Nowadays it’s not easy to meet someone who hasn’t traveled overseas. People go on business trips, get assigned to overseas posts, take vacations, participate in study abroad programs, etc. It’s not rare for me to run into people who have traveled or visited more than a couple dozen countries. The world is certainly getting smaller, and it seems that as it gets smaller, more people are getting the opportunities to become more adept and skilled at crossing cultures. But unfortunately, that’s not necessarily true.
Global travel has definitely exposed many people to other cultures, but you’d be surprised to find how little of that actually translates into cross-cultural awareness and competency. It may actually increase one’s cross cultural blind spots. Tourists often make this mistake. They take their holiday in an exotic resort isolated from the locals and do some group excursion into the local cities and taste the local cuisines and easily think that they’ve tasted and smelt the culture. They know for sure that they didn’t experience the whole culture, but they also often make up their mind on what the hosting culture is like based on these first impressions and their perceptions and take pride in having added another cross-cultural experience. They would go back home to tell others all about this country which they haven’t really learned or understood.
It’s quite understandable for tourists to have this kind of mind set, but it’s not limited to tourists. I see this same tendency among those who go overseas on longer assignments. With these folks, it usually takes on a more subtle form. Many expatriate workers are separated from the local people and culture and don’t really socialize with the locals apart from the ones they are required to for work purposes. This was clearly the case when I worked in Thailand in the 90′s for a foreign engineering company. Most of us in this company did not bother to get to know the local culture and language, did not personally associate or socialize or develop relationship with locals outside the work boundary with the exception of those related to night life. I was guilty as charged. The degree would vary from country to country, and person to person, but this kind of cultural separation is common among most expatriate workers.
Even in today’s globalizing world, cross-cultural naivety and ignorance are too common even among those who have traveled to many other parts of the world. We’ve certainly improved a lot over the past several decades. I am asking that we take it to the next level.
It would take much time, intentionality, and learning attitude to improve our cross-cultural skills, to gain an understanding and appreciation of a different culture. But it certainly makes your overseas assignment more enjoyable and fulfilling to actually engage the local culture. It is so easy to judge and come to a conclusion about a culture or a people based on a 7-night-8-day trip to a luxury resort and much more so with a six-month or a year-long foreign assignment. And most of the times, people are not even aware that they have made a judgment about that culture based on their own biased assumptions and point of view.
That’s because deep in our hearts, we are all ethnocentric to some extent. We are shaped and formed by our first culture far more than we are normally aware, and it affects the way we interact with and respond to cultural expressions and practices that are different from ours, from expressions in local language to table manners to the way you greet a person. The beginning of a great intercultural experience is recognizing this fact about ourselves and admitting our ethnocentrism and cultural arrogance. This will get us further in delving into and learning about another culture and its people, and thus about ourselves.
Any serious intercultural venture would take self-awareness and humility. Whether you are a volunteer with Peace Corp or a business manager of a multinational corporation or a tourist on a week-long trip, recognizing your own ethnocentrism and arrogance and working on identifying and overcoming your own cultural biases will help build bridges with the local people.
And this can bring lots of lasting good fruits. Your attitude toward another culture will determine how deep you can go into that culture. And it will decide how much you can connect with the people’s heart, and thus your fulfillment in your foreign stay, and ultimately it will help you connect with who you really are.
