So here is another issue to consider. Let’s say we have a department that studies another culture. Let’s say, Hispanic culture. People in other cultures often have a different way of building interpersonal communications. Hispanic people might stand closer to each other, kiss others on the cheek when they meet, touch people more, use language that sounds scandalous to Americans, etc.
In a department that’s specifically dedicated to the study of this culture, should students who have decided to dedicate their lives to the study of this culture – say, graduate students – try to understand these ways of communicating and adapt to them OR should they judge them from the point of view of their own cultural expectations and condemn the Hispanic professors as harassers and abusers?
The discomfort that an American student or professor might feel when Hispanic professors* are being their cultural selves can be very real. Should their standards be enforced?
I’m very interested in what people think.
* Hispanic is just an example, of course. It can be Russian or French or Algerian, etc.
Clarissa's Blog 
What about Trump’s culture?
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I knew Trump would shit all over any topic I might propose for discussion. :-)))))))))))))))))))
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My preliminary feelings are that they should be more comfortable to be their own cultural selves in the context of teaching in the department that hired them taking into account the more sheltered and culturally impoverished nature of many of their students (though learning to deal with other norms of interpersonal relations is an important part of language classes).
They should be freer to act more naturally around more advanced/grad students /colleagues while being able to meet local standards outside the department and/or with first year students…
Make any sense?
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And before we go any further, shouldn’t this thread (Sex harrassment in academi II) be private?
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I’m so angry that I don’t even care. Somebody I know was accused of harassment because of the kind of stuff I described and placed on leave. A couple of months later I go on Facebook and what do I see?
“Hey did you hear that X turned out to be a rapist? I always knew he was sleazy.”
This is ridiculous. And it absolutely cheapens the very concept of rape and harassment. If everything is harassment, then nothing is!
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And also, this is the second time I witness this kind of thing. The first time around, the fellow in question had a nervous breakdown and left academia.
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I mean protected….
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Ohhhh, I was just having this conversation with some students the other day.
The student of the other culture should definitely aim to understand the target culture and its ways of communicating and be aware of the differences between their culture and the target culture. The student of the other culture may choose to adopt some or all ways of communicating in the target culture when in a target culture environment, but the student doesn’t have to adopt everything or feel like a failure for failing to adopt everything. What that student does need to do is develop strategies for communicating and navigating in the target language culture in ways that are effective and do not offend anyone. The student also needs to learn not to be offended by things that would be offensive in their native culture but are not offensive in the target culture.
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Exactly! If why we gathered here is to study the culture, let’s not condemn it before we get a chance to learn something.
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Once, when going somewhere social (it was a Spanish Club meeting, and we were to migrate there from my office, I said to the students and one colleague, all female), vamos, chicas as a joke (students had been joking about how there were no men in the major at that point). Faculty member filed grievance against me for having included her in a group I referred to as “chicas”, telling grievance committee that to say this was to address her as one would a maid. Grievance committee, which did not speak Spanish, insisted that I acknowledge to them that the word “chica,” in Spanish, means servant or maid. (I did tell them it didn’t, but they wouldn’t believe me because my name is in English.)
My point: I don’t know how they are going to legislate all of these things. I did feel sexually or perhaps generally harassed when a new colleague (who was a foreigner) called me up, angry at another colleague, and said among other things that she should be raped. It was the whole thing — what right, I thought, does he have to call me at home, complain about someone else even though that person is irritating, assume it is my job to listen to this tirade, and in addition say someone should be raped. It is possible this was not meant as it sounded but what alarmed me was the boundary invasion: he should have known he did not have the kind of confianza with me that might possibly make it permissible or understandable (etc.). I commented on it to a friend whose view was that it was normal speech in this person’s country. It is not, in my experience, but one is to be tolerant, I am told.
I am really not sure. In both of these cases the effort to be understanding of the Other culture meant these people got away with quite poor behavior.
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The chicas story is insane.
But the other colleague you describe, the one with the rape comment, did act completely inappropriately.
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Why standards for behaviour should be different depending on culture?
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Because standards of what kind of behavior is appropriate or inappropriate, rude or polite, ethical or unethical are different in different cultures.
Universities that propose to teach people about different cultures have to be aware of and deal with that fact everyday in lots of different ways.
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Exactly. There is zero chance that students will spend their lives never coming into contact with people from other countries or in other countries. Shouldn’t they prepare?
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Instead of insisting on this non-issue, administrations should investigate about pathological lying professors (who are a majority in academia) and professors who violate regularily their own rules.
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And administrators should also investigate about plagiarism and those professors who discriminate against autists.
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It also occurs to me that the intercultural problem people focus on is physical contact but the ones I actually have is about psychology and communication.
In US culture you have be phelgmatic and not choleric. People get very freaked out about choleric behavior and many Spanish speakers have it and it is not scary to us the way it is to Americans. I think they should learn not to be so judgmental about it.
Bad language is really not OK, feels too violent to many South American sensibilities but Spaniards use it. If I am in thinking in English I don’t mind but if I am thinking in Spanish it seems too aggressive.
