Who on Earth are we? -Part 10

BBC Learning English
Talk about English
Who on Earth are we?
Part 10
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Callum: Hello and welcome to Talk about English and the tenth programme in our
series on culture, Who on Earth are we? Today, with the help of Rebecca Fong,
a teacher of inter-cultural communication at the University of the West of
England, Marc Beeby looks at what is probably the main difficulty we face
when we try to communicate with people from other cultures. What is this
difficulty? Here’s Marc.

Marc: Quite simply, our own culture gets in the way. We’ve already heard, in earlier
programmes, that communication problems can arise because of the different
ways cultures use language, gesture, non-verbal communication - and we’ve
learnt that the way a culture chooses to communicate is the product of its
environment, and of its values, beliefs and attitudes. As members of a culture,
we carry our culture’s attitudes with us - they’re part of who we are. And so,
when we talk to people from different cultures, or visit foreign countries, we’ll
probably be faced with different attitudes, and different ways of doing things.
And it’s at this point that we can meet some serious intercultural difficulties.
Rebecca Fong guides us through these difficulties now, with help and
comments from people from around the world. Rebecca begins with food…
Rebecca Fong
Let’s just take the business of eating as an example. What we eat - whether or not we eat dog
or raw fish or snake or pork or beef or rice or potatoes - all of these things arise from different
conditions for different agricultural or environmental or religious or social reasons and what
about when we eat and how much we eat and food rituals such as whether we eat noisily or
quietly or whether it’s OK to eat in public or not and the people that we eat with and the status
of different types of food in our cultures - all of these things aren’t just simple acts that we all


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do exactly the same everywhere - in fact they all have culture specific norms and rules and
values attached to them.
Mounia el Kouche
In many Western countries I’ve been in I’ve seen that people just rush out, grab a sandwich
for lunch. It’s almost a hassle to eat. However, in Morocco it’s completely the opposite. A
typical family’s lunch will be much larger than western countries are used to. It will be the
main meal of the day so it’ll be huge. It’ll be one big plate in the middle usually, with meat,
vegetables, a sauce. Everybody has bread to dip inside and take what they want to eat. So I
think usually there’ll be about six, on average seven people round one plate, and the meals
could take a whole morning to prepare. that’s why often the women stay home and they cook
and it’s a very big thing.
Rebecca Fong
Not surprisingly we find it much easier to get on with cultures who do things in a similar way
to us than with cultures who do things very differently. And so we’re actively looking for
things that we have in common with them all the time and that means that we tend to equate
sameness and similarity positively, whereas difference and especially extreme difference is
perceived negatively because we are unable to understand really why people would choose to
do or choose to organise things differently from the way that we have chosen to do them or
organise them.
Emma Kambangula
It was quite difficult to live with Angolans the same way we live with Namibians. First
there’s the language difference, secondly our cultures are quite far different from each other.
Take for example the first time when we met with a group of Angolans going to a funeral.
They were kind of dancing and you thought they were happy or something. We thought how
can you mourn somebody like this because in Namibia it’s a serious mourning and you can
see it. Then the same way the way they celebrate things is quite different from ours. So it was
like, no, we can’t fit in this life.





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Rebecca Fong
Very often in fact, we can learn to get used to food and architecture and music with
reasonable ease. It’s much more the things that are invisible to us that we have problems with.
By this we mean our underlying ideas. These ideas can be political or religious or economic
or social but often they are assumptions that are so deeply ingrained in us that we don’t even
know they are there. All of these things are invisibly shaping our attitudes to things and the
way we evaluate the world - even though we might think of our attitudes as totally free and
individual.
Annabel Port
I saw big gender differences in all the countries I lived in, perhaps the most so in Poland
actually. I was extremely shocked to see female friends of mine who are very well-educated
and seemingly very strong and independent rush home to cook some food for their boyfriend
or go round to their boyfriend’s house to clean his bath or stove and I was very shocked by
that. For them it’s extremely normal and that’s what they are supposed to do and it’s very
hard to understand being British.
Rebecca Fong
The real danger occurs because we are imprisoned inside the ideas and beliefs of our cultures
and we don’t even know it. We see our own cultures as the centre of the world - the way that
everybody does things normally. And if we do consider other cultures’ ways of doing things
we often tend to think that the way we do things is superior to the way another culture does
something.
Ilse Meyer
Germans thought, of course, that they were the best people in the world like other nations also
think the same of themselves. Europeans thought they were superior to all the other nations.
For instance when I learnt the names of the five continents of the world, Europe came first
although all the others came according to size and Europe was not the first. Europa - Asia -
Afrika - Amerika - Australia.


