DHAHRAN, 6 June 2008 — On Saturday, Gary R. Weaver, Ph.D., began his tour of the Kingdom, lecturing in Dhahran, Riyadh and Jeddah on “Understanding American Culture: Cross-Cultural Communication and Adaptation.” Professor Weaver, the director of the Intercultural Management Institute at the American University in Washington, D.C. (www.imi.american.edu) was sponsored for the visit by the US Embassy and consulates in Saudi Arabia as part of their programs to prepare Saudi students for success in higher studies in America.
Weaver gave presentations at several universities in the Kingdom, as well as speaking to audiences invited by the US missions.
In introducing Weaver at the US Consulate in Dhahran, Public Affairs Officer Jaffar Diab advised the audience that when training in Washington before going on assignment abroad, US diplomats often attend one of the professor’s presentations as part of their program. He is a prolific author too, and his latest title, “America’s Midlife Crisis,” written with Adam Mendelson, has just become available this month.
Unlike many other well-known speakers who come to the Kingdom, Weaver’s lecture was free of charge and he was generous in ensuring that every member of the audience received a photocopy of his Microsoft PowerPoint presentation so they would be enabled in discussing the material later with others. He began his talk by first explaining that there is often confusion about the meaning of the word “culture.” He said, “Art, music and literature are the result of culture. They are not in and of themselves culture. Rather, culture is the way of life of a people passed down from one generation to the next through learning.” It is the values and attitudes inside a person’s mind that defines his or her culture and these basic values are learned at home.
According to Weaver, many Americans have difficulty in relating to people of other cultures because most Americans don’t travel abroad. “The way to find your culture is to leave it — through travel, for example,” Weaver observed. “Up to last year, just 18 percent of Americans had passports and those passports were disproportionately in the hands of the children of immigrants and people over the age of 65.”
Such a statistic is one explanation as to why Americans have difficulty understanding other cultures — they don’t even clearly understand their own. And for most Americans, especially those living in rural areas, their first opportunity to meet a Saudi national could be a Saudi student attending a college in their area. That individual Saudi will become representative of his or her entire nation and culture. It can be a heavy burden.
Unfortunately both Americans and Arabs have been stereotyped through satellite news, television programs and films. Weaver commented that he’s never met an American who was remotely similar to John Rambo as portrayed by Sylvester Stallone, but he is certain that people who don’t know US culture well would believe that Rambo-like men were common in America. In learning about a culture there are generalizations, which are acceptable, and stereotypes, which are harmful.
“A generalization never applies to everyone in that culture in every situation. It’s only a first guess and it should be discarded when it’s no longer useful,” said Weaver. “Stereotypes are not generalizations because stereotypes are applied to everyone in every situation in that culture without exceptions. Even worse, stereotypes are retained even when they are no longer accurate or useful.”
The professor also pointed out that there is great confusion on the subject of culture and globalization. People think that globalization will result in one, worldwide culture — but this isn’t true. “One of the consequences of globalization is that people are becoming more aware of their own culture. This has resulted in more cultural understanding but not in the abandoning of individual cultures. Just because a young person wears a baseball cap and drinks Coca Cola doesn’t mean that he is Americanized. Primary culture is learned at home, usually by the age of 5 or 6. A change on the outside doesn’t mean that a person has changed on the inside,” Weaver advised.
The goal of cross-cultural understanding is realistic cultural empathy. That is the concept of putting yourself in another person’s psychological shoes and it requires the ability to describe behavior objectively.
“Americans say that the British drive on the ‘wrong’ side of the road,” explained Weaver. “It’s not ‘wrong,’ it’s ‘left.’ If you can’t describe behavior objectively, how can you understand that behavior? It’s important to emphasize that realistic cultural empathy is not sympathy with, agreement with or identification with a culture. Realistic cultural empathy is the intellectual understanding of a culture’s values and beliefs. You don’t need to agree with those values and beliefs to understand them and you don’t need for your culture to be like that culture to have empathy.”
Why is all this important? If we know a culture’s values, the behaviors of that community can be explained and predicted. It will be easier to understand how people in that culture will react to a given situation and then it’s easier to interact with them. For a foreign student, this means that interacting and communicating with professors and students at a university will be more rewarding and less frustrating. In general, realistic cultural empathy gives any individual an awareness of his or her own values and identity, resulting in self-confidence, which is a recognized propellant for personal growth and achievement, especially in an increasingly globalized society.
