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12月23日 Issue 49. December 23, 2008.
I have been following the Brother Peacemaker blog written by an African American man living in Saint Louis. I don't even remember how I came across this blog, but it interested me because my focus is mostly on cultural differences on an international level, but in fact it isn't necessary to cross political borders to encounter cultural differences. It is always my hope that the lessons learned by AFS students living in another country for a year, a semester, or even shorter programs will also take root in their ability to deal with cultural differences they encounter at home. Yet sometimes I worry that this doesn't happen, particularly when the research we've done shows that most of our returnees, our volunteers, and even our staff tend to relate to others primarily on what we all have in common - our basic humanity. This may sound like a positive approach, but as the blog entry cited above complains, ignoring a very obvious difference may not be helpful in building relationships. The research we have done with the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI), Mitch Hammer's assessment tool based on Milton Bennett's Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, shows that it is not only in the USA that minimization of cultural differences takes place. It doesn't happen that we overlook difference in every context, but it is particularly odd when we take pains to overlook differences that are highly visible, such as skin color. Many years ago, a friend of mine took her small son into a shop with her. The little boy had not trained himself to minimize differences, or to concern himself with who might hear what he had to say. Instead he was intent on understanding what made other people different. Much to his mother's embarrassment, he pointed to another customer in the store and asked, "Right, Mom? That man's black?" It was just a question, and the African American customer so pointed out was amused, not offended. And though she answered her son with a quick, "That's right, dear," my friend would have much preferred to be invisible at that moment. She wondered herself why she felt that way. I also wonder why we do this. Is noticing differences so embarrassing? Privilege, Power and Inequality. Perhaps our effort to be color blind comes from the tension between our awareness of the inequality of privilege or power that exists between us, and our belief that such inequality should not exist. Any marker of a difference between us may be seen as a reminder of the inequality that we are suddenly overly conscious of. If instead we can view this person as being "just like me," the reminders of inequality disappear along with the differences. Tolerance and Conformity. When we minimize cultural differences we may also be dealing with a tension between a desire for conformity and a belief that we should tolerate differences. We can tolerate differences if they are not particularly important; if they are just variations on a theme. Life still seems organized and predictable if we are mostly the same, and if we are the same in all the ways that are important. With this stability, the small variations can even add some interest. Inherent in the color blindness is certainly an avoidance of tension, and an avoidance of judgment. We do not have to be "for" or "against" in our dealings with people from other cultures and groups. Minimizing cultural difference is non-judgmental, but it is not necessarily open to the important differences that come with our membership in particular cultural groups. Relationships can be built on the appreciation of difference and trust can be established in many ways; we don't need to always look for the similarity first. My particular cultural group celebrates Christmas this week, and with that comes a whole mixture of feelings from frustration to calm, from joy to depression. There is a group history as well as a personal history for me, and right now if feels very much part of who I am and what I'm doing: so much so, that I can't overlook it. Bettina Hansel Director of Intercultural Education and Research AFS International 12月19日 Special Issue. New AFS Video.
http://www.youtube.com/afsinterculturalprog
Bettina Hansel Director of Intercultural Education and Research AFS International 12月9日 Issue 48. December 9, 2008.
What we may be viewing here -- assuming that this study can be replicated elsewhere -- are the paths of culture shifting. "Happiness" is not really an objective state of being, even if statistically valid questionnaire scales can be created to measure it. How people respond to the scales is certainly a cultural product created within the social network subcultures to which they belong and will reflect among other things how they have learned (perhaps recently learned) to perceive themselves and others. Perceiving yourself as "happy" is part of how your group sees itself. And maybe culture shifts also happen with the same needed geographic proximity, though we still don't know the impact of online social network communications like Facebook.
Bettina Hansel Director of Intercultural Education and Research AFS International 12月1日 Issue 47. December 1, 2008The news last week from Mumbai was just another reminder for me of how frequently people turn violent in conflicts between "us" and "them" While the Twentieth Century was punctuated by two World Wars it seems that there has not been a single day without combat in the world. What would it take to bring us that day? (See "Wars in the 20th Century" on the Nobel Prize web site.) Clearly this would be an enormous amount of work. Wars are fought over diamonds, oil, water, gold, and land, which are inevitably unequally distributed. Mostly they are fought over competing fears: that our way of life will be lost, that our language will be taken from us, that our children's morals will be corrupted, that we will starve, that we will be killed, that we will be enslaved. And of course these things can and do happen. But does warfare actually stop them? AFS was born in war. The American Field Service Ambulance Drivers of World War I and II entered the battlefields armed with stretchers and medical supplies. But following World War II, these young drivers did not move on to the many battlefields that followed. They had a different idea: letting young high school students have the experience of living with a family in another country, and to spend a year growing up within this other culture. They adopted a slogan derived from a Sanskrit adage: Walk together, talk together, all ye people of the earth. Then and only then shall we have peace. Sixty years of peace-making and we're not there yet, clearly. Wars have continued around the world, but rather than send in the ambulance drivers, we have had to suspend programs at times. I was writing the AFS internal newsletter when we had to suspend programs in the then Yugoslavia. It had come on so suddenly that only weeks earlier we had been excited to learn of the increased number of families there who had applied to host our exchange students. Now we couldn't send them, and many Yugoslavian students who were then abroad faced going home to their families in a war zone, with host families afraid to let them go. Twenty-five years before that, I learned, we had faced a similar situation in Vietnam. We know from our research that anxiety around other cultures decreases when people become friends with people from different cultures, when they participate in exchange programs, when their parents encourage them to meet people from other cultures, when they learn to speak a foreign language. Fears about other cultures are stronger when we are isolated from them, when we don't speak any other language but our own, when all of our friends are from the same background. Even as we add up all the exchange students from the many organizations like AFS, and all the university students studying abroad, there are still too few. Fear continues to dominate the headlines. But now, reading about Mumbai, I think about Swarna, Sunita, Jeroo, Saurabh, Deepak, Anish, Kalika, Cedric, Naheed, Roopa, Ishwar, Nikhil, Suresh, Sophie, and Kannan, all of whom studied abroad in the USA and returned home to what was then Bombay. Perhaps they also thought of me when the World Trade Center towers collapsed in 2001 as I watched from the AFS 17th floor office window. In the days that followed that attack, reading the emails from AFS colleagues and dear friends around the world provided my best hope for the future. And it still does. Bettina Hansel Director of Intercultural Education and Research AFS International |
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