How does the small culture approach relate to intercultural encounters?

I notice some people at the next table in a café. An older woman and man and perhaps their daughter. I notice because I can just hear traces of a language that I half recognise. Then I see something about their demeanour and appearance that resonates with people I’ve known and places I’ve been that helps me locate the language further. 

I’m also cautious of going off on a trajectory of false theorising. Wary of the huge danger of national culture stereotypes, I interrogate how I’m thinking about this. I know about destructive grand narratives of nation and civilisation that I’ve grown up with and to which the three people have probably been victim. The pervasive Orientalism that falsely projects the idea that people from ‘those cultures’ lack the critical individualism that ‘we’ possess. I know how this splinters down to personal narratives that produce false essentialist statements like ‘in our culture we …’. 

The existence of these narratives is further evidenced by the numerous people who have privately told me that they have had to tolerate, to ‘put up with’ this Othering on a daily basis. They have occasionally used the word ‘racism’, which I think it undoubtedly is.

So how can I appreciate a sense of cultural difference without falling into essentialist, and indeed racist traps? This is where the small culture approach is crucial. The cultural difference is real. It really is. But at the same time, at the small level, all the people in the café are culturally different in a multiplicity of ways.

Therefore, even if there is something about the behaviour and language of the people that I recognise from a very different place to this, the thing for me to do is to begin with the small as I would with other people there. This is not to deny anything about their cultural identity. It is to open up possibilities that I might not otherwise have noticed.

The man from the table comes into my clear line of view when he stands up and walks past me to the counter. He looks around, assessing the room and who he is in it. He waits a short while in the queue, gets served, and then comes back to his table. 

There is a particular cultural style in the way that he does this which is rich and full of meaning and history. But this has nothing at all to do with the stereotypes that would  negatively position him. He is not reflecting and assessing any more or less than anyone else there. Everyone in the café must be doing this on one way or another, also rich with their particular histories.

As he stands in line I imagine the images that might be crossing through his mind as references to help him make sense of who he is there. Perhaps waiting to buy bread in his city of birth – the smells, the colours, the bread-makers with their professional code, precision and pride, the ways in which the different types of customers make their requests, projecting their types of families and class, how attempts to mechanise the process were tried and failed, his family’s particular method of taking, holding, and carrying the bread home, which he learnt when he was first sent to buy bread as a child.

When he orders his coffee and pastries, I imagine the histories evident in his manner of English, of making eye contact, of showing authority at the same time as respect, and in the pride with which he carries the tray back to the table – having achieved getting what his (probably) wife and daughter want.

Doesn’t though all of this indicated a national culture different to mine? Don’t the details of the bread-buying that he might be recalling indicate a relationality or collectivism that ‘we  don’t have in our culture’? 

No! Absolutely and certainly not! Although the particularities of bread-buying that he might remember are very different to what I can remember from my childhood, I also have memories of my own that enable me to connect when I am standing in the coffee queue. How I behave and interact there are informed by my memories of being sent to the corner shop as a child, also waiting with my father in the bank on Saturday mornings, negotiating which queue to join, in each case watching other customers and learning about the wider society from which they came, all of which helped me learn how successfully to communicate with the person I want to serve me, imagining also all of their relationships and senses of personhood. 

Therefore, in watching the man from the next table, I am not trying to make sense of ‘another national culture’. It is instead a small culture on the go process of finding threads of meaning from my own personal cultural trajectory that help me to relate to people around me. Indeed, watching him helps me recover these aspects of my own trajectory.

If I were to speak to him, it would be drawing on the thread of what it is like to make sense of coffee queues and to get the right orders for our wives and daughters.

I am not suggesting here that he isn’t associated with ‘another culture’. I am sufficiently fortunate to have travelled to places which I imagine might be associated with his background. I have queued for bread with people from there who have pointed out to me the micro behaviours that I imagine he remembers. It was foreign – the architectures of the street, the buildings, the proxemics, the pace of movement, how people dressed, what they were carrying, indeed, how they carried the bread, which was large and hot and difficult to hold. Significantly though, the person I was with, who was born and brought up there, also found some of these things foreign to his family and upbringing. He therefore shared with me his own sense of strangeness and sense-making, which was his thread with me.

But this travel has helped me to understand more what is going on everywhere. There are other people in the café and the queue who, though sharing my national background, are very different to me. Each have their own personal cultural trajectories which bring memories of past experience very different to mine to help them make sense of how to behave and interact.

This is the nature of a varicultural world where cultural variety flows seamlessly across all boundaries. This doesn’t mean that everyone is the same. The circumstances surrounding where we are born and brought up can be hugely diverse, but to different degrees and in different ways depending on a multiplicity of factors of which nationality might be one. Nevertheless, the seamlessness of the flow means that there is always something there with which we can find threads that will push aside ‘us’-‘them’, racist narratives. And then we find that we can all think and work out in very similar ways.