Cross-cultural issues

[Tabouli]

Wanda:
> I laugh with you, I cry with you,
 I suffer and rejoice.
 And yet I've never seen your face,( unless you have webcam)
 Or even heard your voice.(unless you have a microphone)

I'm a great believer in the written medium as a way to bond with people, despite a couple of disastrous trans-global penfriend romances (the last of the snail mail guard, those, and I always insisted on a no-photo clause before meeting).  I used to say that written English was my mother tongue.  Writing to someone cuts away a lot of social baggage that you often have to work through to meet someone properly, such as what someone looks like, the small talk stuff (so what do you do?), the acting, the self-consciousness.  Of course, it also gives people to construct a persona to taste (their own, or the perceived taste of others).

I shied away from the "so what do you do?" thread that cropped up a while ago, but hey, this:
 
> Subject: Whingeing Poms and Gushing Yanks

...was just so close to home I thought I should Reveal All (or some, at least).  I am, by career, a cross-cultural psychologist/trainer, and spend a lot of my life prancing around talking about cultural differences, just like I do on this list!  (by calling I'm a writer, but that's another story...).  One reason why I didn't mention this earlier is because I didn't want to colour people's readings of my cultural comments, or pick me up on any inaccuracies or dubious content on the subject on the grounds that I should know more/better, etc., but I suppose I'll risk it, eh?

Most of the work for cross-cultural trainers in Australia is on the ol' East/West divide, especially in universities, which are subsisting on fees from Asian international students.  Now, I could wail for hours about the abysmal quality of most of the cross-cultural training I have seen, starting with the deluge of theory, jargon, insight-free politically correct preaching/emotional blackmail and lack of practical applications, progressing through the poor handling of the generalisation=racism objection, and arriving despairingly at the chronic lack of linguistic and own-culture awareness content.  However, for the purposes of this message, let's look at one of my favorites... the "Western" culture.

Now, I won't deny that there are some valid broad East-West cultural differences.  All the same, anyone who's visiting Western Europe would surely realise that what most writers are talking about when they say "Western" culture is actually Anglophone culture at best, if not middle class university educated white American culture.

I've been to training programs where the entire session is rambling on simplistically about East/West differences to an audience of university lecturers who keep on interrupting and saying yes, yes, but I also have some American and French students to supervise and I'm having a lot of communication problems, or saying yes OK, but if my Asian students think that, what do I *do* about it?, and the presenter just keeps on avoiding them or feeding them platitudes about it's very difficult but we need to appreciate the Rich Benefits that diversity provides as well, and then hastens away from the subject and throws up a smokescreen of theory and jargon.  Once I reached the point where I took over the presentation and actually trying to address some of their queries, making myself *very* unpopular with the presenter (but very popular with the poor lecturers!)

Grrrgzzz.  But anyway, diatribe aside, *yes*, the large English-speaking countries of the world have distinct cultures and communication styles of their own, not to mention sub-cultures based around class, region and so forth.  One day I'd love to write a light-hearted book contrasting the major Anglophone cultures of the world (probably restricting it to people of a particular demographic profile, or I'll be writing a 20 volume encyclopedia!).  Anyone on the list who has interesting observations or comments about the differences between people in different English speaking regions, both international and intranational (e.g. Southern US vs East Coast US, etc.), feel free to send 'em on to me!  I promise lavish acknowledgments and footnotes in my book...

Tabouli.


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