No offence

After an offence comes an apology: but what if we can't agree on what the offence was?

Last month’s focus was on apologies and on how perceptions of apologies can differ significantly among cultures. This month I go one step before a possible apology, to look at one instance where differing understandings caused offence.

I was recently chatting with Keiko, a Japanese acquaintance, now separated from her French husband. It transpired that problems in the relationship may have started when Chantal, her French mother-in-law, “did not respect” (the Japanese informant’s exact words) her Japanese parents during their visit to France.

“Can you elaborate a bit more?” I probed her.

“Well, my parents are much older than her, and not very active. She had planned out every day of their visit with sightseeing, visiting the countryside, eating out…at some point my parents were really tired and expressed the wish to stay indoors. But Chantal insisted that she had planned so much for them, and that it would be a pity to miss it.” This insistence offended them.

There is a lot to unpack here.

Keiko’s explanation began with the mention of seniority – clearly the factor was significant to her.

“Would you consider whether the concept of ‘respect’ is understood and experienced in quite different ways by the French and the Japanese?” I asked her. She admitted that she had never considered this possibility. I discerned an additional complication: the Japanese-French couple communicated in English, a second language for both of them. They fed their understandings of ‘respect’ through the mould of English - no wonder the whole thing came out mangled and unrecognizable. Had they been failed by the dictionary?

Here's how: I do not speak Japanese, but I assumed that my experience from Persian might point to a promising way of investigation. The entry for ‘respect’ in the English-Persian dictionary gives ehteram as a first equivalent, along with others that are translated as ‘honour’ (ezzat) and ‘good manners’ (adab). As far as I understand from my scholarly readings on politeness, Japanese and Persian politeness have a lot in common: one very important element being the ‘respect’ (closer to what might be termed ‘deference’ in English) given by default to persons older than the speaker. Even though the dictionary gives ‘respect’ as a lexical equivalent, the conceptualisations of ‘respect’ in the mind of English and Persian – and Japanese, I would argue - speakers are very different.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines respect as an “admiration shown or felt for someone you believe has good ideas or qualities.” The entry does not contain any reference to seniority, except in an example about parents (“You should show respect to your parents.”). Another example is especially telling: “New teachers have to earn/gain the respect of their students;” meaning that new teachers are not automatically accorded respect because of their teacher status.

In Iran, and as far as I know in Japan, age and status hierarchy commands ‘respect’ (let’s call it ‘deferent respect’) by default; although, let me note: this deferent respect is not the “admiration for someone’s good ideas or qualities”, but merely a regard given by virtue of their position or age, irrespective of their good ideas or qualities - often despite the conspicuous lack thereof. This deferent respect is conveyed through behavioural modes such as stance, physical deportment, tone of voice and body language. In Iran in particular, deferent respect (ehteram) towards parents and elders is also understood as obedience and conformity to their wishes, even in cases where they directly conflict with the wishes of the younger person. The next logical step is this: assertive behaviour in a younger speaker can be seen as arrogance and lack of respect, and can cause feelings of indignation. This seems to have been the case with Keiko’s parents, and Keiko herself.

On the other hand (again without claiming any intimate knowledge of the French), I assumed that Chantal was trying to show respect in her own way by arranging activities for her Japanese guests, and may have been disappointed when they expressed the wish to take things a bit easier.  

It was this chance encounter that sparked the idea of starting this newsletter: there seemed to be too much at stake, if, according to Keiko, the relationship problems started from this event onwards. And yet, she had never thought of the situation in the terms I described; I would assume that the French participants also saw the situation quite differently from their own perspective, never considering that the concepts of ‘respect’ that they both had in mind were very different, despite being marked by the same lexical item from a third language, foreign to both.

This has been a toe-dipping in the vast ocean of the topic of offence. If you have been reading my posts, you will probably remember the anecdote where I caused offence by using the ‘wrong’ term of address with a senior colleague in the March post. Or my remarks on positive and negative face needs in the very first post. When an Iranian asks you how old you are, and whether you are married or have any children, she is being warm and friendly, and wants to create a footing of connection. Being Greek, I can understand this very well, because my gregarious compatriots would behave similarly. But in mainstream British society such questions can be unacceptably intrusive.

All these aspects in the different ways we see the world, each other, and our relationships can be understood through the use of cultural conceptualisations, a framework put forward by the late Professor Farzad Sharifian, who sadly passed away a year ago next week. Cultural conceptualisations is such a useful analytical construct, that I hope to return to it in a future post, along with the concept of offence, which I have barely touched.

I’d love to hear your comments and experiences.

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Came across

• Technically I came across A Passage to India, my all-time favourite, decades ago, but I keep re-reading it every few years: a masterclass in differing conceptualisations and intercultural misunderstanding.

A pause in the wrong place, an intonation misunderstood, and a whole conversation went awry.

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