How Cultures Vary

This is a summary of what I do in my American culture classes at the Center for English as a Second Language.

We hold these truths to be self-evident…

What’s good for me is good for you…

In our culture it is common, and even considered generous, to view all humans as more alike than different. We imagine that what we like, value, enjoy, and even believe is shared by all of humanity. Yet once you start interacting with people from other cultures, you realize that, in fact, we share very little. You realize that all of these questions, from what we think is beautiful to what is polite to what is enjoyable and even what is real fluctuate greatly from one culture to the next and are indeed culturally bound rather than part and parcel of our shared humanity.

When I travel to Spain, I give two kisses to just about everyone I meet, regardless of age, gender, and situation (work, social, etc.), and even regardless of if I have ever met them before. Yet Americans would wonder if I started homing in on them for the traditional “dos besos”, and in Latin America the two kisses become one or three, depending on the country. My Asian students avoid kissing socially at all costs, considering it a far too intimate act to be shared generally. Meanwhile, my Arab students understand the kissing, but they do it only with family and the same gender, as women kiss women socially while men kiss men. And as the Arab men living in the United States kiss each other, some Americans look on wondering about their sexual persuasion. Greetings are a minor display of a culture’s values, yet the codes of “what’s right” and “what’s wrong” vary drastically among cultures. At the more transcendental end the cultural divergence spectrum, imagine you walk out into the middle of a gorgeous glade with a fervent believer in God (or Allah) and an atheist. To the former, everything around her is proof of God’s actions, whereas that contention would be viewed as absurd by the latter, who would view nature’s bounty as nothing more than the evolution of the Earth since its inception. All of these differences show that most of what we do and believe is cultural more than universal.

I often tell my students that as humans we share little more than our biology: we are conceived and born the same way, and we grow and die the same way. Beyond that, virtually everything is cultural. We all seek happiness and fulfillment, but what makes an individual happy and fulfilled is cultural. Therefore, our opinions about the world around us, both the familiar and the unfamiliar, are inevitably colored by our culture. We interpret every person, every thing, and every act through the lens of our culture. And yet, most people are unaware of this; since culture in this sense is rarely taught or discussed, most people believe that their way of doing things is the natural way, and that any other way is, beyond good or bad, simply strange.

Like students in most English-language programs in the United States, my students come from all over the globe: Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Egypt, Libya, Burundi, Burkina Faso, Togo, Mozambique, Turkey, Spain, Honduras, Nicaragua, Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Japan, Taiwan, China, Korea, ... and more. Each of them comes to the U.S. wearing the lenses of their culture. None comes totally unaware of our culture thanks to cultural globalization, yet their notions are often erroneous based on the media, which unquestionably exaggerates certain glamorous (big houses, beautiful people) or horrifying (violence) traits of American life, while totally ignoring the more mundane ones. My students’ commentaries on the United States and its people and culture, and on our English program, even after they have been here several months, are fascinating. They include:

“Old people in the U.S. are lonely because their families don’t care about them.”

“Americans are cold and inexpressive.”

“American talk too loud.” (Notice the contradiction with the previous statement.)

“American children/students don’t respect their parents/teachers.”

 “American teachers are unfeeling because they are inflexible about assignment deadlines.”

“My teacher doesn’t really care about me because she doesn’t want to be my Facebook friend.”

 “When I go to my teacher’s office, sometimes she won’t meet with me even though she’s there.”

Yet equally fascinating – and erroneous – are the comments by my colleagues on our students:

“Our students try to manipulate and intimidate us by visiting us in groups.”

“Our Latin/African students are too boisterous – they dominate in the classroom.”

“Our Japanese students never speak up.”

“I’d really like my students to call me by my first name, but they insist on addressing me formally.”

 “Our students expect us to break the rules just for them.”

“Our students don’t understand that we are not there to be their friends, but that doesn’t mean we don’t care about them.”       

 “Our students expect us to be endlessly available.”

What is happening here? What is happening is that we all judge other cultures based on our own; we see other cultures through the lenses of our own, and therefore, we see them wrong.

Many Dutch and British researchers have performed both longitudinal and latitudinal studies of different cultures, particularly corporate cultures, and they have tried to break down the cultural differences into different dimensions. All told, around fifteen dimensions (and counting…) of cultural variation have been identified. Following are some of the dimensions that I have found to be the most useful when interpreting the cultural differences that we find in the students in our program, and that our students find in us. Each dimension is followed by a brief description of the features of a culture of this kind. These dimensions are not absolute; in other words, a culture is not either one or the other. Rather, they are continua, and the goal is to map both our own culture and the target culture along each continuum. Obviously, the closer the cultures are, the more the other’s culture will seem “natural” and will not even register on our radar; conversely, the further away they are, the more the other’s behavior will seem “wrong” and will thus draw our (usually irate) attention.

Individual vs. Collective

INDIVIDUAL }  Autonomy }  Standing out from the crowd, creativity }  Self-realization }  Satisfaction and identity come from one’s own independence

COLLECTIVE }  Togetherness }  Blending in with the crowd, conformity }  Group wellbeing }  Satisfaction and identity come from group belonging

A person from an individualistic culture like the U.S. tends to label collectivists as weak, dependent, or immature, while a person from a collectivistic culture tends to view individualists as cold and selfish. An individualist takes pride in being self-sufficient and solving his or her own problems, whereas this independence simply has no value for a collectivist. This is not to say that individualists do not care about others; bulldozing others to get to the top is not accepted; rather, they simply make their own choices and do their own thing, regardless of the collective. And in an individualist culture the collective, specifically the family, would never dream of imposing its will or needs on them.

