What refreshments would you offer a friend who just popped in for a chat?
In my native Greece, the default choice is a coffee and a bakery product. When I was growing up, coffee was always Greek, served in small coffee cups, mostly white, decorated with flowers or other colourful shapes, sold in sets of six. Its accompaniment could be petit-fours, dunking biscuits (voutimata), any kind of cake, or if nothing is available, any biscuits. My mother’s favourites were petit-beurre biscuits probably because I didn’t like them, so she could be sure they would always be there. Nowadays we may use mugs or espresso cups, depending on the coffee, and we may have a cheese pie or a savoury bagel, but the basic formula remains the same, coffee and a bakery product.
When I met Hossein I came across a different formula.
The first day I visited him and his Iranian friends in their flat in Athens, this is what came out of the kitchen: a tray of assorted glasses containing tea and a plate of fruit with a kitchen knife. I felt a little sorry for the poor, foreign students: they did not have proper tea cups, or even mugs, so they had to drink tea out of water glasses, and the only thing they had to offer a visitor was fruit! (In Greece, fruit is a dessert or an afternoon snack, but is never offered to guests unless it forms part of a meal. In Iran, no social occasion from a casual visit to a funeral is conceivable without fresh fruit: even if nothing else is available, fresh fruit always is.) This was the first instance that I, as a culture outsider, witnessed an Iranian practice and understood it differently from the insiders without realising I was doing it.
You may be wondering where I am going with this. The comparison in my examples may seem trivial, but it points to the important distinction between the emic and etic approach. At the risk of oversimplification but in view of my purpose here
· the emic approach studies behaviour in the context and function within a system of cultural meaning, that is as a member of the culture;
· the etic approach studies behaviour relative to a system as seen by an outside observer, that is as someone outside the cultural system
(Kenneth Pike, Language in relation to a unified theory of the structure of human behavior, The Hague: Mouton 1967:37).
To return to my example, as a 22-year-old I took an etic stance: I assumed my national/cultural hospitality practice to be the golden standard, measured the practices of my Iranian friends against this yardstick, found them different and made judgements. An emic stance would be looking at the Iranian practices within their own system, in which the young Iranians felt that this was the right way to look after a visitor. At the time, I only knew how to operate according to the first approach, and, importantly, I did not know that I was doing it. It took me a few years to know any better.
Fast forward a year and a half later, when I got my first paid job with Iran air at Heathrow Airport in late 1988. There were three kinds of employees in Iran Air at the time:
Group 1: management level personnel: dispatched from Iran on a four-year posting; from religious/traditional backgrounds; spoke at best broken English.
Group 2: English local employees, permanently employed from a time before the Islamic Revolution.
Group 3: Iranian local employees also employed before the Islamic Revolution; to put it politely, not in complete sympathy with the ideals of the Islamic Revolution.
I was a bit of a misfit (not for the first nor the last time) but my identity gave me a unique vantage point. Because of my appearance in hijab, the first group were sympathetic towards me even though I spoke about twenty words of Persian. On the other hand, because I spoke relatively better English than the religious Iranians, the English colleagues talked to me freely. As for the Iranians in the third group, we shared the English fluency, but they probably thought that I was some kind of an impostor or a double agent, and were unsure how to deal with me. In short, I was a relative outsider to everyone, but shared some commonalities with all groups.
Because of my peculiar situation, colleagues often felt able to share with me their rather unflattering opinions of each other (the expression of such sentiments sounds so out of place now, but it was the late 80s). These went along the lines of:
· Iranians are all empty talk and so superficial;
· The English only care about themselves and no-one else;
· Iranians never tell you what they really think - you can’t get a straight answer out of them;
· The English are rude and have no regard for other people’s feelings.
These views pointed towards something, but didn’t know what.
I got a hint of it one Saturday afternoon. My Iranian flatmate Giti knew how tiring I found the daily commute between Heathrow and Mile End, so made up for it with afternoon naps. Nonetheless, she called me to afternoon tea. Didn’t she know I was resting? I hinted that I would have appreciated not to have been disturbed.
“I thought you might be upset if I didn’t call you for tea,” she explained.
Here lies the link to my previous post about positive and negative face needs: the basic, and at times conflicting, needs of a rational human to belong and to have freedom of action. As I understood from my analysis years later, it seemed that in Giti’s mind my positive face needs (to be included in the afternoon tea event) took precedence over my negative face ones (to continue napping undisturbed). In theory positive and negative face needs are universal, but one or the other may be predominant in different cultures. This understanding is both simple and profound, and can make or break relationships.
