Deep Culture

The Hidden Challenges of Global Living

Joseph Shaules

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781847690166
• eBook ISBN: 9781847698582
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Social Sciences

A straightforward guide to understanding the hidden cultural challenges of adapting to life abroad. Combining intercultural theory and the voices of sojourners who talk about their experiences, it maps out the process of resisting, accepting and adapting to cultural difference. We see that all sojourners, from tourists, to expatriates to immigrants, go through a similar learning dynamic. We learn that intercultural experiences can be deep or shallow, and that hidden cultural difference can increase sojourner prejudice. The book examines intercultural sensitivity while avoiding "feel good" idealizations about cross-cultural contact. It brings clarity to debates regarding the importance of cultural difference and the effects of globalization. An essential resource for sojourners, language teachers and intercultural educators.

Part 1

The Intercultural Experience

Chapter 1

Intercultural Contact in the Global Village

Japan is predictable. Lots of times that’s a good thing. I know my train’s going to come on time. I know I’m going to get good service.

Jack, talking about life in Tokyo after fourteen years in Japan.

Sojourns as a Learning Experience

Spending time in a foreign country is a learning experience. On a short trip abroad travelers see previously unfamiliar places and increase their knowledge of the world. They may try gnocchi for the first time, learn to buy gasoline in Turkish or simply familiarize themselves with the landmarks of Paris or Shanghai. Those who spend a longer time abroad – immigrants, study-abroad students, expatriates, etc. – must go through a longer and deeper process of learning about and adapting to their new environment. They often must struggle to learn a new language, get used to a new lifestyle and form relationships with people they may not fully understand. Each in their own way, both short-term visitors and long-term sojourners go through a learning process as they interact with environments that they don’t fully understand.

These learning experiences change the people that go through them. We think of people who have traveled extensively as being international. Those who have lived abroad and learned a foreign language are seen as having gained intercultural awareness or an appreciation of cultural difference; they may have faced culture shock; they may have become more tolerant or changed their personal values. Some people seem even to ‘go native’, taking on the lifestyle and values of people from another country. These experiences may even have provoked an identity crisis. Long sojourns can teach transformative lessons far beyond gaining the ability to ‘get by’ in a foreign land necessary for short-term visits.

Adapting to life in a new cultural environment – in this book, cultural learning – can be a very powerful experience. At the same time, its outcomes are difficult to predict and explain. When language teachers send students off on a study-abroad program, they know that some will have their lives altered in fundamental ways. Others, however, may spend their time with their compatriots and return having learned seemingly few deep lessons. Some will become fascinated by their temporary new homes while others may have negative stereotypes reinforced. Some students may even find the experience so stressful that they return home early. Explaining how these different outcomes come about is not easy. Life abroad is an all-encompassing experience, and personalities and living situations are so varied that it can be difficult to conceptualize the changes that sojourners go through.

Educators and trainers who prepare sojourners for stays abroad know they can try to do so by giving concrete information about the geography, history or literature of a particular country. Yet, the intangible challenges of living abroad – gaining insights into values, learning to communicate in a new way, discovering one’s own prejudices, etc. – are much harder to teach prospective sojourners. Deciding what one’s educational goals should be and what elements of the intercultural experience to focus on is a constant question. For their part, sojourners who have never been abroad often have little idea of the challenges they will face and may wildly under-or overestimate how easy or difficult it will be. Asking sojourners what they are likely to learn while they are abroad often draws puzzled looks. Asking sojourners how their values or worldview might change is an unfair question: the process is so deep and living in another country is so unlike other experiences that it is difficult even to have a point of comparison.

Goals of This Book

This book focuses on the hidden challenges of living abroad. Its goal is to present an intercultural learning model which gives both educators and sojourners a way to think and talk about the hidden adaptive challenges of a long-term stay in a new cultural environment. Entering any new environment creates a learning challenge, but longer-term sojourners are often challenged to adapt to their new environment in deep ways. Adapting more ‘deeply’ to a new environment refers to a need to rethink the out-of-awareness beliefs, values and assumptions that we normally use to make sense of the world and get along with others. Changes in behavior may be accompanied by concurrent changes in how we view the world. And because our worldview is greatly influenced by our own cultural conditioning, it often takes an experience with those who have different cultural backgrounds to make us aware of our own cultural perspective.