Since most cultures are more collectivistic than American culture, our students’ misconception that “Old people in the U.S. are lonely because their families don’t care about them” is understandable. Yet what they don’t take into account is that many old people here cherish their independence; it is, in fact, what keeps them youthful and maintains their self-esteem. Likewise, as members of an individualistic society, we often think that “Our students try to manipulate and intimidate us by visiting us in groups,” but what we don’t realize is that individuals in a more collectivistic society rarely deal with problems on their own. Visiting us in groups is not meant to intimidate; it is more for the students than us. These are perfect examples of how all of us misinterpret and negatively label each other’s behaviors based on what they would mean in our own culture, not what they mean in the target culture.

Neutral vs. Affective

NEUTRAL }  Emotions are not displayed }  Expressing emotions = offensive, imposing }  Effusiveness and touching are awkward/uncomfortable

AFFECTIVE }  Displays of emotions are OK }  Expressing emotions = honesty }  Effusiveness and touching are welcomed ways of sharing

The neutral vs. affective dimension defines to what extent emotion and expressiveness are accepted in our cultures. Interestingly, the U.S. seems to be in the middle of the spectrum worldwide. Therefore, international students from more affective cultures – Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, for example – often find us cold and milquetoast, whereas that is how we label our students from cultures that are even more neutral than ours, such as most of the Far Eastern cultures – Japan, China, and Korea, just to name three. So as teachers we may say “Our Latin/African students are too boisterous – they dominate in the classroom,” or “Our Japanese students never speak up,” in each case bemoaning the fact that the other is not just like us on the neutral vs. affective scale! And our students do the same with us, with claims like “Americans are cold and inexpressive,” or conversely, “American talk too loud,” depending on the speaker’s home culture.

Students from neutral cultures find us overbearing, while students from affective cultures find us flat. With no awareness that this is a dimension along which cultures vary, we tend to judge others, but once we are aware of it, we can more readily accept that people tend to be embodiments of their culture. One of my Japanese students once told me that his teacher, my colleague, had told him that he should “smile more”. I apologized to him; this teacher would do well to understand that there is no need for the student to change his behavior to be more American; rather she should understand his values with regard to expressing emotions.

Egalitarian vs. Hierarchical

EGALITARIAN }  All humans are equal }  Outward displays of vertical distance are distasteful/ mistrusted      }  Questioning authority is a duty

HIERARCHICAL }  There is a pecking order }  Outward displays of vertical distance are expected }  Questioning authority is subversive

This is conceptually an easy dimension, yet one that manifests itself in multiple ways. It is not about whether a given culture has a hierarchy; all cultures do. The question is how comfortable we are with showing that hierarchy or conversely how comfortable we feel thumbing our noses at it. My favorite way of getting my students, who usually claim that everyone is equal in their culture, to discern whether their culture is more egalitarian or hierarchical, is to ask them what they call me. My gripe is: “I’d really like my students to call me by my first name, but they insist on addressing me formally.” I always tell my students to call me Mary, yet their automatic show of respect for a teacher is so ingrained that it simply feels wrong, and if they feel close to me they might call me Ms. Mary, but never just Mary. This clear-cut sense of vertical distance, also called power distance, is a clear sign of a more hierarchical culture.

My favorite illustration of the egalitarian ideal of the U.S. (ideal because in reality there are scores of exceptions) was supplied by an Afghan student of mine. He explained how on his visit to Afghanistan, Barack Obama went through a cafeteria line and sat with the troops to eat. The Afghanis were flabbergasted: He’s the President! But this sort of “regular-guy” behavior is almost expected of a leader in American culture, and any signs of superiority are met with rabid rejection. In a more hierarchical society, however, it is natural and fitting to show and respect rank. Therefore, my students often say to me something along the lines that “American children/students don’t respect their parents/teachers” because they see children arguing with parents and students calling teachers by their first name. This casual behavior, which epitomizes an egalitarian culture, would be interpreted as disrespectful of the parents’ or teachers’ authority in their culture. Likewise, the pomp and circumstance associated with more hierarchical cultures seem ridiculous to a more informal, egalitarian society. Differences in this dimension lead to many misinterpretations of other cultures as, paradoxically, either disrespectful because some people are regarded as visibly superior to others, or disrespectful because inferiors are not deferential enough to their superiors.

Universal vs. Particular

UNIVERSAL }  Rules }  No exceptions }  Blanket application to all people/situations }  Objectivity is fair

PARTICULAR }  Rules, but… }  Flexibility, exceptions are expected }  Every person/situation is unique }  Subjectivity is fair

            This dimension – which mainly describes how “fair” is defined – is fascinating in the context of an English language program, where both students and programs have so much at stake. Most of our students are eager to get admitted into the university, and the English program is just a required way station. Many of them will beg and cajole to get through the program, and teacher complaints tend to sound like, “Our students expect us to break the rules just for them.” From a culture closer to the universal end of the spectrum, we believe that systems can only remain coherent and functional through strict observance of the rules. That does not mean that there are no exceptions; it means that the exceptions are few and far between and clearly justified. We think this is fair.

Yet a person from a particularlist culture believes that taking into account each individual’s circumstances is fair. Students may come with a late homework assignment and beg off with personal reasons, which fall onto the somewhat unsympathetic ears of many American teachers. We, in turn, often refuse to be flexible as a way of “training” students to work within our system, which is what they will encounter at the university. Our students then complain that “American teachers are unfeeling because they are inflexible about assignment deadlines,” viewing this as draconian strictness and a greater concern with rules than with individuals. Who ever knew that the concept of fairness was cultural, yet it is! A univeralist will think that a particularist is trying curry favor or get around the rules, and in the worst case scenario is corrupt, while a particularist views universalists as cold and uncaring. As such fertile ground for misunderstanding, this particular dimension has serious implications for smooth interpersonal relations among people from different cultures.

Specific vs. Diffuse

SPECIFIC }  Relationships based on objectives (“my soccer friend”) }  Relationships easily entered and broken }  Compartmentalized lives

DIFFUSE }  Relationships permeate all realms of life }  Relationship are forever }  Hard to access, but once you’re in, you’re in

This particular dimension tends to have repercussions mainly in students’ social lives, yet the one place I have found it is in the confluence of the two: the social relationships I develop with my students. I often socialize with my students, but I consider this part of my job, and rarely do I admit a student into my truly private sphere. If I do, it is usually when they are no longer my student.

