Culture

Culture is a hot topic for everyone operating outside their own borders, from business professionals to diplomats to soldiers. Unfortunately, the attempt to understand others too often means a turn to something like "The Arab Mind," a book that not only simplifies a huge set of people into a single typology, but also does so with the most ridiculous of sets of evidence, logical tools, and conclusions. At the other end of the spectrum, culture means making sure that you never offend anyone, all the while excusing their every fault. This often takes the form of seminars conducted by well-meaning people with bigger hearts than brains talking about how wonderful a given people are and telling all about how to act dainty around them and to uphold cultural norms that even most of them have given to breaking in recent years. Personally, I think that such sensitivity seminars are bullshit conducted by bullshitters who have nothing better to do. The bottom line is that (a) if, regardless of specific cultural norms, you treat a people like decent human beings and keep your word, they'll respect you for that to a degree and (b) if your interests and actions run contrary to theirs, no amount of etiquette in the world is going to keep them from opposing you at the best or trying to kill you at the worst. This is not to say that an attempt to understand culture is bullshit, but that culture-as-etiquette-classes is bullshit.



Professionals operating internationally do not have the luxury to partake in fallacies of prejudice or sympathy. They must avoid over-simplification, but they must not make excuses. They must look for the underlying logic, realizing that some very few actions have no logic, most have a logic that can be understood if you dig deep enough, and some have a logic that is real, but will never be understood by an outsider.



Clifford Geertz, the late preeminent anthropologist, had some excellent insights on this in his collection of essays, The Interpretation of Cultures. I think that he would agree that professionals need to strive to see through the other's eyes, not to focus on aesthetics.

What... most prevents those of us who grew up [in other cultures] from grasping what people are up to is not ignorance as to how cognition works... as a lack of familiarity with the imaginative universe within which their acts are signs.

He goes on to warn:

The danger that cultural analysis... will lose touch with the hard surfaces of life -- with the political, economic, stratificatory realities within which men are everywhere contained -- and with the biological and physical necessities on which those surfaces rest, is an ever-present one. The only defense against it, and thus, turning cultural analysis into a kind of sociological aestheticism, is to train such analysis on such realities and such necessities in the first place.