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Rebecca Fong
This is what inter-culturalists refer to as ethnocentrism - from the Greek words ethnos which
means nation or community and centrism - centre. So what we are saying is you are born in
the centre of your own community or nation and you take on that way of acting and thinking
invisibly - without even knowing it. We’re all born ethnocentric - it’s probably the greatest
barrier we’ll ever have to understanding other cultures.

Because of ethnocentrism we set up standards of what we believe to be possible and what we
believe to be right or wrong and when we see cultures doing things in other ways we’ll
immediately evaluate them and we’ll say ‘oh yes’ that’s a good thing - they are doing that
right, or oh no they’re doing that wrong - what we mean is right or wrong relative to our own
cultures - they’re doing it right if they’re doing it the way we do it.
Eilidh Hamilton
We all believe that our culture is the right way of doing it because we’ve always been told this
is right, this is how you behave, this is what you must say, this is what you must do. When
you move to another culture often you have to realise that what you have learnt is not
intrinsically right - it’s just one way. So for example in the Arab world people would drop in
on others a lot more - a much more informal visiting culture. There’s a definite value in being
willing to drop whatever you’re doing to entertain your guests and moreover and perhaps
more importantly, not let them be aware that you were interrupting them in any way. Whereas
I think in current Western culture people would be quite surprised if someone came to their
door.
Rebecca Fong
How do cultures set up norms and values for themselves in the first place? Well we all know
that the world is infinitely complex - there are millions of different ways of behaving and
organising life and viewing things and evaluating them. So we simplify by taking experience
and categorising it. We decide what behaviour is acceptable and what’s not acceptable – and
because we simplify like this we are at the same time, we are excluding the many many other
possibilities that exist, so that when we go to another culture we naturally ignore all these
other possibilities that no longer exist in our culture. We only see the obvious differences and
this can often lead to stereotyping. Stereotypes are the preconceived ideas that we have about


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a different culture - so we might say rather glibly well in Italy they spend all their time eating
spaghetti or the Chinese, yes the Chinese are very very hard-working. And by having a
stereotype in mind ironically what we also do is that we look to satisfy that stereotype in our
minds so that’s preventing us from seeing other things that also exist in that culture.
Rajni Badlani
My impression came out from, you know, books I had read, novels, fiction, etc. Which is like
the people in the west have a lot of, sort of, personal freedom, are very individualistic are very
materialistic. Westerners begin sexually very available in India when, you know, people are
propositioned on the streets. That’s our stereotype of the west.
Rebecca Fong
Some degree of stress will normally be present in all inter-cultural situations. Because if
you’re attempting to use their language, for one thing, you can’t conduct a conversation in the
way you’re normally capable of conducting it and you may feel embarrassed or stupid if you
make mistakes.
Guillermo De Yavorsky
We were travelling in China for a holiday. We were trying to ask something and it was
difficult to relate because they didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak Chinese. And then
the Chinese people started to laugh and I never knew if they were laughing at you or with you.
I found it very annoying.
Rebecca Fong
You can end up feeling quite depressed or exhausted and this can lead to culture shock.

Marc: Rebecca Fong, ending our survey of some of the barriers to successful
communication between people from different cultures - and introducing us to
the subject of next week’s programme - ‘culture shock’.
You also heard from Mounia el Kouche from Morocco, Emma Kambangula
from Namibia, Guillermo de Yavorky from Venezuela, Annabel Port from
Britain, Ilse Meyer who grew up in Germany, Rilidh Hamilton who spent
several years in the Middle East, and Dr Rajni Badlani of the British Council in


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India.
So, in order to communicate effectively with someone from another culture - in
order to be a good ‘inter-culturalist’ - how far do we have to go? Do we have to
give up our values and beliefs and adopt someone else’s? Who’s right? I’ll
leave Rebecca to answer that question. Join us next time.
Rebecca Fong
Inter-culturalism isn’t about simple either/or ways of doing things. It’s not about right or
wrong ways of doing things - it’s about understanding that there are a huge number of
different possible ways of doing things each of which are equally valid. And what we should
do as inter-culturalists is learn to judge the actions as appropriate to the particular context
from which they come rather than by our own culture’s standards - so you might find that
there are times in fact when you’re abroad or in another culture or dealing with somebody
from another culture that you find yourself doing something or saying something or behaving
in a way that you wouldn’t necessarily do back home but you are doing it in the interest of
being a good inter-culturalist - and isn’t it brilliant that there are all these different ways of
doing things in the world. We should consider this to be a marvellous, positive thing and not a
limitation in any way.