Dance(s) of Difference – (3) Intimate level

Dance(s) of Difference – (3) Intimate level
Torrey Orton
March 8, 2009

The different sometimes touches softly as in the following examples:

“She has family, Ma’am, but none immediate. They think of such things more loosely and more intricately than we. For us family is string, for them it is lace.”
The Protector speaking of the last surviving child of King Romeo to Lady Franklin in Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2008, Knopf; pg. 68)
And,
“The relationship between family and family members can be likened to the relationships between a body and body parts. For example, I feel itchy on my leg and my hand comes to help by scratching it. Does my leg have to say, “thank you, hand.” Does my hand reply, “you are welcome.” No, neither one does so. Why, because they are supposed to help each other as they belong to a single unit. Though parts can be distinguished, they do not function independent of the body. The mutual relationship between parents and children are understood by Chinese in the same way.” (Chen, AERA, 2006).

At other times it hits from the instrumental with the blind power of a (unintended?) personal assault:
A US fire fighter stepping off the plane in Melbourne a few weeks ago (Feb. 15) to spell our CFA volunteers a week into the struggle with the Black Saturday aftermaths. The guy‘s TV news quotable was something to the effect: ‘…you people are a little backward here (in your fire-fighting), but we’ll try..’

Working with my Chinese business partner in Shanghai since 1997 has helped me open my culturally blinkered eyes, though had I lived there two years between ’81 and ‘83. While my partner and I shared doubt about our respective media, specific doubts were often not shared because they drew on identity matters for both of us. Examples include the American bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and the aerial clashes between spy planes and their watchers a few years later. More easily managed were reporting of SARS, and the like.

There are a number of likely subjects of inter-cultural conflict. A list might include differences of language, religion, gender and generational roles, authority structures and values, health standards, education contents and processes, and so on. Many of these are also hot points within our own cultures these days. Lists like this offer ways of guessing when conflict may arise and its subject(s), but not how it will arise (the precipitating actions) or why (the other situational stressors). So, a difference list can be used to suggest where and when pre-emptive action may be necessary.

Successful pre-emption requires nearly intimate relationships, or intentionally sliding into intimate levels of content and process. Put another way, the civic must become intimate to get through the conflict. Another take: I know when a relationship deepens, especially one across cultures, when the other shares something from inside their culture not accessible to non-members without a personal introduction. This can apply to within own culture workplaces and similar settings.

A key turning point in a conflicted relationship is the will and effort to clarify differences of knowledge about the respective cultures. Appropriate respect is the key competence for success in these growth potential moments. Practically, respect is especially required in situations where ignorance on either’s part is an unavoidable element of a difference. Then achieving personal or organisational understanding has a particularly difficult hurdle to climb.

Each event is, also, potential highly volatile… as most challenging intercultural events are. All participants are asked, or asking, to be taken as representatives of entire identity groups of which they are members by fate (birth). Part of the challenge inheres in the management of ones own (my own and the other’s in the following vignette) ignorance which is the occasion for the event and the block to its reduction. Here’s one.

China from the inside out: ‘Why do tourists take pictures of old stuff?’
In 2007 I was running a leadership program in China with participants I had worked with in earlier programs. Intercultural understanding across the 6 cultures in the business was a specific topic of the event, so some constructs for engaging differences were on hand already. AS well, we had explored the implications for business conduct of the actual differences in managing style between the participants and their company’s home (France) leadership style.

In a break one Chinese guy asked me, “Why do foreigners take pictures of the old, dirty parts of Shanghai?” I asked what places (I know Shanghai well) and why he was interested. The places he mentioned I recognised as old worker quarters (aged 80ish), not yet subject to the developers’ ‘dozers and the city government’s forced displacements of their inhabitants to the outer suburbs. His interest was that he thought the snap-artists were seeking information to show China in a bad light wherever they came from. This is not an uncommon perception by young educated Chinese.

In a couple of discussions at the moment and over three months, with other members of the leadership group present at all times, I presented a few ideas. Most prominent in my mind, because it is my experience and that of many foreigners I know in China, was that the old China is the one of most interest to us. The new we really can see in Hong Kong, Dubai, Singapore or New York – domains of unrestrained modernity from the origins to the latest flavours. That China can achieve modernity of this sort in super-short time is striking, but the final outcome we already know more or less. What we don’t know is the very different human history underlying the new – a place of as much wonder to us, perhaps, as modernity has been to the Chinese when they first began to see it in Europe, the US and so on.

This explanation failed at the time. One reason has to do with residual effects of the well recalled history of foreign oppressions of China. I don’t know that any explanation could succeed now; and, at the same time, I’m sure I can follow up with him later and see how his thinking has developed. In that sense the event was a success from my point of view. Our relationship was still alive. This is not my fantasy because I saw him 10 months ago in another training event and we were on firm discussion grounds throughout a physically and emotionally challenging teamwork experience at sea.

So, maybe the developmental pathway through conflictful understanding is via the intimate, the personal, the humanly scaled and the extensively as well as intensively experienced (though I suspect extensive is more useful than intensive; time provides its own perspective as memory moves away from the immediacy of perception). I look forward to hearing others’ tales of attempts to engage volatile cultural matters respectfully.

Next blog, I’ll review a current example of these difficult interactions conducted through the public media – the choice of a name for it is itself filled with opportunity for presumptive misinterpretation (unconscious stereotyping). This is the reported and subsequently commented (starting in THEAGE on February 19, ‘09) history of the Indian students mugged in the West of Melbourne. My concern is that this is an example of creating conditions under which sharing our ignorance to increase our understanding becomes less likely. This is the pathway of intensified stereotyping.


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