Intercultural or International?

Take a deep breath. Just breathe.

Today has been an exercise in practicing patience, tolerance and learning to bite my tongue.

One of the things that drive me absolutely crazy is that whenever people talk about “cultural differences” they are usually referring to differences between nationalities or ethnicities that are defined by a specific geographic location or language group.  In my program of study, I see and hear people consistently confusing culture with nationality and it makes me want to scream because culture is so much more than what is written on our passports. However, the very title of my Masters program is indicative of this problematic – “intercultural and international communication”. Intercultural and international communication are not the same thing, but we treat them as one.

For example, we just listened to a lecture on “intercultural communication” by the president of my university who for an hour compared “Canadian” and “Chinese” culture. The problem with this is that it makes the assumption that all Canadians or all Chinese share the same culture when in fact many cultures co-exist within both of those Nation-States. An individual’s concept of culture is shaped not only by their nationality, ethnicity, language or geographic location, but can also include their class, gender, sexual orientation, family history, moral values, urban-rural geography, type of profession, political system, religious beliefs, etc. When we overlook these intersectional differences than we miss a key point in intercultural communication which is that we cannot make assumptions about people based solely on where they are from. In other words, I can’t assume that all Chinese people are going to react the same way or share the same opinion of something because they, like us (my cohort), are not a coherent, internally consistent and uniform group.

Two things are happening when we talk about “Canadian” or “Chinese” culture; First, we are making generalizations that contribute to reinforcing harmful stereotypes; and second, we are creating a binary system of “us” vs “them” that polarizes people and makes it seem as though we are in opposition when in fact this is a false dichotomy. Identity is complex, multifaceted, contradictory and transformational; it is not fixed or stable. So any effort to try to pin down identity and culture into comprehensible categories is an oversimplification of their dynamic nature.

This is problematic for a group of Masters students whose goal is to understand and uncover “the truth” about culture. We spend all our time pouring over models, theories and labels trying to make notions fit into the categories we’ve been taught in the hopes of making sense of something that is inherently contradictory and inconsistent.

For example, this morning in our debrief about the sock factory visit we talked about “the Chinese”, “the factory workers”, and “our buddies” as if each of these groups share the same reality and experiences. The discussion revolved around the fact that a factory worker had graffitied a note to a table approximately saying: “If this is my life, I would rather be dead”. How much can we read into this note? The truth is we know nothing about the person who wrote it or what kind of state they were in when they wrote that message. Just because someone expresses discontent at work, doesn’t mean that they feel that way every day or that everyone else in the factory agrees with the statement but neither does it mean that everything is hunky-dory or that factory work is just peachy. There were a lot of comments in the discussion this morning that suggested that since we don’t know much about the situation that we should reserve our judgements. Maybe factory workers don’t view themselves as oppressed, maybe they are grateful for the work, maybe they are better off working in a factory…but all these maybes shouldn’t prevent us from critically reflecting on working conditions and the exploitation of people by the current global economic system. Just because somebody is worse off somewhere else in the world doesn’t make it acceptable or justifiable. Nor does it mean that we shouldn’t try to challenge or seek to change it for a more positive solution. To me, saying that something is “normal” somewhere or that “it’s just how their culture is” is not an excuse for inaction. We often use culture as an excuse to not get involved, but there are ways to intervene that are not imperialistic or arrogant. Critical thinking and constructive dialogue can be ways of questioning certain supposedly cultural practices without imposing one’s own way of thinking.

I say supposedly because cultural practices are not inherently natural and intrinsic to a society, but they are constructed generally through discourses controlled by the dominant group. The objective of thinking critically about subjects such as the conditions of factory life is not to say my culture is better than yours, but is a practice where one can examine relationships of power and challenge how certain cultural norms are selected, perpetuated and maintained in that context.

According to Uma Narayan (1997) when considering discourses on culture and identity, we need to “think critically about the elements of culture that should be preserved and those that need to be challenged...to distinguish between cultural changes that should be valued from those that should be resisted”. This includes a revision of national history and the patriarchal practices and institutions that collude to represent culture and tradition as “natural givens” rather than the “historical inventions and constructions that they are”.