. He proposes that there are stages of
development that lead from our natural state of ethnocentrism to a more
ethnorelative state (ref and define as Bennett’s term).
Bennett views ethnocentrism as the cognitive state in
which the existence of other cultural worlds is not experienced as fully
real. Experiencing cultural difference can teach us that other cultural
worlds are real and valid in their own right. This increased cognitive
capacity is more than an attitude. It includes the ability to have cultural
empathy—to look at the world from another cultural point of view.
Those who have become highly bicultural, for example, may experience a
kind of cultural “code-shifting”. A Senegalese man I know with many
years experience living in Europe described this as the feeling of
“putting on his Senegalese glasses” when visiting Senegal. When in
Dakar he sees the world through one set of eyes and while in Paris
another.
Bennett has labeled the stages of intercultural
development as denial, defense, minimization, acceptance, adaptation and
integration. (EN define + ref) Bennett’s fundamental insight is that
intercultural experiences can lead to fundamental changes in our
cognition.(ref) Some people manage to attain a highly adapted
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intercultural state in which they can consciously shift between different
cultural worlds, communication styles, patterns of thought, and so on.
They manage this without losing the sense of who they are or their
personal values.
Some intercultural specialists call this state integrated
marginality. By this they mean that one has learned to participate in
multiple perceptual worlds, but that one has successfully integrated them
into an organic whole. One is not fragmented as a person, even though
one may shift points of view or communication styles. Integrated
marginality doesn’t mean giving up your values. Rather, when making
moral choices, you do so within the context of understanding different
ways of perceiving a situation.
I generally use the terms DC understanding or DC empathy
when talking about what we can gain from our intercultural experiences.
DC understanding implies awareness of how one’s own mind works, not
only in terms of one’s personality but also our DC programming. DC
empathy refers to the ability to enter into other perceptual worlds. These
qualities are often developed through intercultural experiences but can be
developed in other ways as well.
DC understanding is not something that one ever “gets”
completely. It’s simply an approach to dealing with the world—one
which brings us closer to an understanding of the human experience.
Perhaps we can call it a practice because it’s something we undertake in
pursuit of greater understanding.
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The Practice of Deep Culture Learning
I believe that DC learning can help us develop important
qualities—empathy, openness, insightfulness, balance, and so on.
Eventually, we can learn to move smoothly between different world
views and resolve apparent contradictions. To do this we have to practice
DC learning in a wide range of life experiences. DC learning is not
something that’s done in a cave, isolated from the world. On the contrary,
it involves fully engaging with the world so as to stimulate reactions
which illuminate hidden parts of the self.
One historical figure that personifies the engagement and
reconciliation of DC learning. is Mohandas Ghandi. He exhibited great
moral clarity, but had a deeply empathetic and multicultural view of the
world. Born to Hindu parents, he was raised in a Jain community. At 19
he went to live in England and even admired parts of English culture. A
student of world religions and a deeply spiritual person, he was
nevertheless deeply involved in the secular world of politics and a fight
for social justice. He transcended apparent contradictions: he was an
Indian fighting for independence from England who didn’t hate the
English; he fought for equality but did so without violence, he deeply
respected different religious traditions but maintained his own spiritual
path.
Nelson Mandela is another example of someone who
managed to reconcile extreme contradictions in his fight for social justice
in South Africa. Throughout the struggle, he never lost sight of the fact
that he was not battling Whites, but rather the apartheid system and the
prejudice that it was built on. He managed to hate racism without hating
racists. What an accomplishment!
Despite persecution and imprisonment, he held a deeply
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empathetic view of the worldview of Whites—to the point of
befriending and attempting to educate White guards in prison. He was
no sell-out, however. He simply understood that their attitudes were to a
large degree a result of their cultural conditioning. He also knew that no
amount of conditioning takes away the ability of the individual to learn
new cultural lessons and gain new perspectives.
DC practice in everyday life
Some people are forced to deal with the contradictions
and conflict of differing worldviews. It’s increasingly common these days
for the children of expatriates, for example, to grow up in different
countries, sometimes speaking multiple languages. And anyone who
takes an assignment in another country, immigrates or signs up for a
study-abroad program, will also need to deal with these challenges. Even
tourists face these challenges, if only for a shorter time.