The four highlighted judgments by my Iranian and English colleagues point towards other differences in communication styles, such as conventional indirectness and expressions of disagreement; to my mind, these issues may relate to the emic/etic ways we look at others, and subsequently the judgements we pronounce on them. I will return to these topics and many more in future posts.
This is where I see the aims of this newsletter:
· to look at aspects of culture expressed in language usage, even though this is really a case of chicken-and-egg;
· to adopt an emic gaze and try to see things from the perspective of the “other”, the “other” being a host nation, a colleague, a next-door neighbour or an intimate partner;
· to highlight aspects of behaviour and worldview, and thus…
· to help make a real difference in human relationships, not just intercultural ones.
In short, as I’ve said elsewhere, to highlight once more that what unites people is much larger than what separates them. At the end of a meal, a Greek will say to the host “health to your hands”, a Chinese will burp, but both are grateful for the nourishment and appreciative of the cook’s time and effort.
Crossed my path
Online event Managing relations across cultures: an evaluation perspective
An excellent online event by Professor Helen Spencer-Oatey, organised by SIETAR UK (2 February 2021). She examined a clip of a confrontational interaction between an English and a Polish man on an English train. Professor Spencer-Oatey illustrated the multiple elements involved in the judgements (positive or negative) that we make of others and their behaviour, and how these judgements may be ‘unfair’ if our respective foundations to them are different. She then considered how culture plays a role in this process (from the event description). The lively discussion that ensued focused on ethnocentricity and xenophobia; face threatening behaviour; gender roles; appeal to different moral orders; knowledge and enforcement of law, among others. It highlighted the multiplicity of vantage points of the participants: a Rorschach test for intercultural practitioners.
The talk coincided with the publication of her new book Intercultural Politeness: Managing Relations across Cultures, co-authored with Daniel Kadar (CUP), where this clip is analysed in more detail.
Resources for cultural communication
If you are interested in communication across cultures, do check out globalpeople.org.uk, based at the University of Warwick, where Professor Spencer-Oatey is Professor Emeritus. The organization brings together academics from linguistics, education, business management, psychology, organizational behaviour and work-based learning, all united by a common interest in how people interact, communicate and learn together across cultural boundaries (from their about page). The site contains great resources for practitioners.
Book The Geography of Thought
The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners think differently and why
Richard E Nisbett argues that even though all people use the same “equipment” for thinking, they think and see the world differently “because of differing ecologies, social structures, philosophies and educational systems that date back to ancient Greece and China” (from the back blurb). This is why East Asian thinking can be seen as a circle (holistic) whereas Western thinking can be likened to a line (analytical). The book concludes that in our global world both groups have adopted and assimilated elements of each other, and ends on this uplifting note:
“So I believe the twain shall meet by virtue of each moving in the direction of the other. […] It may not be too much to hope that this stew will contain the best of each culture.” (p 229)
Postcard (from) home
Dear Adam
Somewhere among my papers I’ve still got one of the first pieces of correspondence we exchanged after you agreed to be my supervisor during your time in Birkbeck College, London in the early 90s.
It begins, “Dear Sophia (please reciprocate!!!)” Even though you were not much older than me at the time, I could not find it in myself to address you by anything other than Dr Jaworski. I still operated under the Greek mindset where the difference in authority between teacher and student is encoded in the terms of address. This was the first, and possibly the most important, of the many insights I gained from our journey together: that it is possible to bypass my own filter of seeing the world in order to gain a greater understanding of how others do. Over the four years we worked together, we looked at pronouns, terms of address, politeness principles, sincerity, respect, face, apologies, compliments, invitations, and many more. I learned that my viewpoint was just that, a viewpoint, no better and no worse than any other, and that it was possible to look at the world through the eyes of others.
Even now, after more than two decades since we last met, this lesson remains the thread that binds my work together. I did manage to call you Adam, the one who gave names to ideas that didn’t have a name in my world. You will always remain my Teacher: “thank you” does not really cover it, but here lies the limit of my language.
Sofia
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A brilliant piece of writing.I am delighted to read that.
PS Great to see you here, Maria! Very much looking forward to catching up with you in due course as well!