As we will see, in spite of all that specialists have learned about the nature of intercultural experiences, there is little agreement on how to describe the process of intercultural learning. Part of this results from the fact that intercultural learning is studied from a wide range of different perspectives. Yet even among educators and intercultural communication specialists there is little consensus on questions as simple as: What constitutes a successful intercultural experience? What is intercultural awareness? What is the role of culture in determining behavior? Is it possible to go ‘beyond’ cultural difference? Is cultural difference even a valid concept in our globalized world?

This book will attempt to find some answers to these questions. In doing so, it will attempt to avoid vague idealized intercultural goals such as ‘increased awareness’ or ‘global consciousness’. It will also attempt not to moralize about what people should learn as a result of intercultural experiences. Instead, it will look at both positive and negative outcomes, and try to understand how they come about. It will not deal with issues of social justice or equality. Prejudice will be dealt with, but only in the context of coming into contact with cultural difference. This work assumes that while some intercultural learning outcomes may be more desirable than others – acceptance of cultural difference is preferable to denigration – all are normal human reactions to the intercultural learning process. This work also assumes that ethnocentrism is a product of human evolutionary biology and thus the starting point of intercultural learning. The ways in which inculcated prejudice affects human relations is beyond the scope of this book.

An important difficulty in understanding the process of intercultural learning is that every intercultural situation is different and individuals differ widely in their responses to apparently similar situations. It is difficult to compare the challenges faced by an extroverted tourist, a frustrated economic immigrant, an idealistic Peace Corps volunteer and a fun-loving student on a homestay program. Yet the assumption of this book will be that all intercultural learning experiences share certain elements which make the intercultural learning process, if not predictable, at least comprehensible. Part 1 of this book will focus on three areas in particular: (1) the nature of culture and cultural difference; (2) the demands that encountering cultural difference imposes on sojourners; and (3) the depth of intercultural learning experiences. Part 2 of this book will bring these three areas together into a model of intercultural learning meant to help sojourners and educators talk in a more explicit way about a process which normally takes place at an intuitive level.

Deep Culture

The recurring theme in this book will be the concept of deep culture. In the context of this book, deep culture refers to the unconscious meanings, values, norms and hidden assumptions that allow us to interpret our experiences as we interact with other people. These shared meanings form a framework which acts as a starting point for our sense of what it means to be human, what constitutes normal behavior, how to make moral or ethical choices and what we perceive as reasonable. (Hampden-Turner & Trompenaars, 2000; Trompenaars & Hampden-Turner, 1998) Deep culture generally functions out of awareness at the intuitive level and we usually remain unaware of it until confronted with a need to interact with people who have different cultural assumptions. It is our ‘cultural programming’ or, as Barnlund (1989) puts it, our ‘collective unconscious’. Geert Hofstede (1997) describes it as the ‘software of the mind’. To take the computer analogy further, if our body and biological predilections are our hardware, then deep culture is the operating system – the learned framework of perception, interpretation and judgment – that allows us to run the interpretive programs with which we engage in the tasks of daily living.

Living in or visiting other countries often brings us into contact with people who have different deep-culture settings. This does not necessarily refer to witnessing behavior one might find unusual (e.g. washing in cow urine, reportedly practiced by the Masai in East Africa). Deep culture does not refer to specific behaviors but rather to the values and assumptions that underlie those actions. Some examples of deep culture are: differing cultural assumptions about the role of men and women; differing orientations towards time and feelings of identity (e.g. collective versus individual); differing senses of morality and ethical behavior (e.g. feelings of ‘face’ or individual morality); and many others. This book will argue that cultural difference at this deep level constitutes the most fundamental challenge of intercultural learning. It is the foundation upon which ethnocentrism rests and it constitutes the raw material for our cultural biases.