The incident related to this dimension comes when students send me friend requests on Facebook. My Facebook page is for me and my friends and family members. There, I am “me”, not the “work me” or the “professional me”, but the real, authentic, uncensored me, a distinction that someone from a diffuse culture would find baffling. I am reluctant to accept my students’ friend requests because that means letting them into the personal side of my life, which might include political or social beliefs that I do not necessarily want to share with them. Yet in many cultures, the idea of slicing our lives into difference pieces is quite foreign and even absurd. If you are my friend, you are my friend, and I put no boundaries on this friendship. In the past I seriously offended many students, who said, “My teacher doesn’t really care about me because she doesn’t want to be my Facebook friend.” And yet my response would be, “Our students don’t understand that we are not there to be their friends, but that doesn’t mean we don’t care about them.” Caring in some aspects but not in all parts of our lives is a foreign concept to someone from a diffuse culture, and one that often leads international students to be sorely disappointed in their friendships with Americans, which they often perceive as lifelong, although within months of leaving the country the American often loses touch.

Sequential vs. Synchronous

SEQUENTIAL }  Time is a tangible commodity }  One thing at a time }  The task counts; I’ll deal with you when I’m finished with my task }  Time is linear

SYNCHRONOUS }  Time is intangible }  Multitasking }  Relationships count; I’ll finish my task after I deal with you }  Time is overlapping, looping

            It is quite astonishing how much a sequential, or Western, conception of time can lead to serious cultural misunderstandings. Since ours is a sequential culture, time seems to loom heavily over us. The illustrious anthropologist Edward T. Hall wrote how the Native American groups whom he studied actually believed that the European-Americans had a “devil inside who seemed to drive them unmercifully. This devil was time” (Hall 1992; p. 218). In fact, the idea that time is a commodity that you can “save,” “spend”, or “waste” is downright laughable (and not a little pathetic) to people from synchronous cultures. We sequentialists are jealous of our time; it may seem even more important than the people in front of us. My classic example of this is when I lived in Spain. I was the director of a language institute, and whenever I was working on my computer and an American teacher came to my office door, I knew I could just tell them that I’d come find them when I finished what I was doing and they would leave, perfectly happy, knowing I would hear them out as soon as I could. However, if I did that to the Spanish support staff the reaction was insult: I was putting some abstract task on the computer above this living, breathing person requesting my attention here and now.

Our students, like Spaniards, tend to be more synchronous than we are; in fact almost every culture – perhaps with the exception of Germany and Japan – is more synchronous than we are, and this leads to misunderstandings. In our program, teachers have office hours when they must be available to students, yet they work many more hours, some of which, in the interest of productivity – grading, planning, committee work, etc. – simply is off-limits to students. Yet our students are often not familiar with strict hours when they are welcome (or not) and may come at any time. When the teacher rebuffs them, as they sometimes do, and tells them to come back during office hours, the students may think, “When I go to my teacher’s office, sometimes she won’t meet with me even though she’s there,” which is interpreted as a slap in the face and proof perhaps of the teacher’s lack of interest and even professionalism. One former student of mine from a hierarchical culture even interpreted this as the teacher pulling rank and showing her superiority over the student, yet another example of how our interpretations of a culture are often more a reflection of our own. Our teachers, in turn, complain that “Our students expect us to be endlessly available.” We do more than teach, although it is the core of our profession, and there are times when we simply must devote our attention to our other duties. Yet because of this different cultural perception of time, our students may view us as rude, uncaring, and inflexible, while we see them as pushy and disrespectful of our time.

            This has been a brief survey of just six dimensions of cultural variation, and I have necessarily simplified them for the sake of space. Yet there are many more, and each of them affects our relationships with our students. Other dimensions include direct vs. indirect (which has huge implications on both verbal and written communication); high context vs. low context (which also affects interpersonal communication and behavior); external vs. internal control (who or what determines the course of our lives and to what extent); and ascription vs. achievement (how we are accorded status, by our own merits or by birthright, which is closely related to “leaders” that often develop among student groups from the same culture).

            The value of the dimensions lies in the fact that they can provide us with a systematic scaffolding on which to hang our cultural experiences and incidents. Without this scaffolding, we simply accumulate random experiences and have difficulty making sense of them, since culture on this level – the underwater level in the iceberg metaphor, in which the tip or visible culture is readily visible – is rarely discussed or taught. However, with the scaffolding of the cultural dimensions, we can not only organize our cultural experiences and incidents, we can also make sense of them, and understand that our own culture’s place on that continuum is just one of many and that whenever someone acts differently, it is most likely a symptom of a different cultural mapping along one of these continua. It is in this sense that cross-cultural awareness becomes a tool of peace. Instead of judging others’ behavior as wrong, and likewise labeling them negatively – as rude, disrespectful, cold, unfeeling, obnoxious, corrupt, etc. – we understand that they are simply playing by different rules and operating from different coordinates. We learn that our way of being is not natural; it is cultural. We learn that our assessments of other cultures are not necessarily accurate and usually say more about our own culture than the culture of the person with whom we are dealing. We learn not to judge others based on our own culture, and instead we learn to observe, analyze, and understand, not to react viscerally.

As I always caution my students, this does not mean that anyone should adopt anyone else’s rules or culture; rather all it means is that we begin to grasp that there are different possible rules governing a culture, and so instead of reacting negatively or viscerally (with irritation, frustration, condemnation) at others’ behavior, we can react more as cultural investigators, with the thrill of trying to decipher what dimension might be at play and filing away that knowledge away for future reference. We learn that every culture has its logic, even though we may not share it. So we learn to understand and therefore respect (and not fear!) different cultures. Anger, misunderstanding, and even hatred morph into a fascinating game of cultural diversity, one that leads to understanding – mutual understanding in the best of cases – which is the antecedent to any peace in this world.

