Culture Clashes

In a recent news article about the aftermath of the US pullout from Afghanistan, a Taliban spokesperson was addressing the issue of women’s rights. He made the following statements:

“[T]here will be no issue about women’s rights.”

He opposes Western views that “women should have an education without [a] hijab.”

“That is a change of culture. Our culture … they can receive education with hijab. They can work with hijab.”

“There will be no issue about the women’s right. No problem about their education, their work. But we should not be after changing each other’s culture as we are not intending to change your culture, you should not be changing our culture.”

I recognize that there are many who have reason to doubt these statements, given the history of the often brutal way in which the Taliban has dealt with its citizens. But I’d like to focus on the last sentence regarding culture. So let me give a little of my own cross-cultural experience and then I’ll come back to Afghanistan at the end.

 

Some of My Cultural Experiences

I have had the opportunity not only to travel to other countries on work-related activities, but to get involved in investigating the culture of other countries and writing about it. You can read about some of that here. Over the years we produced a series of host family handbooks for these countries.

Culture can be illustrated as being like an iceberg in that most of it is “below the water line” and is not observable.

[Cultural Iceberg]

 

When two cultures clash, the clash most often is between the various components that are unseen. So, while we can easily see things like dress, food, etc. we are not aware of things like personal space, the importance of time (or lack thereof), etc. But these unseen aspects can be even more important than the ones that are unseen.

[Culture clash]

 

One can also think of culture as being the color of our glasses. When a person is wearing yellow-tinted glasses and sees something that is blue, it appears to them as green. But another person who might be wearing red-tinted glasses would see that same object as violet. Taking off your own glasses and putting on someone else’s (i.e., looking at the world through their lenses) is not easy.

[Culture lens]

Aspects of Culture

Here are some of the aspects of culture that we explored in these various handbooks. Not every topic is important in every culture, but this gives you an idea of the range of things we need to consider.

• ·        Greetings
• ·        Direct/indirect communication style
• ·        Showing negative emotions
• ·        Volume and tone of voice
• ·        Eye contact
• ·        Disagreements
• ·        Conflict resolution
• ·        Independence/dependence
• ·        Religion and beliefs
• ·        Life cycle customs (birthdays, weddings, deaths, etc.)
• ·        Friendships
• ·        Social values
• ·        Personal hygiene
• ·        Modesty/nudity/sexuality
• ·        Diversity/prejudice/disability
• ·        Personal space

 

Thailand Example: Greetings

During my first full day on my first trip, Noon [a former exchange student who had lived with us for a year] had told me that I should expect to be visited by a number of her relatives. After all, it’s not every day that one’s “American father” comes to visit. I was seated with her in their living room and could hear voices outside. She told me, that’s my uncle. He came in the room and walked toward me. I stood and was preparing to greet him with the traditional Thai wai (bow) – hands together, etc. Instead, I was surprised that he stuck out his hand to shake mine, to which I thought, “he’s going to greet me in the US tradition instead,” so I shook his hand. But the next words out of his mouth were, “How old are you?” I was a bit taken aback, as this is not the typical first question that anyone in the US asks, but I also quickly went through the reading on culture that I had done and realized why he was asking. Relative age is very important in Thailand and the younger person must honor the older person, including by bowing more deeply so that your head is below the other person’s. Since we were both older gentlemen with balding, white/grey hair, he did not know if I was older or younger and needed to know so that he knew how to address me. All this thinking went through my head in a fraction of a second, so I then answered him, to which he replied, “Ah, young man, young man.” (He was about a year older than I was.)

I’ve used this story many times to illustrate how culture plays a part in our lives. On the visit with the AFS-USA team a few years later I had told this story to the team at the beginning of our time there. The following day, we were visiting a school and the teacher asked the class if they had any questions for us. One of them finally got up the nerve to talk and asked, “How old are you?” which turned into a great teaching moment.