But the qualities that we can gain from these experiences
can be cultivated in our everyday lives as well. An understanding of DC
learning and the cognitive unconscious can be applied at work or with a
spouse, just as it can be applied to a sojourn far from home. Some of the
everyday qualities that I think are particularly important in DC practices
are:
Engagement: We learn from doing and trying new things, not
cogitating or navel gazing. Engagement is the ability to deeply care about
what you do, without being too attached to how things turn out.
Humility: Self-importance is the enemy of learning. DC practice
involves seeking out the limitations of our own point of view. This more
difficult if we feel the need to be right, defend our opinions, ego, honor,
and so on.
Break routines: Our lives are dominated by routine. Disrupting them
engages our ability to learn. As a simple experiment, for one meal try
switching the hand that you use to hold your fork. Even simple
disruptions can be quite challenging.
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Cultivate empathy: This involves focusing our attention outside of
us—on the thoughts, feelings and point of view of others. We can
cultivate a greater awareness of our physical environment as well.
Empathy gets us out of our own heads.
Bodymindfulness: This involves paying attention to what’s happening
inside oneself—thought processes, feelings, sensations. DC practice is
not simply intellectual insight, it’s a form of body learning as well. (ref)
Suspend judgment: DC practice seeks to understand what is, rather than
what should be. Sitting in judgment runs counter to this. It’s especially
difficult not to judge oneself if we become aware of qualities or
behaviors we’d prefer not to have.
This list is not very original. You may find similar ideas in
self-help books, religious or spiritual writings, or stories illustrating folk
wisdom. But that’s because fundamental learning processes are common
to people everywhere. Nevertheless, articulating these practices can
remind us that intercultural experiences can serve us in profound ways.
Dealing with difference—traveling, learning a new language, living in a
new country, communicating with an unreasonable boss—represent
important learning opportunities. If we are only interested in defending
our point of view, satisfying our petty goals and reinforcing our sense of
self-importance, these experiences will be especially stressful. If we can
focus on what we have to learn, we can sometimes transcend these
challenges.
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Deep Culture, Clash and Cash
Clash
In 1993, political scientist Samuel Huntington published
in article in the influential journal Foreign Affairs, titled “The Clash of
Civilizations?”. His thesis was that in a post-cold-war world, a
fundamental driver of future international friction would be cultural
conflict. His article, and the book he published to elaborate on his ideas,
ignited a firestorm of controversy. After 9/11 in particular, the idea that
much terrorism, war and international conflict might be a predictable
result of cultural difference evoked intense debate.
I would have liked to avoid brining up such a contentious
subject After all this book focuses primarily on what we have to learn
from intercultural experiences, not from the extremes of violence and
hatred that cultural difference might engender. In addition, this book
talks about cultural learning as an experience within the individual, not at
the level of geopolitical conflict. It’s risky to equate possible
misunderstanding or prejudice among individuals to the complex
interactions of politics, economics and nation states.
There are, however, ideas in this book which relate
directly to the issue of culture and conflict. And I believe that an
understanding of DC can help us better understand things such as ethnic
conflict, terrorism, geopolitical tensions, etc. That’s not to say that deep
culture explains any of these things. Rather, the basic insights of deep
culture act as important background knowledge when discussing these
issues and looking for solutions.
Cultural conflict and different realities
People in different cultural communities have different
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worldviews. This means that two people can witness the same event and
understand it in completely different—even opposing—ways. Nowhere
is this more apparent than in entrenched mutually destructive conflict
with roots in different worldviews. Both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian
conflict, for example, feel victimized and make sense of their own role in
the conflict in radically different ways. This can lead to a vicious cycle of
retribution and distrust and close contact between can breed ever more
distrust.