Stranger, Danger

Today I had to go to a nearby small town to get my car fixed. It’s the kind of Midwestern town that has been built around an interstate intersecting with a local highway, one that has gradually spread its tentacles of truck stops, fast-food joints, half-deserted malls, gas stations, and car dealerships ever wider, but that is basically still rural, hillbilly, local, Appalachian here in Southern Illinois. A town nestled so deeply inside the United States that you could drive for an entire day and never reach another country.

I had about a two-hour wait, so I took my students’ final exams to grade. Seeing the papers spread over the table in front of me, the couple in the seats along the wall behind me asked what I did. I told them I teach English to foreigners. The man’s immediate response was: “I wish you’d teach all of them. Cain’t even speak the language – what’re they doin’ here?” Okay. To avoid going there, I told him I teach students who come from abroad to earn university degrees here. His next response was: “Who pays for them to study? I hope not our government!” I assured him their governments usually paid and he was relieved. An aging, tattooed hippie across the room joined the conversation, adding how it was criminal that not everyone in America could speak English and how we let just anyone in when it’s our country, clearly referring to migrant workers.

The first man asked me where my students were from, and I told him Latin America, Asia, and mainly the Middle East: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Afghanistan (which doesn’t really count as the Middle East, although I suspect they wouldn’t have made that distinction). Mr. Tattoo squinted his eyes and peered thoughtfully into the distance. “You know, how do you really know what they’re thinkin’ and what they’re up to? They act nice but who knows what they’re plottin’ behind our backs?”

I guess I understand that: the unknown is frightening, and if the only images and words the average uninquisitive American ever receives from the mainstream media are evil terrorists insidiously infiltrating the West and creepy, bearded medieval-looking characters who seem to live in caves, that would be a reasonable conclusion. It would be the same as my students in Spain who were convinced that all Americans carry guns and are just a step away from gunning down the entire school, mall, etc., that we live in mortal fear of being shot down every time we leave our homes. After all, what other news do they get of this country but the dramatic bloodbaths wrought by raving fanatics? And what other images do we get of Saudi Arabia (bearded men in gowns), Iraq (the evil Saddam) and Afghanistan (those half-animal cave dwellers)? We always get the striking, electrifying images, the scary ones, the shocking events which seem to be the only fodder for what we call the news and that only fan the flames of misunderstanding and hatred. We never get pictures or stories of everyday, decent people just trying to get through life with some modicum of comfort and happiness, regardless of their country. In other words, we never see what we share with them; we only see what sets them apart from us, what makes them alien, unknown, and thus frightening and threatening.

“Well,” I told him, “my students are great because once you talk to them you realize they’re just like us. Almost every single Muslim student has told me how saddened they were by 9/11, and the Saudis told me how their country was also targeted by Osama Bin-Laden and his folks,” something we never hear in the U.S., the great and only victim.

I went on: “You know, the Muslim women with their faces all covered up are kind of scary and intimidating to us, but as a woman once I get to know them and they take off their headscarves and coverings, they’re as modern as I am, and smart and funny. They just keep it private. And all my students walk around in jeans and carry cell phones. They dance and laugh and will talk your head off. And they work really hard. All they want is a better life, which is all any of us wants, really.”

The other couple had left, but Mr. Tattoo was engaged now. He was softening. “You know, you got something. In my company [the oil pipeline business, it turns out], the only ones who work hard are the Mexicans. The Americans are just lazy and good-for-nothing, so it’s not surprising we’re losing jobs to foreigners.” He went on to tell me about the youthful slothfulness of his own son, which he fortunately remedied through hard lessons. “They’re good guys,” he concluded about his immigrant workers, “I just wish they spoke English.”

“Well, maybe the company can offer them some English classes,” I suggested, not so much as a distinct possibility but as a way of saying that meeting them halfway might work. “Yeah, I’ve even thought about taking a Spanish class,” he said, imagining himself taking a step to bridge that gap. Wow! Where had that bigot gone? Our conversation had gone from trite, pseudo-patriotic “hate them foreigners” to real discussion and consideration of solutions, and of these people as humans worth interacting with instead of scary monsters threatening our life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

People are funny. It’s as if my American-ness led him and the other couple to believe that I would naturally be equally outraged at what they perceive as the takeover of America by non-Americans and equally suspicious of foreigners, the expected attitude, at least around here. What they couldn’t have imagined is that I actually feel so much more joined with my students than with them: we share a larger worldview, a sense of the greater world as tangible and important as opposed to distant and abstract; a realization that differences come more from open or closed mindsets than from geographical origins (which are, after all, accidental); a sense that someone different from me is fascinating, not threatening. Yet once these possibilities were brought into the conversation, Mr. Tattoo became reflective and willing to listen; he even defended those “dang furners” who are purportedly taking over our country.

It makes me think that a more educated discourse in the media and among individuals would surely bring this world closer together and build bridges, sow the seeds of understanding and harmony instead of suspicion and hatred, even among people who are arguably as adamantly pro-American and ignorant of the outside world as is possible here in America’s heartland, days from any other country. It makes me think that this would make the world so much smaller and knowable, it would shine light on what unites us instead of what divides us, and it would be so much more productive than the current discourse of hatred, mudslinging and stereotypes, which people who don’t know any better just swallow, their all-American mother’s milk that nursed them into patriotic being.

In Praise of Play

My daughter Cecilia and I moved from Spain to the United States two years ago, originally just for a year, but now it looks like that year is being extended indefinitely. Until I can gather the funds for a “real” home, we’re living in a little rental duplex: not exactly where I want to be at this age, but I do know it’s temporary. Back in Spain, I was used to being surrounded by Ceci’s friends; she would always invite them over to play (no, not “play dates”, perish the expression!!!), have lunch, or spend the night. I love those friends and the easy banter we had – after all, we’d known each other their whole lives. They were my surrogate children, and I still love them dearly.

