Generational Cultures: Some personal reflections

I am taking off work this week for a different kind of intercultural experience. I am spending significant time with my mother. The last time I visited her we helped her put together a scrap book with a collection of various things she had considered important and had saved for so many years. There was an advertisement from the automobile dealership where her father worked, featuring poetry in tribute to the founder of a make of car that no longer exists. There were announcements about the weddings of friends and birth announcements for their children. There was an old love letter from someone she no longer remembers, and an associate membership card to her father's athletic club. There were newspaper articles featuring her for the leading role she had in a locally produced film in the 1920s. There was a letter of recommendation from her employer. What struck me about all of these items is that they each displayed a use of language, a depiction of some behavior, a style of communication, a way of thinking, and/or a set of values and assumptions that are not common today in the United States.

She is 91 years old. Her parents came from opposite sides of the U.S. Civil War. This put her in an interesting place, culturally, in the early 20th Century. She had been part of the U.S. cultures of the "Roaring 20s," the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the post-war suburbs when I joined her. In each of these layers of culture, she was shaped and she participated. And though she has traveled through the 1960s and all the subsequent years that I have known as well, she still loves the songs she heard in the 1920s, sets her hair (and understands economics) in the way she did in the 1930s, wears a shade of red lipstick that she wore in the 1940s, and makes the more or less the same assumptions about the role of men and women that she did in the 1950s. And so the "5 Frameworks" also help me look for differences in my own and my mother's culture. I change the way I talk and behave around my mother, quite instinctively recognizing the differences and adapting my behavior a bit to fit her expectations and needs. Sometimes I do minimize the differences between us, particularly as I see her expression on my own face and wonder if I, too, am destined to wear my current hairstyle into my 90s. But I do know that I have developed a much keener empathy with her now than what I had as a teenager or as a younger woman. I now very clearly remember her when she was the age I am now, and I see the differences and similarities between us and understand more clearly why they are so.

From my own perspective of more than 50 years, I also remember living in past cultures. It is with quite some amusement that I remember how upset we felt in 1968 in Kansas City when one of the girls from my class decided to wear a pants suit to a dance at another school. We were concerned about the reputation of our school. This doesn't sound very much like the US today. I also remember with some astonishment that the teacher in my class in 1964 would often use a hard stick to strike boys who misbehaved, and we all felt this was expected and normal.

I have adapted to new cultural generations as I have lived through them, but I am still very much marked by my participation in the 1960s era, which affects such things as my reaction to tattoos, my feelings about the military, and my reluctance to write in anything but complete sentences and paragraphs. Understanding how my attitudes and reactions have been shaped in the context of my generational layers of culture may also help me recognize and respect the completely different layers that affect people from other cultures.

Bettina Hansel

The job of AFS is enormous. One only needs to read the newspaper to see that intercultural education is sorely needed.

It is not enough to simply go to another country and culture and "just be yourself." Recently you may have read a story of a British teacher arrested and imprisoned in the Sudan for a class project she created for the children that involved a teddy bear that she allowed the children to name Muhammad, to take him home and write stories about him.

See: Sudan Accuses Teacher of Islam Insult By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

Looking at this situation with British or US "glasses," this seems like a creative and perfectly normal thing to do, since in a vote, the children themselves selected the name. Yet the parents of some of the children did not think that this was appropriate at all and expected that a teacher would certainly know that. They were clearly looking at the situation with a different set of "glasses" -- with different values and assumptions about what is sacred, about what distinguishes people from animals.

Earlier this year, a different cross-cultural faux pas made its way to the press: actor Richard Gere's public kissing of actress Shilpa Shetty in India.

See: When a Kiss Is More Than a Kiss By PAUL VITELLO

While we have no idea what the U.S. actor, Richard Gere had in mind, it is likely that he was just "being himself," behaving in a way that, in Hollywood, might seem appropriate and amusing. And in spite of his several visits to India in the past, he apparently did not know that this non-verbal behavior was shockingly inappropriate in India.

These are highly publicized and dramatic examples of the difficulties that can arise from an outlook that minimizes cultural differences. AFS volunteers who work with our exchange participants can usually find their own examples of host families who over-react to what the AFS participant assumes is perfectly normal behavior for everyone, or exchange participants who become upset or worried by the family's ordinary, appropriate actions or what they consider "common sense."

Yet in spite of our familiarity with these types of examples, it is still common among both staff and volunteers that we are not always expecting cultural differences when we meet with people from other cultures. While we recognize some differences between cultures, we tend to believe they are somehow less important that the similarities, and that the similarities we share will ensure that we can relate to each other. And where there are some similarities, we may assume that there are many others.

I was struck recently by an article that appeared in the October/December 2007 issue of "Intercultures," an online Canadian journal published by the Centre for Intercultural Learning, Canadian Foreign Service Institute, Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada. (Cliquez içi pour l'édition française.) The article that caught my attention was the interview with Richard Nesbitt, author of Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently... And Why  (Free Press; 2003). The article with the interview is  called "Culture and Cognition." This can be helpful to readers who want to explore what is meant by differences in cognitive style.

Non-verbal Behavior, Cognitive Style (or how we think), and Values and Assumptions are three of the five frameworks of culture that AFS has been using as a way to actively look for and expect differences when we come in contact with other cultures. Understanding how and why cultures may differ in these ways can help us to recognize and accept such differences when we encounter them and to learn how to adapt our behavior in appropriate and respectful ways.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Research, AFS International