Name: Beyond Culture
Rating: 4.2 (64 reviews)
Author: Edward Hall

What’s in it for me? Learn to understand your culture better and then transcend it.

Globalization has torn down barriers. Today it’s not unusual to see people from Asia, America, Africa, Europe and Australia living in a single neighborhood in London, for example. You can jump on a plane in New York and be in Paris in a few hours; you can send a text from Sydney to Buenos Aires in a second.

As a global society, we have overcome the world’s physical and technological barriers to connect easily with one another. Yet one hurdle to connecting remains, and that’s culture.

In these blinks, you’ll learn that no matter how many barriers we’ve conquered, culture is still a divider, determining how we act and think in groups. Even today we easily misunderstand behaviors that are unfamiliar, and this often leads to confusion, or worse. Here you’ll learn how to recognize the practices that blind you and importantly, transcend bad habits and open your mind to other cultural norms.

In these blinks, you’ll also learn

what the German language and programming languages have in common;
why your Brazilian colleague won’t have an excuse for being late; and
why Pueblo Indians consider Western schools to be poor.

Your actions and thoughts are shaped by the culture in which you grow up.

Human beings are cultural by nature. Regardless of where a person is born and raised, her culture – the ideas, customs and social mores of her community – will inevitably have an effect on the way she acts and thinks throughout her life.

From birth, we begin to learn from the people around us. In this way, a person’s actions are changeable, as they suit the cultural context in which the person exists. Over time, learned actions develop into ingrained habits. Eventually, these habits become second nature, almost automatic.

By the time we’ve reached adulthood, these learned actions have become internalized, unconscious behaviors, specific to the culture in which we were raised.

A good example of this can be found in the way people greet each other. While the Japanese bow, Inuits rub noses. Such behaviors are taken for granted within each culture and are performed automatically. Both actions, however different, convey respect or gratitude, yet only when performed in the context of each respective culture.

So what other practices does a culture carry with it? Different cultures usually speak different languages. Some researchers have argued that the language a group speaks has a big effect on the way a group thinks.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, formulated in 1929 by anthropologist Edward Sapir and linguist Benjamin Whorf, supposes that the way people see the world is significantly influenced by the language a people speaks.

In English, you can tell someone, “It rained yesterday.” Yet from that statement, it’s unclear whether you know it rained because you got caught in a downpour; whether you saw puddles on the ground last night; or whether someone told you that it had rained, and you were just passing on that information.

In contrast, the Hopi of Arizona encode such details through verbs in its spoken language. This communicates to the listener not only information, but the source of the information.

Different cultures have different ways of communicating, and each has its pros and cons.

Have you ever struggled to plan an event with people from different cultural backgrounds? This situation isn’t uncommon and results from cultural differences in communication.

In short, different cultures have different ways of communicating. Some communicate explicitly while others communicate implicitly.

Cultural differences shape the way you walk, and the way you perceive time.

We’ve looked at differences in styles of communication between cultures. But there’s more. Even the way you walk down the street is influenced by your cultural background!

Not only do people from different cultures talk differently; they move differently, too. In fact, each culture comes with particular ways of sitting, standing, dancing and moving around.

You see the world through the lens of your culture, which can lead to a lot of misunderstanding.

Because we view the world through our unique cultural glasses, we expect other people to act and think the way we do. It’s no surprise then that there are many misunderstandings between cultures.

Actions deemed “appropriate” are in particular a sensitive area between cultures. You may be startled or even offended by the actions of a person from another culture, especially when the gesture clashes or conflicts with what you see as correct or acceptable.

Kernaussagen in Beyond Culture