They would take over one entire floor of our house with their elaborate set-ups and scenarios: a combination of all the different toys Cecilia has ever had in her life , most of them animals and homes for the animals, but also shoe boxes converted into stables, farms, zoos, and homes, toilet paper rolls with green construction paper on top for miniature trees, fences made of popsicle sticks, and other childish yet clever accoutrements she and her friends spent hours carefully crafting. When they tired of that game, out would come the costumes, a mixture of hand-me-down tutus, old Carnaval and Halloween costumes (running the gamut from her giraffe costume from when she was three years old to her more recent “Gothic witch girl” costume), scarves, boas and anything else that could be tied, draped or tucked into a fantastical getup. Or perhaps they would haul out the paint, brushes, paper, pencils and other art gear and proudly produce their handiwork an hour later. They would spend hours and hours playing upstairs, and even last summer, when we were in Barcelona for a visit, although they were now 11 years old, they still played, fought, made up (fer les paus), invented, created, and giggled for hours on end.

A few months ago I asked Cecilia why she never invited her friends over to our home in the U.S. I imagined it was because she had just met them at her new school and wasn’t familiar enough with them yet, or maybe because she was a little embarrassed by our tiny quarters. Her answer flabbergasted me: “I don’t want them to see my horses.” Now, Cecilia is a collector, no, make that hoarder, of any plastic horse or conceivable horse-related accessory on Earth. She has dozens and dozens of them, plus at least ten stables –  from the lovely wooden one her father gave her last year to an old box that she carefully cut out and glued with dividers to make stalls, shelves, and tack hangers. Of course they’re all fitted out with her store-bought and handmade bales of hay, apples, carrots, tack, saddle pads, hoof ointment, bridles, halters, and anything else a barn has. I realized that Cecilia had just revealed the change I’d noticed in her since she’d started in her new school, a change I had attributed more to her age than the school, although it no doubt has to do with both. At her school, girls her age are into makeup, mall clothes (the same five brands, all overpriced and identical except for the name screaming across the chest  or rear), boys, sports, cell phones, iPods, roller skating, and other ‘tweeny stuff. Cecilia has suddenly tried on this personality for size, too, and I have to say that I missed her sweeter self, the more “Cecilia” Cecilia, the kid. Nostalgia for a lost little child, one that was all mine. And now although she is unwilling to give up her toys and crafts – she can still spend hours at it and often does, she has to do it alone instead of with her school friends to avoid ostracism if she revealed her littler self. I thought it was a reasonable, though sad, compromise: don’t give it up, but don’t make herself vulnerable to mockery by sharing it.

The exception is her friend Kathryn, the daughter of a dear friend of mine, a girl she’s known all her life, whom she has sisterly spats with and walks away in a huff… but only so many days can go by before Cecilia tells me she misses Kathryn – she needs a Kat fix. They go to different schools, so both seem to feel comfortable revealing that inner layer of child they each still hold so dear. Sometimes Kathryn’s mother and I listen to them play, and we look at each other and wistfully sigh, keenly aware that these days are numbered yet tickled that our children still hold onto the joyful abandon of childhood and have someone to share it with.

Last year, our first year back in the U.S., Cecilia went to a private, alternative school where not only can kids be kids until eighth grade (and they emphatically are!), but the five-year-olds easily play with the twelve-year-olds. A magical place. On the last day of class, two mothers and their daughters from Cecilia’s class invited us to join them in their yearly “school’s out” ritual of lunch and then the bookstore to pick up summer reading material. At the bookstore, as we mothers chatted on foot-high stools in the kids’ book section, we heard the girls’ laughter and chattering, and I turned around. There they were, three 11-to-12-year-olds, playing with the toy train set there to entertain little kids. I realized what a blessing that school had been, that with her school friends they could still play, still be little and innocent, still laugh with childish glee, not oh-so-knowing cattiness, and let their minds wander and imaginations soar.

If only I could have afforded to keep Cecilia in that school, but it was a home of our own or school, and home won out. How I miss the child that she could be there! Yet this past spring break, back in Spain again, no sooner did we enter our home than Cecilia disappeared upstairs. I was busy unpacking, but after about an hour I snuck up there to see what she was up to. There was my mature, clever, knowing 12-year-old surrounded by a sea of old costumes, a vast farm scenario already set up – big as our living room in the U.S. – her doll house tidied and redecorated. She had literally marked her territory, or reclaimed it, in truth. Cecilia was wallowing in, relishing, frolicking in her childhood again, and soon her best friends Maria, Anabel and Ramon joined her. And I realized just why it is so hard for us to imagine giving up that home in Spain: that is her childhood home, a magical place where she can create her own world, dress crazy, fight over who gets what horse, make up dances, draw and paint on her easel, make tiny little make-believe voices, take boxes, pieces of paper and other odds and ends and turn them into whatever her heart desires and imagination conjures up. There Cecilia can return to her original, truest self, and I can reclaim my baby, my little girl, my crazy, madcap, silly, beautiful little Tweety whom I miss so much.

The Perils of Academia

April 20, 2011

As I prepare to enter academia as a student for the first time in over two decades, I am full of trepidation. I grew up in academia; I know its pitfalls. I know the departmental political in-fighting; I know the petulant rants and tirades of academics, which would get them fired in the business world; I know the petty territorial skirmishes, as savage as in the wild yet unacknowledged by the supposed aesthetes engaging in the battles. At least in the business world this competition is open and acknowledged; in academia it is denied under the veneer of culture and thus infinitely more vicious. I know that departments are, after all, microcosms of high schools with their dramas, cliques, and side-taking. Faculty are often polarized on both theory – understandable, at least – and personality – rather unforgiveable, to my mind. Lord, I am hoping I left high school far behind…

Some of the pitfalls of academia were so aptly expressed in Muriel Barbery’s book The Elegance of the Hedgehog. In this novel set in France, one of the narrators muses thus on the oh-so-intellectual thesis written by a resident of her haute bourgeois apartment building: “but intelligence, in itself, is neither valuable nor interesting. Very intelligent people have devoted their lives to the question of the sex of angels, for example.” I agree. Call me a pragmatist, but I disdain purely intellectual play with no thought of contributing to humanity’s betterment. I know. I’ve been there.