In many intercultural contexts, deep culture is not noticed or understood in any profound sense. An English visitor to Thailand may experience a profound sense of cultural difference when seeing monks with begging bowls. The visitor hasn’t – strictly speaking – had a Thai experience but an English experience in Thailand. The deep elements of Thai culture are not those that are the most sacred or symbolically important, they are those that are most fundamental and subtle. What seems ‘spiritual’ to our visitor may seem simply an everyday routine to many Thais. Thai communities place an importance on ancestry or family relations that our English visitor will find hard to grasp. The levels of formality in the Thai language may seem impossibly complex and hinge on social distinctions that our visitor is unaccustomed to making. The meaning of simple concepts – family, responsibility, independence, morality, shame, fun, adulthood, etc. – may seem very different when viewed from a Thai perspective.

As our visitor participates more fully in Thai communities, however, the perception of Thais may change. This change occurs when the visitor shares more of the hosts’ worldview. The visitor’s understanding may be transformed from that of an outsider, observing and interpreting an explicit cultural phenomenon, to that of an insider sharing the meaning and interpretation of the community that produced the phenomenon. This change is primarily intuitive, not intellectual. It requires a willingness to suspend one’s outsider’s judgment and attempt to see the world from a new point of view. In doing so, the internal logic of that community becomes clearer and one may learn to operate within these new cultural frameworks. It is this intuitively felt internal logic, the unspoken assumptions behind a community’s behavior, which constitutes deep culture. The process of acquiring the ability to step into these new frameworks of meaning is deep cultural learning.

The deeper ‘hidden’ side of the intercultural experience has been recognized at least since 1959, when Edward Hall (1959) published his seminal book The Silent Language. Since then, cultural frameworks and worldview have widely been recognized to function primarily out of conscious awareness; in the same way that fish don’t notice water, we don’t notice our own hidden cultural programming. Unfortunately, the implications of this fundamental insight are seldom focused on. This book will argue that not having a clear conceptualization of the hidden structure of deep culture leads to confusion about fundamental issues in intercultural relations such as: whether culture is a useful concept given increasing globalization; whether being socialized into a particular cultural community can predict particular behavior; and how to understand the difference between the role of personality and culture in influencing behavior.

This book will also argue that it requires more than a brief trip abroad or simply meeting someone from a foreign country for deep cultural learning to happen. To support this argument we will examine the experiences of expatriates who were interviewed as part of a research project on intercultural learning. We will explore the deep culture lessons that these sojourners learn (or don’t) and try to understand the stages in their learning process. As we will see, sojourners have a variety of reactions and learn widely different lessons as a result of experiencing life in a new cultural community. Some adapt readily and report very positive experiences while others seem to resist change, complain or openly criticize their cultural hosts. Linda, for example, a British woman living in France, describes her new life as a ‘voyage of discovery’, while Adele, an American living in Japan, describes bitterly her four years abroad by saying: ‘I think one thing I’ve learned [in Japan] is that I really like the United States, and I’m glad that I was born there.’ In addition, some people have deeper intercultural learning experiences than others. Jack (quoted at the start of the chapter) has lived a contented life in Tokyo for 14 years yet speaks only rudimentary Japanese, has few Japanese friends and is barely integrated into Japanese life. We will try to make sense of these different reactions.

Deep culture and the global village

It is important to understand the experiences of people like Jack, Adele and Linda because globalization is revolutionizing intercultural relationships. As early as 1964 Marshall McLuhan (1964: 4) argued that the world was turning into a ‘global village’ in which communication technology was ‘extend[ing] our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time’. McLuhan (1968:11) also predicted that people everywhere would soon ‘adjust to the vast global environment as if it were his little home town’. And while some argue that global interconnectedness heralds the advent of a new ‘transcultural community’ (Agar, 2002), deep culture differences still pose a challenge to most people who spend an extended period abroad. Even within a village there are prejudice, conflict, discrimination and inequality. Increased contact does not always lead to harmony. It can also lead to a vicious cycle of misunderstanding and aggression as we can see, for example, between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, Palestinians and Israelis, The Singhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka, and relations between India and Pakistan or Ethiopia and Eritrea.

The ‘global village’ metaphor can also be carried too far. Though contact in our new global village is extensive it often remains shallow. Commu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Intercultural Experience
• Part 2: A Model of Cultural Learning
• A Glossary of the Intercultural Experience
• Background of the Sojourners
• References