David recently posted the following conundrum in an essay:
How do you best convey experiences of living with a disability that are so alien to so many people? Where do you start? How do you convey challenges that people have never even considered?
This insightful — and sometimes “incite-ful” post, because it made me thoroughly annoyed on people’s behalf — reminded me of a handout I’d found while cleaning out old files. One of many available to university tutors, it was yet another authorless 12-point gem. (If someone does know the source, kindly let me know!)
The page refers to the assumptions we mentally trip over when working with people from other national, religious or ethnic cultures. I rather doubt that the author(s) considered how broad the cultural spectrum can be. One doesn’t readily think of the various Deaf cultures, but of course, there they are. I’m almost certain that they were not thinking of disabled people. Good heavens, even people studying various aspects of disability politics and history can’t agree on whether there is a “disability culture” or what it’s comprised of. Given the vast differences, definitions quickly break down into things like “autistic subculture” and debates thereof.
But nonetheless, this is still a spiffy list, so I’m sharing it with you all to mull over and run off with for your own purposes. This is the delight of blogging: cross-pollinating one’s brain with all sorts of novel combinations of ideas!
Cross-Cultural Relationships
1. What seems to be logical, sensible, important, and reasonable to a person in one culture may seem stupid, irrational, and unimportant to an outsider.
2. Feelings of apprehension, loneliness, and/or lack of confidence are common when visiting another culture.
3. When people talk about other cultures, they tend to describe the differences and not the similarities.
4. Differences between cultures generally are seen as threatening and described in negative terms.
5. Personal observations and reports of other cultures should be regarded with a great deal of skepticism.
6. One should make up one’s own mind about another culture and not rely on the reports and experiences of others.
7. It requires experience as well as study to understand the many subtleties of another culture.
8. Understanding another culture is a continues and not a discrete process.
9. Stereotyping probably is inevitable in the absence of frequent contact or study.
10. The feeling which people have for their own language is not often evidenct until they encounter another language.
11. People often feel that their own language is far superior to other languages.
12. It probably is necessary to know the language of foreign culture to understand the culture in depth.
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