I wrote my MA thesis in Linguistics on “The Relative Nouniness and Verbiness of Gerunds and Infinitives”. Yikes – it pains me to write it. Do you even know what gerunds and infinitives are? Most people don’t and are none the worse for their ignorance. Now, I did enjoy the intellectual game, but let’s face it: who cares? Through what stretch of the imagination could the relative nouniness or verbiness of anything count? In what way might it conceivably matter? How on earth could anyone be bettered, uplifted, enlightened by this thesis? Yet I passed with flying colors, my thesis advisors and committee praising my innovative approach to analyzing gerunds and infinitives. Wow. An innovative approach to analyzing gerunds and infinitives. Now that’s what the world needs. My thesis was like taking a microscope to a very tiny corner of human knowledge and further dissecting that minuscule corner. The light shed on that little nook will never filter up to normal human beings, you and me. So I consider it a futile effort, and even then I knew it was. It is no wonder I escaped from academia as soon as I graduated, despite my professors’ entreaties to begin a PhD. I needed to reconnect with the real world, with real problems, and with real people.

In another passage, Barbery brilliantly picks apart the basic strategy of academics as they desperately try to ‘publish or perish’, often scratching out meager little corners in their field that could hardly be of wider interest just so they can publish something, anything (and the plethora of academic journals only adds to this syndrome), pad their résumés and thus earn tenure. Apparently this is universal, or at least rife in Europe as well, as Barbery states in the field of philosophy:

…if you want to make a career, take a marginal, exotic text that is relatively unexplored, abuse its literal meaning by ascribing to it an intention that the author himself had not been aware of…, distort that meaning to the point where it resembles an original thesis, [and] devote a year of your life to this unworthy little game…

I’ve been there, too. I remember my friends who were earning their Master’s in English dissecting a text to a molecular degree that the author was unlikely to have imagined in his or her wildest dreams. I, too, kept publishing after I started working, squeezing one micro-insight after another from well-worn, hackneyed material just to publish it and be able to list it on my résumé.

I was climbing the professional ladder then. At some point, I hopped off. I just lost interest. That’s someone else’s game, and I have no interest in playing it. Publishing when I actually have something to say is a worthy goal; publishing just to stay ahead of the game (or barely tread water, as the case may be) is a bore, a futile, self-serving end in itself. As Barbery, my new intellectual heroine, says, “What is the purpose of intelligence if it is not to serve others?”

I hope that as I start my new degree, a PhD in Anthropology, I can find a way to avoid trifling office politics and make a contribution that will enrich all of us. To serve others, as Barbery says. I hope I can avoid the perils, pitfalls, and politics of academia and instead find its rich vein, then mine it for my and the world’s edification. What a hopeless idealist, after all this time. Still, if you ever feel a pressing urge to explore nouniness and verbiness, you know who to ask. Good to know!

Rugged Individualism

April 13, 2011

Every country has its national myths, stories about itself that shape and define its identity. Catalans have the myth of seny, meaning wisdom or sensibleness, and rauxa, or impulsiveness. Most foreigners I know living in Catalonia would be hard-pressed to identify specifically wise or impulsive traits among the natives, but scratch the surface, really ask a Catalan about his or her national traits, and seny and rauxa are always mentioned.

We Americans have our own myth of rugged individualism. You know, the brave pioneer family – or individual – striking out on their own, into the wilderness, conquering the land (um, not to mention the people that were there before them… but that’s another issue). The individualist who thinks for himself doesn’t want government (Big Brother, that is) messing with his life. Our heroic icons: successful people who pulled themselves up by the bootstraps, the self-made (wo)man, the Marlboro man. Do your own thing. March to the beat of your own drummer. Our language is rife with words and images that express our exaltation of individualism, and we can thank Herbert Hoover for coining the term ‘rugged individualism’, as he put it, “those God-fearing men and women of honesty whose stamina and character and fearless assertion of rights led them to make their own way in life”. Yikes! Sounds like a scary, overly self-righteous super-race to me! Sounds tiring, too.

We contrast this to more collectivist cultures, ones that value the group and make decisions based on the community. We disparagingly refer to herd mentality, to following the pack, drawing on animal metaphors to show the inferiority of this kind of society. We view this as weakness, as a lack of moral, intellectual, and/or physical strength. We pity their weakness, spinelessness, lack of self-reliance compared to our super-evolved culture of advanced individualists, monoliths uniquely capable of weathering the storms of life on their own. I am a rock; I am an island. We write self-help literature to counter this social disease: “codependence” is a bad word, and anyone who is simply dependent deserves our pity, not to mention disdain.

Yet this myth is not only belied by the history of mankind; it is also belied by the history of America. Banding together has always been a survival strategy for humans; how else could we have outwitted all the other animals we competed, and essentially still compete, against? We are, after all, the naked ape – a pretty harmless, almost laughable, specimen compared to our mammal brethren. Think about the covered wagons of those pioneers. Rarely did a pioneer family strike out on their own, and if they did, they rarely survived. Instead, groups of pioneers travelled together, and when evening fell they drew their wagons into a circle to protect themselves against any external threats.  When they reached their destination, neighbors pitched in to help each other build houses. The pioneers relied on each other.