But I’d like to relate one other “greeting” incident where I did NOT do the right thing. Most of the Thai members of our AFS-USA-Thailand group were female, since most AFS volunteers in Thailand are teachers. They would address me with the Thai greeting, “Suwadee Kha”. So, I decided that I would greet them back by saying “Suwadee Kha” to them. But this only generated a lot of giggling on their part. It turns out that “Suwadee” mean not simply “Hello,” but something more like “Hello from,” and the “Kha” part is feminine. So “Suwadee Bangkok” on a t-shirt means “Hello from Bangkok” and “Suwadee Kha” means “hello from a female!” Thus, when I say hello, I need to use the male ending and say, “Suwadee Khrap.” They quickly corrected me and I added to my knowledge of cultural mistakes!

 

Germany Example: Nudity

In 2007, I was part of a group who travelled to Germany to confer with our German counterparts in writing the first of a series of handbooks that addressed culture specific issues for host families of students from that country. One of the volunteers had acquired two magazines designed for young teens. One was in German and was for a German audience, the other was published by a US subsidiary of the same company and was designed for a US audience. They were both for the same month in the summer of that year.

The US version had its lead article devoted to Selena Gomez, a young actress who was about 15 and who had recently begun working on shows on the Disney Channel. Like most such magazines, there was a picture of her on the cover. The article inside had several more pictures with captions, but not a lot of text to go with it. All were in keeping with the wholesome image that one would expect of Disney.

The German version also had a picture of Selena on the cover, but there was more text in the article as well as additional pictures. However, the pictures were designed for a German audience which has different cultural norms – so there were pictures in various phases of undress and one where she was nude from the waist up.

I was startled enough by that, but turning over a few pages my cultural norms received a further shock.

There was an article, which apparently was a regular feature, with the title being something like “All About Me” (but in German of course). Taking a full page was a full-frontal nude picture of a teenage girl, about 15 or so. Around the edge were facts about her – age, hobbies and interests, etc. She was evidently a reader of the magazine and had submitted it for publication. In the US that kind of thing would be labeled as child porn, but since nudity in Germany is fairly common (coed saunas, changing on the beach in full view of others, etc.) it was not out of the ordinary. Flipping over the page, one encountered another such picture, but this time a full-frontal nude male about the same age and similarly marked.

 

Applicability to Afghanistan

Now, let’s look back at the last sentence in the quote from the Afghani spokesperson:

“But we should not be after changing each other’s culture as we are not intending to change your culture, you should not be changing our culture.”

Afghanistan has a long and storied history. There is evidence of human activity dating back 52,000 years and of urbanization dating back 4000-5000 years ago. Although landlocked, its position at the crossroads of central and south Asia made it the target of conquest by many different empires over the centuries. Thus, at various times, the dominant religion (Hindu, Buddhist, Islam) was a product of whomever controlled the area at the time. But these times of occupation each lasted hundreds of years, the time required for introducing a change of culture.

Those of us in the West make a great number of mistakes in our relationships with places like Afghanistan. These include at least the following:

o   Our view of the world is overly influenced by the modern-day boundaries of countries. But in the case of Afghanistan, those boundaries were only established in the late 1800s by agreement between the British and Russians. Thus, the current country includes areas which have had different tribes over the centuries and these differences in historic control mean that there is still much internal conflict.

o   Afghanistan has been a Muslim country for a millennium and a half. Change takes a long time.

o   The Afghani people rightfully have a negative view of outsiders. Much of their history has been one of being overrun by others – whether those from Iran to the west, India to the east, Russia to the north, or the British during their empire-building time.

o   All past changes in culture were imposed by conquering armies who then occupied the land (or at least part of it) for centuries afterwards.

Against this background, we see the recently-ended US occupation – a scant 20 years. And we see the typical US philosophy – not of wanting to conquer and control, but to enter in order to find and root out those who dared to attack us on 9/11/2001 and then leave once we had accomplished our purpose.

And then we have the expectation that simply because we were there for 20 years that they will change their culture in areas such as women’s rights, religion, etc. and simply ignore the prior centuries! No! Their culture includes warring tribes within an externally imposed border, reliance on Islam, disdain for “outsiders” and only changing if those changes are imposed upon them for several centuries. And we have the audacity to think that our being there for 20 years will cause change! It doesn’t work that way.

I’ve written many times in the past that when we ignore the events of the past and are not students of history, that we are setting ourselves up for failure. In this case, as much as I may disagree with some things that the Afghani spokesperson represents, his statement on culture change is correct. The influence of the 20 years of US occupation will be but an insignificant footnote in the history of this part of the world.