I am in the process of preparing a course on intercultural communication. This will not be an academic course, but more of a how-to, mostly aimed at relatively new arrivals in Sweden (like myself). I will be aided by a friend who has been in Sweden somewhat longer than me, with more hands-on experience navigating the divide between newcomers and the Swedish authorities. As a result of this project, as well as my continuing research, I’m taking a dive into the great rainbow of cultural diversity.
As I recently wrote, culture and identity are not the same thing. One of the ways in which they are different is that culture is not quite as discrete as nationalist perspectives make it seem. Nationalism separates ‘us’ from ‘them’, accentuating differences between people: frequently exaggerating those differences. Ontological nationalism (about which I will write more at some point), induces people to think about ‘cultures’ in a nationalist framework. Regrettably, people already think in nationalist stereotypes, and the concepts and methodologies employed by those who write about intercultural communication further underwrite those.
My point, here, is that culture should generally be thought of as a more continuous concept, in which many different cultural traits generally shift gradually over the space between people and geographic distance. Migration and long-distance interaction put people with more striking differences in contact with one another, but patterns of migration and such interaction do not happen along country borders; they tend to happen in cosmopolitan cities. As a result, those cosmopolitan cities themselves change culturally in order to accommodate the cultural differences. This creates striking cultural differences between cities and rural and suburban areas. Because cities and countrysides are closer proximity to one another than culturally distinct countries are, the differences between city and country are much more relevant to understanding cultural difference, than national ‘cultures’ are.
Below the fold I critique the common conceptualization of national cultures, provide a more continuous way of thinking about cultural diversity, and provide an outline of why this matters. One of the main ideas that I hope a reader comes away with is that most people are average, and the things that shape them to be very different by coming from a certain society, can frequently be mitigated by other factors that also shape their values system.