We all survive because we rely on each other. We form societies to lean on each other. Humans don’t live in isolation, except the occasional crazy – or spiritual – hermit, or perhaps the uniquely American phenomenon: the survivalist, individualism taken to the nth degree. Also the exception that proves the rule. While thinking for oneself is undoubtedly a virtue, why do Americans glorify individualism to such an extent? We are so afraid of being engulfed by the group that we make life harder for ourselves. Why do we see relying on each other as a sign of weakness instead of strength, not to mention simply a sign of our humanity, or our humanness? Why isn’t reliance viewed as a human need… as well as a wonderful opportunity to generously give the people we rely on the chance to grow by helping us? I suppose there are occasional freestanding people of genius who manage to achieve greatness without anyone’s help, but I dare you to name one.

I don’t advocate blind adherence to the group, mindlessly conforming to what some randomly-chosen ‘leader’ says we should do, listening to ignorant hype and believing it to be the truth. I believe in thinking for ourselves and informing ourselves about the world. But I also believe that there is strength in numbers, and that self-reliance is hugely overrated. Why is alienation such a uniquely American ailment? When asked to share their first impressions of Americans, my students from more collectivistic cultures say ‘lonely’. I defend Americans – we like to be alone, we choose to be alone, I tell them. And that’s not a total lie, yet there is some truth in the loneliness of Americans.

My students are also horrified by the idea of feeling pressured to move out of your parents’ house at age 18. Let’s face it, now that we’re older we know that an 18-year-old is a child. Few have the wherewithal to make wise choices. On top of it, if they are going to college they’re probably already in debt from student loans, so why dig them deeper in the hole? For what? The much-vaunted independence? Living in squalor to prove their strength? That’s cruel. I did it – we all did. We had to or risk shame at our immaturity. I got in debt for doing it. And I got myself into hairy situations – which fortunately worked out well – that I wasn’t mature enough to handle. The situation in Spain where adults live with their parents well into their thirties isn’t the idea either, but 18 is awfully young to throw our offspring into the cruel world. Independence? They’ll get there… we all do.

When the miners in Chile were trapped, the news reported the following: “Though some miners have requested them, personal music players with headphones and handheld videogames have been ruled out, because those tend to isolate people from one another.  With earphones, if they're listening to music and someone calls them, asking for help or to warn them about something, they're not available. What they need is to be together." (http://www.gmanews.tv/story/202026/chiles-trapped-miners-get-brad-pitt-not-nintendo) Togetherness equals survival. Standing alone is for the strong; togetherness is for the weak. But don’t we band together as a society precisely for the strong to help the weak, and for the whole to be stronger than its parts? Aren’t we all weak at some point in our lives? Or is that just a liberal view of what a society and community should be?

To my mind, collectivism is the very definition of society. We band together, work together, survive together, flourish together. We take care of each other, help each other, give to and take from each other. We are each other’s biggest responsibility. This is a sign of our higher consciousness and humanity. Viciousness, competition, and survival of the fittest are the law of the jungle. As humans, haven’t we risen above that?

The Red-Eye

April 3, 2011

Saint Louis, MO – Chicago, IL

6 a.m., March 11, 2011

We are bleary-eyed like everyone. Six a.m. Who can deal? But we line up, check our bags en route (a very circuitous route) to Spain. We board, settle in, look around. The plane is filled with mainly businessmen (some businesswomen). I note the men. Big, hearty Midwestern guys. At least six feet tall, bulges around the midriff. Dress shirts half-tucked in, half-untucked. Ties askew. Jackets rolled into balls and used as pillows for the duration of the flight or jammed into the overheads. Oblivious to their surroundings except to sleepily greet whoever is near them with a good-natured comment. Hair haphazardly cut and combed. Totally unaware that they might be making an impression, that anyone is looking at them. Tired, slightly sweaty already. Decent fellows (almost said “chaps”, as my British friends might).

Barcelona – Madrid, Spain

6 a.m., March 21, 2011

We are bleary-eyed like everyone. Six a.m. Who can deal? But we line up, check our bags en route (a very circuitous route) back to Illinois. We board, settle in, look around. The plane is filled with mainly businessmen (some businesswomen). I note the men. Trim, neat, stylish. Five-eight to six feet max. Well-ironed shirts (ironed by their wives or cleaning ladies, if the wives are lucky; if not, they’ll stay up ‘til one in the morning to make sure their husbands – and children – are well-pressed). Ties neat. Jackets carefully removed, folded lining-out, neatly stowed. Aware of the impression they’re making; perhaps a curt nod and “Buenos días/Bon dia” to the person next to them. Hair well-cut, neatly combed, sometimes slicked back, old-style, with “gomina”. Subtly looking around the cabin, noting who is there, who is worth noting, what impression they’re making. Tired, perhaps, but polished. Attractive, knowing men.

The American guy. He’s a good guy, a simple guy, a man’s man. Feminine side atrophied, if it ever existed. The Spanish guy. He’s clever, perhaps too clever by half, philosophical and therefore not at all simple, a woman’s man. Feminine side well developed, enough to wield when useful.

The other night I was out with two friends, Spanish and Ecuadoran women, married to Americans. They know all about Latin men, love them, but prefer to marry the decent American lug. Me? I know that decent American lug. I miss the witty, knowingly charming, polished Latin man, the one who knows what to say when. My friends say, “Yes, they sweet-talk you but behind your back who knows what they’re up to, while my American guy may lack in the graces but he’s solid and faithful.” So right. Damn… where’s my hybrid?!?

The Joys of Netflix

March 8, 2011

Ah the joys of Netflix! After months of being prodded by friends, I recently gave in and signed up after the local Blockbuster shut down. As it should. Natural selection. After all, why actually leave the comfort of your home to venture out into the scary world, drive a car and possibly be killed, enter a Blockbuster store and run the risk of catching a pernicious infection carried by some ill person who forgot to slather their hands in anti-bacterial gel before touching the door handle, perform the desultory task of trolling the aisles for videos, perhaps next to some perv in the you-know-what aisle, engage in chit-chat with the unsavory clerk, and then have to risk your life all over again just to get home? I mean, why do all that when you can sit in your jammies at the computer, click and watch?

