Indiscrete Culture

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.

Nationalist frameworks of conceptualizing culture

In preparation for the course, I have been working with the writings of two noteworthy authors on the subject of social values and intercultural communication – Geert Hofstede and Richard D. Lewis. I’m also greatly informed by the work of Ronald Inglehart and the World Values Survey (WVS). I have found these authors to be both enlightening as well as frustrating. These paragraphs get at my main disagreements with them.

Both Hofstede and Lewis provide the necessary disclaimers about conceptualizing culture together with the nation. Yet, once they provide those disclaimers, they dive right in and nationalize culture in rather crude ways. They defend their nationalist approaches with essentially three arguments:

• The idea that national identities create powerful models for behavior,
• The fact that much of the data they have on culture – either produced themselves or drawn from databases like that of the WVS – is national in its database framework, and
• The idea that people engaging in intercultural communication can usefully guess a lot about a person’s cultural traits by knowing from which nation they come.

I accept the first rationale somewhat. They certainly have a point that people adopt the beliefs, norms, and habits of those with whom they identify. Or, at least, they outwardly behave that way. However, their assumption is that the nation is:

1. The dominant identity model, and
2. That it provides models for all relevant aspects of culture.

The great problem here is the assumption of ontological nationalism – the assumption that everything (e.g. culture, politics, economic exchange, identification) happens along national lines. This is simply not so.

Regarding the second defense, as a consumer of survey data, I certainly sympathize with the fact that we are forced to use this data in the format with which it comes to us. The problem here is their surrender to methodological nationalism. There should be more pressure for surveys to allow users to disaggregate and re-aggregate according to the frameworks that are really being investigated. To some extent, we are getting more of that, but it’s taking a long time.

The third argument is one of helping people guess at other peoples’ belief and habit systems. This is a powerful argument, since there is a strong relationship between geographical origins and cultural beliefs and habits. Since nation-states have geographical boundaries, knowing a person’s nationality helps you know where in the world they’re from. There are, however, some serious pitfalls as well, because it suggests that if you can only know one thing about a person, that you should choose to look at the nation, rather than, say rural/urban background, social class, religion, minority status or gender identities, etc. That’s not to say that those are necessarily more important (though they might be); it’s to say that the cultural nationalism tends to excuse not making further inquiries. We shouldn’t be so lazy or think so categorically.

Disrupted continuous concept

I prefer to think about culture as a disrupted continuous concept. Unless you’re from some village in a faraway pocket of the world that has had only limited contact with the wider world, then culture is probably not discrete for you. Culture is much more continuous than identity. With identity, you’re either an American or not; a Russian or not, Chinese or not, Egyptian or not, Mexican or not, etc.

Your cultural values, on the other hand, will be along numerous continuous dimensions. You may be a raging individualist or a die-hard collectivist, but most people fall somewhere in the middle of the extremes. By the same token, you may be very egalitarian, thinking that everyone has the same value and should be treated equally, or you think that some people are much more worthy than others, and worthy people should have privileges over those who are less worthy. Again, most people fall somewhere between the extremes. The nature of averages suggests that ‘peoples’ will be even more average than any given individual might be. Of course, there are still differences in averages – that is the shape of cultural diversity.

Talking about ‘many cultures’ suggests that culture is a countable concept, and that are clear borders where one culture ends and another begins. This gives us the idea that there are discrete cultures, that one might be able to count. However, culture as a continuous concept makes one set of cultural traits’ separation from another an arbitrary thing. It is indeed arbitrary when the lens of identity comes in, such as in the no-true-Scotsman fallacy:

Smith: All Scotsmen are loyal and brave.

Jones: But McDougal over there is a Scotsman, and he was arrested by his commanding officer for running from the enemy.

Smith: Well, if that's right, it just shows that McDougal wasn't a TRUE Scotsman.

Here, loyalty and bravery are held to be valued in Scottish society, and McDougal is accused of not having the values that would make him a true Scotsman, and perhaps not a Scotsman at all. But, does that make a loyal and brave samurai a Scot, simply because the samurai would be loyal and brave? Doesn’t there also have to be whiskey and haggis involved somewhere? Rather, many cultures do value loyalty and bravery over narrow self-regard and making discretion the better part of valor, but at what precise measurable level of loyalty and bravery does one cross from one culture into the other?

That’s not to say that places of distinct cultural difference do not exist. They exist between one person who is the carrier of one combination of cultural traits and another person who is a carrier of a very different combination. When people migrate vast distances, those borders become apparent because people who are culturally very different come into closer proximity to one another. That is where the disruption comes in – there have been migratory patterns that have brought people with radically-different value, belief and habit systems in close proximity to one another. The fact that people associate identity names and stereotypes with those cultural differences makes those differences seem even more significant.

Geographically speaking, the real borders between cultures are more likely to exist within and around cosmopolitan cities than they are to exist on the political borders between countries. The neighboring areas of countries – especially when those borders run through rural areas, as they usually do – are very likely to be very alike in culture. How culturally different is a guy from Malta, Montana (USA – population ~2000) Val Marie, Saskatchewan (Canada – population ~140, not far on the other side of the border from Malta, Montana), as compared to that fellow’s similarity to a random person from New Orleans or San Francisco? Does nationality really matter more than rural plainsiness vs cosmopolitan urbanism does? I doubt it.