Another example of this split in world views is the
differing perceptions of the attacks of 9/11 held by some parts of the
Arab world and of the West. The understanding in New York or Seattle
is generally that the attacks were the result of a coordinated action
undertaken by Muslim extremists. In the cafes of Cairo or Tripoli,
however, you will commonly hear that there was Jewish or American
complicity or planning involved in the attacks. They are often said to
have been launched in order to provide a pretext for America’s invasion
of Iraq.(ref NYT)
How can we explain such widely divergent views of
reality? Regardless of one’s personal opinions about these subjects, an
understanding of deep culture teaches us that our “common sense”
understanding of the world is often based on unconscious assumptions.
There is an assumption in some parts of the Arab world, for example,
that official news sources can’t be trusted. Therefore, if the American
government says that the attacks were planned and carried out solely by
Arabs, it must not be true. In the US, there is often an assumption that
the United States is a benevolent presence in the world community. This
perception is not shared by everyone around the world. These differing
assumptions, combined with many other differences, lead to widely
different “realities” as to the meaning of the 9/11 attacks.
Deep culture versus civilization
There are many arguments against the idea that
something as vague as culture or civilizations could be a primary cause
of geopolitical conflict. It is argued, for example, that it’s a mistake to
equate the motivation of radicalized extremists with general societal
discontent. In addition, those who argue for a clash of civilization point
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to historical patterns of conflict. Those who disagree say that
socioeconomic factors are much more meaningful in looking for
explanations. (ref Understanding Arabs, Nydell)
These points have merit. But they don’t conflict with the
idea that deep culture difference can contribute to war, ethnic conflict,
genocide terrorism, and so on. This because DC is not a cause of conflict.
But when deep culture settings are in opposition conflict easily becomes
more likely. Also, saying that deep cultural difference exists is not the
same as saying that a particular religion or political ideology is at fault.
Understanding how deep culture functions on the level
of the “gut” or basic emotion helps us understand fervor in issues of
politics, religion and war. And finally, understanding that ethnocentrism
can lend itself to the perception that difference is a threat, and that
people from other communities are strange or less than human can help
us better understand the human capacity for prejudice and even
genocide.
My final word on DC and political conflict is to say that
understanding factors which contribute to violence is not the same as
excusing it. In the same way, saying that ethnocentrism is a natural result
of our evolutionary biology is not the same as saying that it is desirable.
Sickness and death are also a natural part of life, but that doesn’t mean
we shouldn’t do everything we can to understand them and fight against
them.
Cash
There is one other sensitive topic that I can’t avoid: How
might cultural values and DC settings be related to poverty and
economic development? Are some countries or regions poor or
dysfunctional for cultural reasons? Within the field of intercultural
relations, this subject is somewhat taboo. Many hesitate to discuss it
because history has seen industrialized countries impose their will and
extract natural resources on countries that didn’t have the ability to
defend themselves. It has also seen those who have economic and
political power define “progress” and “development” in ethnocentric
and abusive ways. No one wants to associate with those attitudes.
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Nevertheless, the poverty, lack of basic social services,
poorly developed health-care systems, and political corruption that
persists in certain countries and parts of the world cannot be ignored
either. Economists and aid
specialists have studied
these questions and have
provoked
a
spirited
debate—sometimes with
Anthropologists—about
what
reasonable
conclusions can be drawn
about how cultural factors
might contribute to the
vast differences of quality of life (as defined by access to food, shelter,
social stability, health care and education) found in different countries. A
glance at a graph showing the worldwide distribution of wealth, for
example, can gives a snapshot of just how wide this disparity is. (table)
The political economist Max Weber was the first to argue
that there is a strong relationship between cultural values and economic
systems.(ref) He was particularly interested in the sociology of religion
and argued that protestant cultural values were instrumental in the
development of capitalism. For a time, some argued that Western values
of individualism and personal autonomy were a requirement for the
development of industrialized economies. The economic success of Asia
refutes that idea, but the idea that there is a relationship between cultural
values and economic systems and industrialization still rages. (ref)
Some argue that using culture as an explanation for
differing levels of economic development is misguided at best and
demeaning or ethnocentric at worst. It’s argued that geographic and
historical factors are enough to explain differences in economic output.