Yes, the joys of never having to leave home, never having to see the outside world, never having to put ourselves at risk of crazy drivers and lethal bacteria, never having to engage with anyone outside our own cozy circle! And imagine the perfect Saturday night: why bother getting dressed up, maybe even putting on make-up and heels, going through the effort of actually going out, perhaps somewhere different…? Why actually interact with other people and run the risk of meeting someone new, hearing a new story, getting a new viewpoint, being challenged in yours, actually connecting with another human being…? I mean, really. Why bother when your very own couch beckons you into its comfortable, womblike embrace and you can vicariously live someone else’s life on the TV screen and never, ever have to deal with the messy, scary world outside?

Ah, this American life… this is the life!

On Llufes and Pets

March 4, 2011

If you find farts distasteful, stop reading now.

Um, let me rephrase that. If you find farts disgusting, crude, rude, nasty, stanky things… No, that’s not it either.

The third time is the charm: If it doesn’t bother you to read about farts and other earthy matters, keep reading. You see, the Catalans are fart masters. I’m not saying they issue more gas than anyone else, but I am saying that their vocabulary for talking about farts is more refined and descriptive than ours, similar to the way the Inuit have countless words to talk about snow. They perfectly capture the glorious taxonomy of farting with two words that encapsulate the two very different kinds of burps in the pants. Sorry? What is a burp in the pants, you ask? Well it’s what our parents told my sister, brother, and I that farts were called in our childhood because ‘fart’ was a bad word, until, that is, Mark, the older boy who lived across the street, burst out laughing when he heard us say ‘burp in the pants’ and quickly straightened us out.  Humiliated by our naiveté yet secretly thrilled with the forbidden word, we quickly adopted ‘fart’.

Now, it’s not like English doesn’t have its own synonyms or euphemisms for farts, and especially for the act of farting: breaking wind, cutting the cheese, and tooting on the more colloquial side, along with the Southern-girl classic, “Who pooted?”, and flatulence on the more medical side. But the Catalans make an essential difference: the llufa versus the pet. Yes, pet. More on that below.

A llufa is what we call in English an SBD, silent-but-deadly. In English we need to cobble together three words to describe it, just the way we have to say ‘falling snow’ where the Inuits say qanik, and ‘snow on the ground’ where they say anijo. Circumlocutions don’t count – words, solitary, freestanding words, tell all about what matters to a society. A llufa is the stealthy, foul kind of fart, the kind that creeps up on you, engulfs you, and makes you cry out “WHO FARTED?!?!” The other kind of fart, the kind you hear, is called a pet in Catalan. Of course this leads to no end of mirth when Americans and Catalans find this out about each other’s lexis (“How many pets do you have?” “Oh, honey, an endless supply…”). A pet is a more innocent fart, the kind that you – I mean, someone else – “lets rip” but that causes no serious olfactory harm.

If a society has several words for the same phenomenon, it’s because that phenomenon weighs heavily in their collective consciousness.  Catalans actually have somewhat of a scatological obsession, and I think farts would fit into that category. If you doubt me; if you think I am overgeneralizing or propagating negative stereotypes, I challenge you to go visit Catalonia at Christmastime. There, the Christmas markets are filled with caganers, usually male (although sometimes female) figurines that Catalans place in their beloved – and quite impressive and elaborate – nativity scenes at home, figurines with their pants down, squatting, with a thick, curly pile of turds under their butt. Uh huh, I kid you not. Look it up. You can almost see the steam…

The other scatological Christmas item is the cagatió, a wooden log with sticks attached as legs and a face drawn on one end. A traditional red barretina – a hat remarkably similar to Santa Claus’s, now that I think of it – is placed on the cagatió’s head and then, because we appreciate his need for privacy, his rear is covered with a blanket. The children then feed the cagatió (which, incidentally, means ‘Shit Log’), and of course, after eating, the guy’s gotta do his duty. So the kids beat the cagatió with a stick as they wait for him to put forth (the effluvium is presents for the kids, no less), singing:

 

Cagatió, avellanes i torrons,                                                             

Si no cagues bé

et daré un cop de bastó.                    

(or some variation thereof).

(Shit Log, hazelnuts and nougat,

If you don’t shit well,

I’ll hit you with my stick.)

I kid you not. Beat a log, he cacas and you get presents. But it gets better. How do you say two people are so close they're like peas in a pod? Well, in Catalan they say they're like "el cul i la merda", literally, "the butt and the shit". I mean, really: should we lock these people up?

So the Catalans’ interest in farts should come as no surprise.  It took me a good 15 years to be enlightened on the fine distinction between llufes and pets, and I have Gemma to thank. One night when my daughter Cecilia invited her friend Gemma to spend the night – it must have been when they were eight or nine years old – we all crawled into Cecilia’s bed before going to sleep, all three of us, talking and giggling about God knows what, when suddenly Gemma uttered the magical words: “WHO FARTED?” In Catalan: “QUI HA TIRAT UNA LLUFA?” I stopped in my tracks. “A llufa?” I asked her. “What’s a llufa?” When she told me I asked her about the only word I had heard until then: “Isn’t that called a pet?” She then shared with me the insightful and oh-so-accurate distinction between llufa and pet. That kept us up giggling – and holding our noses – another half hour at least… and I’m not going to blow the cover of the guilty party, either!

Of course we Americans, some of us at least, truly do enjoy a good laugh over farts. Please tell me I’m not the only one who with girlfriends at sixth-grade sleepovers would empty a can of Pringles and proceed to… well, I’d better not continue in case my friends and I were weird beyond the pale. If you don’t know how that story ends, please, just drop it…

Ahem.

There are certain words in every language that are so perfect that I believe every other language should have them, words that utterly capture something: a feeling, a thought, a social act, or, in this case, a bodily function. Llufa and pet fit into this category in all their onomatopoeic perfection, and I know that even though we speak English in my home and left Catalonia over a year ago, llufa and pet are two borrowed words that, sorry to say, we utter all too often.