From an Anglo point of view many Hispanic persons, especially Spaniards, are paranoid — they see second agendas everywhere. A lot of times this really is pure paranoia because in Anglo culture things often are more what you see is what you get. But in Spanish departments and also French, there sometimes really is plotting and planning and paranoia isn’t paranoia — it is just awareness. Americans tend not to understand this, get impatient, and refuse to take into account facts that are right under their noses until it is too late.
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Around 10 or so years ago a colleague went to a US university to teach in a summer program devoted to international and intercultural communication. The teachers and students both were from a variety of countries and continents.
One teacher was from Brazil and was a very friendly, outgoing, touchy, contacty person (and was this way with everybody regardless of age, status or sex).
Anyhoo, in one semi-stuctured encounter between the teachers and students he reached over and patted a female American student on the shoulder… She went straight to the administration and made a sexual harassment charge against him (she didn’t mention any other incident in or out of class, it was all based on patting her shoulder). Apparently this began a big dose of unpleasantness for the Brazilian and cast a pall over the rest of the procedings…
The student (there to study issues in cross-cultural communication) never did recognize this as being grounded in cultural differences but held firm that it was a violation of universal human norms…
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That is precisely the kind of thing I’m talking about. Americans do tend to have very intense attitudes about sex. They tend to see it everywhere.
Going back to the issue of Trump, I’m ecstatic that he’s collapsing but I find it bizarre that the fall is the result of him saying “pussy” and not the result of his comments on Muslims, nuclear weapons, judge Curiel, etc. Bizarre.
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Hmm. I think calling it ‘sexual harassment’ is a bit extreme.
However, I’m quite uncomfortable with physical contact and I don’t think the cultural background matters. I’ve known someone who was a very huggy, touchy, bouncy person and had people say; ‘Oh but he’s gay so it doesn’t matter. He’s like that with everyone’. But I feel uncomfortable being hugged all the same.
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‘ I’m quite uncomfortable with physical contact and I don’t think the cultural background matters”
Well as a presumably normal person you probably would have said something like “I’m uncomfortable with physical contact, please don’t touch me unless I ask you/touch you first”
This person didn’t do that but went straight to the administration (and again, the whole context of the meetings were about intercultural communication – at the first sight of anything that made her uncomfortable (for whatever reason) intercultural communication was out the window and monocultural standards were called in to stomp on an alien…..
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“intercultural communication was out the window and monocultural standards were called in to stomp on an alien”
That’s precisely the problem. Should one standard be imposed administratively and punitively? That’s the question.
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“Should one standard be imposed administratively and punitively? That’s the question”
Off campus in the wider society, yeah, you need a single law for what is and isn’t a civil or criminal crime.
On campus in the context of personal space and subjective feelings (especially in a cross cultural context) then people need to be a bit more flexible.
My general intra-cultural rule is that the greater burden in any communicative situation is on the person with greater meta-knowledge of communication.
I think that can be easily expanded to cross-cultural communication, the person with the greater knowledge of cross-cultural communication has a greater burden to prevent breakdown. This is why I think foreign language teaching staff should be able to modulate their behavior considering who they’re dealing with.
In dealing with other staff and grad and/or advanced students they should be freer to follow their home cultural norms and when outside the department they should conform to local cultural standards. Beginning students are a hybrid situation they’re there to (partly) learn other cultural norms but that may have to be slow-dripped to them…
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Around 15 or so years ago I knew a Canadian in Poland (Anglo but lived several years in Quebec).
He had major problems in adapting to Polish institutional culture and some interpersonal issues. He never thought of these as cultural differences. He didn’t like the very idea that any of his perceptions were guided by cultural norms.
Once he wanted to participate in a program that required either payment or permission from the director. His boss called the boss of the program (standard procedure then) to facilitate his participation but when he met the boss of the program in person he was told: “Just bring a copy of X when you show up” (X was a book, a major project of his department that had just been published).
He was unable to not think of this as a bribe. I explained that it didn’t seem that way to me and offered several different culturally appropriate ways for him to react without violating his internal norms but he wasn’t having any of it. The whole enterprise had been tainted by corruption. He ended up leaving Poland not too long after that.
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There does seem to exist this strange idea that cultural differences do not exist and everybody is exactly the same. I see big cultural differences even between Canadians and Americans, let alone people from different linguistic backgrounds but even in a foreign languages department I don’t manage to get people to recognize these differences.
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I’ve heard it’s specifically Americans (and in Europe, the Swedes) who like to think that there are no cultural differences, they have no culture of their own and that everyone is like them… And that they, having no culture to distort their vision, see everything as it really is.
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“the Swedes) who like to think that there are no cultural difference”
I would love for a bunch of Swedes to tell a bunch of Turks (or Arabs) that there is no such thing as Turkish or Arab culture…..
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I believe what one should do, is withhold all judgment when learning, while building a functional model of given culture in their minds in order to be capable of most competent understanding of it. One’s own cultural values, or even manners ingrained at home, tend to get in the way as an unwarranted filter. “They do such things, which are bad because I wouldn’t”, basically.
Just a thought.
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