Poor countries, for example, are more often landlocked, have fewer
natural resources, and more often a history of colonial control. In
addition, some communities may define the “success” of their society in
different ways, such as the honoring of traditions or social cohesiveness.
But there is still a strong argument for the idea that DC
plays an important role in how economic systems develop. Take the case
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of the island of Hispaniola, an island in the Caribbean Sea. The western
third of the island was colonized primarily by the French, had a large
population of slaves, won early independence from France and became
the nation of Haiti. The Western portion of the island was colonized by
the Spanish, had fewer slaves, remained part of Spain longer, and
eventually gained independence as the Dominican Republic.
The Dominican Republic, while not a rich country, has
developed economically at a pace with the rest of Latin America. Yet
Haiti, despite sharing nearly identical geography and having won its
political independence first, is one of the poorest countries in the world,
ranking 146th out of 177 countries on the United Nations Human
Development Index (wiki-2006). The difference, it would seem, are the
differing cultural histories of the two countries.
An understanding of deep culture also seems to point to
at least some relation between economic systems and cultural difference.
Certain DC values and assumptions seem to be related to higher levels
of economic output. One of them relates to the perception of wealth: Is
wealth a) limited, meaning that if some people have more than others
have less, or b) unlimited, meaning that there’s limit to how much can be
created. Societies that tend to agree with the former statement tend to be
less economically developed. Other DC factors may be attitudes towards
fate (are humans in control of their own destiny?), or a belief in magic
versus an assumption that the physical world only follows natural laws.
Values related to the importance of sharing and communal responsibility
may contribute to people finding less reason to save and plan for the
future.
There is, of course, a chicken and egg quality to some of
these ideas. Do people feel that wealth is limited because in their society
it really is? Or does that belief somehow inhibit greater economic
productivity? Certainly there’s no single answer to these questions, and
DC would seem only to be one of the many factors that lead to large
discrepancies in quality of life indicators. Still, DC is an important part
of how humans make sense of their worlds and is closely related to the
kinds of societies we create for ourselves, so it can’t be ignored when
asking such important questions.
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Taking responsibility for deep culture understanding
We don’t need to be economists nor political scientists to
look for solutions to these problems. As global citizens we can’t let the
difficulty of these topics, or considerations of political correctness, get
in the way of seeking answers. At the very least, developing DC
understanding can help us suspend judgment and keep an open mind
about possible answers to the challenges that communities around the
world are facing.
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Deep Culture Adventures
I first became interested in DC on an airplane in 1992. I
was just starting graduate school and had received a background reading
list which included Edward Hall’s book The Silent Language. His
fundamental premise, that humankind needs to break free of cultural
conditioning, deeply resonated with my own intercultural learning
experiences. I consider my interest in DC to be a continuation of his
work. Unfortunately, his ideas seem to excite relatively little interest today,
even among intercultural specialists who are aware of his importance in
creating the field of intercultural communication.
To read The Silent Language today reminds me of just how
greatly the world has changed in the last 50 years. It also shows me that
the fundamental insights of DC learning have not changed. I consider
Hall a seminal thinker. I believe that he was, like Marshall McLuhan,
ahead of his time in anticipating the challenges brought about by
increased globalization and communication technology. But whereas
McLuhan focused more on mass media and changes to society, Hall was
interested in the personal experience of confronting cultural difference
in our lives and interactions.
The challenges and opportunities that Hall described a
half-century ago are now being faced by millions. Intercultural
experiences are no longer the domain of diplomats and the cultural elite.
We’ve all got something to learn and plenty of chances to do so. It’s an
exciting time to be a deep culture explorer.
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Appendix
End notes
References
Stone tools photo: Image copyright held by author, Chris Henshilwood.
Photo by HenningSource Originally from en.wikipedia; description page
is/was here.Date 2007-08-10 (original upload date)Author Original
uploader was Chenshilwood at en.wikipediaPermission(Reusing this
image) CC-BY-2.5; Released under the GNU Free Documentation License.
All other photo images in this work are in the public domain.
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The Beginners Guide to Deep Culture Joseph Shaules JII Publications

Transcription

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