Dance of difference(s) - 1

Dance of difference(s) – 1 – Close up and impersonal: Instrumental relationships
February 5, 2009
Torrey Orton

We are entering more dangerous times for difference. As many threats, and a few promises, assail us, our room for response contracts. This will lead to uses of difference (stereotyping, demonising, etc.) which make normal engagements with difference unmanageable, producing a self-fulfilling prophecy of difference’s distastefulness and, eventually, punishment worthiness. This is the material for clashes of civilizations occurring daily in various sites and sizes around the world. Many of them are already in play here, too.

Reading Melanie La’Brooy’s plaint about strangers in the street asking her ‘Where are you from?’ (27/01/09) in The AGE, I was thrown into one of my favourite dilemmas – the cultural differences entanglement. It enthrals me because it is so much the classic dilemma: two seemingly incompatible truths about the same experience. One truth, all cultures are the same because all people are the same – they solve common human problems. This is why we can read literature classics across centuries and languages of almost untranslatable difference. We can see the world through different artistic eyes and hear its tunes on different instruments through different ears and body rhythms.

Truth two: all cultures are different, as are all individuals. They differ in human ways which we can understand once we learn the culturally appropriate means of experiencing their solutions to being human. We have to learn to hear uncommon music (even within our own culture, if you recall your first atonal notes), to see as Aborigines see the world, to taste as Chinese flavour their food (and it’s probably easiest to learn things in the reverse order). Foreigners of all sorts master other cultures’ cooking (see the Japanese show Iron Chef on SBS for one approach), but fewer master really different painting and music unless there’s an important cultural prize for doing so. 250 years ago Chinoiserie was a hit but Chinese living was another thing. Now everything of ‘ours’ is made in China, and they still won’t soon become like us.

As LaBrooy made clear, we often experience our difference by having it put in our faces by others who, we learn, we are different from. Second generation immigrants get this one often unless they live largely in same-culture enclaves, think of themselves as being of it and have futures which are largely enclosed in its displaced variation in their parents’ new country. We ‘get’ it because we are reminded in a variety of ways. These are up close but impersonal encounters. However only the dominant culture folks get to say it is not personal. It always feels personal to the different.

The only place I remember hearing an Anglo group saluted with a sneering soubriquet – “skips” – was a technical school with a larger Italian/Greek population than Anglo. When my wife, teaching in another of that lost type, was told that her husband “isn’t a wog, miss” there was an initial surprise. On the other hand, I have not to this day 35 years later failed to be asked “Where ya from, mate?” by people who don’t on the face of it have a right to know – bank tellers, check out kids, and such, with whom I have no relationship – just a once-off transaction. These are invariably Anglo locals. From cab drivers I sometimes get the same question as a precursor to discussion from inside the veil of otherness. It is always more directly broached in an appreciative remark about difference – theirs or mine – where usually I am assigned partial membership of the dominant Anglo mass.

If you are one of them – the Anglo locals – you might get a feel of the experience I’m talking about by walking into a pub in a part of town where you are not ‘at home’. Or, try a part of the footy ground where you are not at home because of your colours. Remembering your early days in school is also a source of debilitating difference experiences for many within their own cultures. A tram ride in central Melbourne seems to provide similar insights for others – the strange sense of exclusion that arise from hearing another language used as if it belongs to the space we are in. Which it does. Our culture abounds with internal difference projects to right disadvantages arising from e.g., bullying, gender, class, congenital disablements, religious minority, and so on. These are similar to the intercultural differences.

The intercultural newbie’s experience is something like this, only it happens daily in the street at unexpected, though not wholly unpredictable, times. The intent of the locals in explicitly noticing our difference(s) is often a bridge / expression of their slight discomfort, their uncertainty of whether ‘normal’ politenesses will work, or produce a discordant moment. But for us, the others, it may be an invasion. I don’t often want to have my American self recollected. Where to begin with sharing it with anyone who doesn’t have it already (and then, of course, the often quickly explicit assumption that I share their version of my stereotypical history!)?

I need a relationship framework to make sense of this experience. There are at least three major clusters of human relationships: the intimate (covering the family, personal friends of long duration and intensity (not 500 Facebook ‘friends’, thanks)), the instrumental (most life maintaining activities) and the civic (providing the broader relationship of humanity to itself or the universe…). The civic provide the setting and content of our respective cultures – and the prospect of their sustainability. Intimate provides the platform for the other two. Instrumental is enabling; necessary but not sufficient.

Add significant differences of basic relating – gender and generational role expectations, religious habits, and governance role expectations which are signalled through ‘race’, ‘class’, and language – and the mix becomes threatening to immediate comfort. It cannot all be learned at once or wished away in encomia of oneness. Our turbulent times increased pressure on these points, the early civic effects of which can be seen in public protests of foreign workers in the UK, rise of exclusivist political groups in Europe and random race / ethnicity based violence.

These are the matter of major cultural differences which distinguishes them from internal, own culture differences – the spectra of forms and values which life takes in our cultures of origin. Hence, it seems clear that progress in handling of differences can only occur through some degrees of conflict.

In following posts I will explore challenges of difference at the civic and intimate relationship levels, with instrumental more in the background. I will begin to introduce approaches to engaging the potential for violence(s) in productive ways.

Neighbouring* subjects & issues: social policy, intercultural communication, sustainability and culture(s), difference and learning, power.
*neighbouring = historical and conceptual factors which give perspective to the blog topic