Intercultural Eyes

What is a border, really? When I grew up in the suburbs of Kansas City, I could see State Line Road out our kitchen window, a street that straddled the border between Kansas and Missouri. I never bothered to wonder how the two states coordinated the street paving, but we were impressed with the idea that we could stand in the middle of the street with a foot in each state, traffic permitting.

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While cleaning out some files the other day, I came across an old article by Michael Paige in that strange blue-violet type made by a ditto machine. I realized that part of the educational value of the piece, in addition to whatever Michael had written, was its iconic value as a representation of the culture of education in the baby boomer years....

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“And so you see I have come to doubt
All that I once held as true
I stand alone without beliefs
The only truth I know is you.”

Kathy’s Song. Paul Simon.

I often marvel at how young Paul Simon was when he wrote this song, but it has haunted me for years, particularly these lines, with the stark emptiness of doubt in everything except for the one person for whom the song is written: Kathy, I presume. What impressed me most was the possibility of such a complete emotional upheaval that would leave a person clinging desperately to one other person, with no other bearings. The intensity fit my teenage years, but not too closely, because at that point in my life I did believe I could change the world, or that young people would change the world. Much of that optimism stays with me, but now also much of the doubt.

My first real encounter with another culture was my exchange experience in France at 17. I am rather amused to remember my efforts to connect with a street corner revolutionary just across the border in Germany where I traveled with my host family. He was handing out some kind leaflet, and I knew immediately that we both belonged to the same worldwide youth movement. My French was reasonable enough, but I still don’t speak German. My host family stood patiently by while I tried to make this important connection in a pigeon English. We traded revolutionary leaflets as one might now exchange business cards. My host family ushered me back into the car and of course I never saw that guy again.

The complete confidence I had in whatever it was that I believed at age 17 served me well in some ways, but it did not leave me very open to the cultural differences I encountered. I held my views a bit too strongly, and judged quickly. Openness requires some doubt about your own perspective, and at that age I didn’t see the value of doubting what seemed self-evident to me.

I needed very much to balance my certainty about the world with some serious doubt: to have a willingness to explore the possibility that what I know from my own perspective may simply not be true. Where certainty brings strength, doubt brings vulnerability, but it can also yield to openness, wonder, curiosity, and the realization that there is so much more to learn.

Next week as I leave the daily contact with my colleagues at AFS and start on a new journey, I welcome the doubt that is creeping in as a counterweight to the confidence in what I have learned so far and where I am heading, and I welcome the new and renewed relationships that bring me new perspectives to ponder.

Next week also this site will have a new look as I move it to WordPress.com. Click here for a sneak preview. You will still find it at http://www.interculturaleyes.org and I will provide links from the current site to help you find it.

When I was very young, my grandfather's cousin Sue relayed a story about an American woman friend who was living in London as an ex-patriate for a time. An issue that came up for this woman was her worry that she instinctively used an American approach to apologies when riding the London "Tube" instead of the British approach. So whenever she accidentally stepped on someone's foot or bumped into someone on the Tube, she automatically said, "Oh, Excuse me!" The British, she observed, always seemed to say simply "Sorry!" in the same situation. Months passed, and then one day when she happened to step on a stranger's foot, she suddenly said, "Sorry!" and the other woman turned to her and said, "Oh, excuse me!"

I remembered this story while reading an article by Xiaowen Guan, Hee Sun Park, and Hye Eun Lee, called "Cross-cultural difference in apology" in the January 2009 edition of the International Journal of Intercultural Relations, or IJIR. Like Cousin Sue's friend, these three researchers asked people in the USA, China, and Korea to think about the situation of stepping on someone's foot in a train or bus, and their expectations about apologies. Though it can be amusing to read a very academic analysis of an everyday behavior, it is interesting to think about why we apologize and the role culture plays in this. After categorizing apologies according to the intent, desire, obligation and norms of the one apologizing, Guan and colleagues put forth some hypotheses about how culture influences apologies, and learned from their research that they were wrong!

The researchers had supposed that apologies would be more common in collectivist societies than in individualistic ones, but in fact, the Americans in the study showed a greater tendency to apologize than either the Chinese or Korean study participants. Though someone might accidentally step on another person's foot on the train or bus in any of these cultures, the variations in response don't seem to relate to how individualistic or collectivist are the people involved.

Of the three possible other explanations they provide:

(1) that Americans don't ride public transportation much so don't step on others' feet so often;

(2) that the American sense of personal space makes such an accident more offensive to the other person; or

(3) that the lower context US culture demands more of a spoken apology;

I vote for number 2. Living in New York and riding the subway daily, it certainly feels to be the norm that both the person stepping on the foot and the person stepped on will immediately apologize: the one for stepping on the foot and the other for being in the wrong place when the other person was stepping. Sometimes when this doesn't happen, you can hear a loud request for an apology, using indirect communication (a cry of pain, for instance) or direct communication ("Watch where you're going! You stepped on my foot. You could at least apologize.")

Ritual apologies
In this New York, and probably USA context, there is an enforced norm to apologize quickly for any accidental invasion of personal space. "Excuse me" or "Sorry" may now be equivalent, but whenever I realize that I have really injured someone in such an accident, I feel obliged to say more. "Oh, I'm so sorry. Are you OK?" I need to show more sincerity and not just ritually take the blame and move on.