Source: Society 3.0

But which aspects of culture matter for defining one culture against another – if one is to be discrete about culture? Lewis’ communication styles capture an interesting range of behavioral patterns, which are plotted along a fairly continuous 1.5-dimensional concept (see image and link below image) in three poles (reactive, multi-active, and linear-active). This idea is not discrete. Much of the world has fairly multi-active communication styles, but as you move more east in Asia, you encounter more reactive communication styles. So too, people in Northern Europe and the Anglosphere tend to have more linear-active communication styles, and as you move south and east from these areas, you gradually encounter people with multi-active communication styles. These styles are not bounded by borders.

Source: WeImproveCompanies

Regarding language, before language was seized by states in the 19th and 20th centuries, it was also a fairly continuous thing. Before that time, if you walked from Andalucía to Naples, you would not go from a Spanish-speaking country, through a French-speaking, to an Italian-speaking country. You would find people in dialects gradually shifting from one local dialect to another, including what we now recognize as Catalan and Occitan. That has not completely gone away. Religion? There are so many different flavors within each religion, and even so religion is both a concept of culture as well as an identity – especially at the level of the lay person whose grasp of theology is vague.

So what?

What, then, is the point of all this? One point, of course, is not to just trust national stereotypes, even if you correct yourself for plausible negative bias. This is also true of stereotypes based on cultural data (for which I prefer the term archetype). The data have their limitations, and their collection techniques make the world seem more culturally discrete along national lines than it really is, the authors’ disclaimers notwithstanding.

The bigger point, however, is not that national stereotypes/archetypes cannot be helpful. If you have nothing else to go on, it’s what you have to use to make the best guess as to how someone from another culture may think and behave. Yet, there are usually more things to go on. I’ve found that knowing if someone is from an urban environment as opposed to a rural area is also a useful indicator on cultural values – though, again, this is a tendency not an absolute. Then there is social class, gender identity, religiosity (more than religion per se), and a host of other things that can help you make a guess at someone’s cultural framework, while still leaving room for error because individual people can be surprising.

A useful thing that the cultural data provide however, is insight into how social values do shade. Latvians and Argentinians are likely to be a little bit more hierarchical and collectivist than Swedes, Americans, and Dutch people are, but they are still fairly individualistic and egalitarian, especially in comparison to your average Russian or Arab. Of course, a middle-class urbanite from St. Petersburg or Moscow is probably going to be somewhat more individualistic and egalitarian than a working-class person from Siberia will be. (Again, individual persons may vary from these averages.)

With all of these different aspects of a person’s background, it’s worthwhile to remember that there are laws of averages, including [regression to the mean]. One set of background factors in a person’s cultural system may be contrasted by another. Few people have all the factors that would shape them into being outlier cases – the sort of people one thinks about when one uses extreme stereotypes. Most people are somewhere in the middle range on things, and that goes for culture too. There are cultural differences, but that doesn’t mean that people who are culturally different will have extreme expressions of those cultural differences. Extremists will also exist, but they are rare – and there may be some reason for the radicalization of someone exhibiting extreme traits that is not – in the most profound sense – embedded in how a person was raised by their parents.

Conclusion

In closing, I’d just like to remind the reader that my point here has been that culture is a disrupted continuous concept. It is certainly shaped by the societies that are associated with countries and nations, but there are more aspects of culture than those countries’ and nations’ peoples are known to possess, and there is a lot of variation within countries. As such, it is still worthwhile to know the variation of cultural traits and where certain combinations of them can be found. If you have nothing else to go on, then a well-informed stereotype or archetype can be very useful, but there’s more to culture than nations. Different social classes, urban/rural background, gender identities, etc., etc., all put their imprint on social values, and those correlate to different communication styles as well.

People reflect the culture in which they’ve grown up, but cultures can vary from setting to setting. There are many sub-settings in which people’s values and communication styles, habits and beliefs are shaped. The social values data try to capture that, but they are too wedded to national categorizations for some questionable reasons, such as ontological and methodological nationalism. As a result, they help create national archetypes, but by privileging their national data frameworks, they obscure other factors in cultural socialization.

It is, therefore, useful to think of culture as a disrupted continuous concept. Without migration and urbanization, culture varies slowly and continuously over distances. Values, just like languages through dialects, shade into one another. Migration and cities, which tend to act as focal points for migration, create disruptions in the continuous patterns. They bring people with very different cultural backgrounds in closer proximity to one another. They make people seem alien to one another, and that seeming is frequently exacerbated by the imagination.

Now, I’d also like to say that it’s really worthwhile to get to understand the cultural values that are different than your own. You don’t have to embrace them as your own to learn to appreciate them for what they are in the societies in which they are current. There are benefits and drawbacks to each cultural set of values that a society embraces. As societies made the disaggregated subconscious choices that shaped their cultures, they made trade-offs. By becoming individualist, Western societies gave up much of the warmth and security of belonging to a tightly-knit community. It is clear that in many corners of the West, people on the political left and the right are regretting that choice and looking to re-socialize with their people.

In closing, I’d like to share a TEDx talk from Tbilisi that I have used in my classes to help students understand some of what I’ve written here.