Who on Earth are we 9（在线收听）

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

do exactly the same everywhere -in fact they all have culture specific norms（规范） 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（激战） 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（同等对待，使相等） sameness and similarity positively, whereas difference and especially extreme difference is perceived（察觉，感觉，认知） 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.（葬礼） They were kind of dancing and you thought they were happy or something. We thought how can you mourn（哀悼） 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.

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（不可见的） to us that we have problems with. By this we mean our underlying（在下面的） ideas. These ideas can be political or religious or economic or social but often they are assumptions （假定，设想）that are so deeply ingrained（根深蒂固的） 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（比。。。优越） 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.

Rebecca Fong

This is what inter-culturalists refer to as ethnocentrism（民族优越感） -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（内在的，固有的） 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 （先入之见）that we have about a different culture - so we might say rather glibly（流利的，流畅的） well in Italy they spend all their time eating spaghetti（意大利式细面条） 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（老套） 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（唯物论的）. 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 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.  (本文由在线英语听力室整理编辑)