Several months ago I wrote about genres of communication having different cultural norms. The apology is one such genre that can look very different across cultures. For instance a German AFS student in Hong Kong noted, "Here it's acceptable to belch out loud, but if you sneeze, you must apologize. Back home just the opposite is true."

When we cross cultures, we may feel strongly the obligation to apologize (or not to apologize!) in particular situations, and even if we speak the language perfectly, we may still want to express our own cultural selves by showing respect in the way we most expect. In Claire Kramsch's excellent book, Context and Culture in Language Teaching, she gives an example of an American student in Germany who is asked by her host father to close the door after she entered the room. She wants to say, "Oh, I'm sorry" as she does this, but no apology is expected by her host father. She considers several options for a German term and chooses "Entschuldigung" because it just felt disrespectful and impolite to say nothing.

I thought of this recently when reading a message from a Japanese speaker who was completely fluent in English, but chose to use a more Japanese style, apologizing for being the one to take the post of a beloved colleague who was retiring. I believe he understood well that an American speaker would never think to apologize for replacing someone who was retiring, but it must have felt disrespectful and simply wrong not to communicate in this Japanese way. It was a strong message, coming from one cultural context to many others, asking for good will and cooperation, honoring a colleague, and communicating respect.

If we are to communicate meaningfully across cultures, we will necessarily be communicating from the perspective of our own culture, and that will often include using some of our own cultural modes of communication, translated and/or explained.

In my own inadequate way I hope to do this as well.

Bettina Hansel

Geography sometimes suffers from image problems in the USA. When I tell people that I have a doctorate in geography, they assume I must know the names of every national, state, or provincial capitol in the world. Or that I can name the 10 longest rivers, the 20 highest peaks. Several years ago I was called for jury duty -- that institution of the US court system that places ordinary citizens as members of a jury to determine the outcome of a trial or civil case. As part of the voir dire process of jury selection, when my turn came I was publicly asked about my education level by the judge. I responded that I held a doctorate. "In what field?" the judge wanted to know. When I answered, "geography," the entire court room burst out laughing. Geography, it seems, was seen as knowledge for trivia contests, and not as a serious academic field.

But yesterday in the New York Times, the field made headlines on the first page of the "Arts" section: under the headline, "Mapping the Cultural Buzz: How Cool is That?" In their social science way, Elisabeth Currid and Sarah Williams are looking at the spatial distribution of cultural phenomena. Their data: thousands of professional photographs of "flashy parties and smaller affairs on both coasts" for sale by Getty Images. Because these stock images are commercially available (and a bit expensive), they have been given a certain market value and significance. Getty Images photographers seek out events that they believe will allow them to sell their images, and the presences of photographers also draws a certain crowd. In short, Currid and Williams take this as the "cultural buzz" -- what people in the USA are talking about.

And they mapped it with an attractive mapping program, showing the color-coded epicenters of art, music, theater, and television events.

I have been trying to decide if this is in the "Arts" sections because the maps are visually attractive, or because they are maps about events relating to the arts. But for me, the importance is the map itself, and the association that it makes between culture and place. For even if this is only about the "buzz" of celebrity, it speaks of the patterns left on the ground: the "where" questions we ask about anything that happens or simply exists. Where is it?

Earlier this year I talked with an AFS student heading to a host family in the Bronx. There is an entirely different "buzz" around the Bronx than shown by the "Arts" maps of Currid and Williams. A quick search of photos posted for the Bronx on Google Maps revealed that numerous people have pegged their 25-year-old photographs of abandoned buildings and urban graffitti to various locations in the Bronx. The images are powerful and potentially frightening. Getty Images, on the other hand, now shows image of the Yankee Baseball Stadium, the Bronx Zoo, the Bronx Botanic Gardens, a few interesting and stylized portraits of young African-American men, and some occasional images of grafitti. This, I guess, is what sells now. Some places become landmarks, others go unnoticed. Still others are hopelessly stereotyped. Neither the photos mapped on Google or the Getty search of Bronx photos give a true impression of the Bronx. You need to know what else is going on, and how to interpret it.

Google Maps are useful if you start to save them to "my maps" and mark them up. Map the bars, the dry cleaners, the churches, the schools, the shoe stores, the courts, the banks, the grocery stores, the auto repair shops. Find the shared maps where people have located crimes or auto accidents, or their favorite restaurants. Nothing is evenly spread across the landscape. A map helps you see what's plentiful and what's scarce in a place, and this tells you a lot about power and about culture. With the technology today, we can map at the level of the street address rather than country, state, province or nation. We can see the amazing variations and understand how complex is the fabric of culture. But we still need a few local informants to help us interpret what we are finding.

Where you are and where you go is important, and quite often you need to go someplace else to change your perspective. Most people would be able to learn a great deal about other cultures simply by taking more of an interest in the diversity that exists within their own city or town, but the familiarity of the place where we live may keep us from crossing the borders that are set up within it. Instead we stick to the paths we always use, and encounter the people we usually encounter along those paths: even in a big city like New York. 

In the coming months I would like to do more with cultural mapping -- not the buzz, perhaps, but maybe more the variation in the mundane in the places I live and visit. I also am planning a move of this blog to a new host: one that makes it easier to comment and will allow me to add pages. It will still be found at www.interculturaleyes.org but with a new look.