Small culture formation on the go everywhere – material culture 3 – and the intercultural imagination

Following my previous two blogs, the materiality of small culture formation on the go can be seen wherever we look. This is our everyday engagement with the intercultural in which we position and reposition ourselves in working out how to conform, contribute, resist, stay or pass on in response to the flux of cultural life around us.  

Despite false propositions that so-labelled ‘Western culture is not’, I believe that for all of us this is a relational process through which we interconnect with each other and the objects around us. That we all share this deep methodology enables us to learn from how this is done, about our own cultural experience, wherever we are.

Sometimes it takes particular events to draw our attention. These may be in culturally near or distant places. But the greater unfamiliarity of the latter might be more likely to shake our think­ing-as-usual, to see something we hadn’t previously thought of even though it’s always around us.

In a small hotel in Italy in a breakfast buffet, it wasn’t so-labelled ‘Italian culture’ that drew my attention. On the basis of bits of language that I could hear and clues from physical appearance and demeanour, other people there were from a variety of other countries.

It wasn’t possible to order eggs; and I was wondering how to elegantly shell and eat the hard-boiled eggs that were available. This might seem like a simple thing; but I hadn’t done it for quite a long time, and never in a public place.

Perhaps it’s because I’m these days thinking about cultural threads and materiality that I began noticing more acutely what was going on around me. Someone was eating a croissant with a knife and fork. At another table someone was peeling a kiwi fruit, then cutting it into pieces which she put into a bowl to mix with yoghurt. In both cases these were not the micro-eating habits that were familiar to me. 

As I looked around further, it seemed that almost everyone there was adapting their accustomed material-culture micro-practices to the small-culture setting which was a little unfamiliar to all of us. Although many of us were probably used to breakfast in hotels, each time is different due to all sorts of national, regional, corporate and institutional factors and the personal styles of the hotel staff.

There was also a particular visibility of behaviour in the setting – like a laboratory with a particular task – to eat breakfast and begin the day – in front of each other – choosing tables in the bounded geography of the space available – some managing being with family or colleagues themselves behaving differently because of the place and proximity.

One can imagine that each person walking in and looking around in front of the others will be to some degree self-conscious about ‘good behaviour’ – brought from whatever sense of ‘I’ or ‘we’ – nationality, region, community, class, sub-culture, profession – they want to be or not be identified with. 

It might not have been eating habits that everyone was focusing on. It might have been how they dressed and walked and sat – and some far less self-conscious than others. For the less self-conscious there would nevertheless be multiple tacit connections.

There’s always a variety of cultural styles. Regarding eating croissants, also when just using fingers: holding it with or without a tissue, cutting it or breaking it, taking it to the mouth in whole or in pieces, and so on.

It was all of this that helped me to find an efficient and hopefully elegant way to take the shell off the hard boiled egg – the tapping of it with a knife encouraged by the sound of tapping at other tables – wondering how self-conscious their tapping was – then cutting it in half end-to-end, putting something on it to make it less dry, with appropriate holding and finger movements, and so on.

This localised experience then sparked recollections from other near and distant times and places.

Seeing the person peeling the kiwi fruit invokes first memories of how members of my Iranian family peel oranges – first cutting around and removing the top and then top-to-bottom segments, and then arranging the peel as a bed for the orange pieces. I liked its mathematical elegance more than what I’d been brought up with, and to a degree learnt it. (This is not to say that there aren’t plenty of elegant mathematical methods for preparing and eating in my upbringing, some of which I pointedly rejected.) 

So it isn’t just eating the egg efficiently, but perhaps also appearing ‘sophisticated’ and ‘travelled’. I’ve written elsewhere about Anna being marginalised by her friend’s parents being disparaging about her ‘provincial manners’ at the dinner table not being sufficiently ‘cosmopolitan’.

This demandingly complex micro-politics is very much part of small culture formation on the go, where there will be blocks to us being understood and also understanding others; but also threads that will bring us together – to make connections across distant as well as near experiences.

This ability to find threads might be termed an intercultural imagination – where we can locate ourselves within a bigger picture of the intercultural. Anna might therefore be able to find a thread, unpleasant though it might be, between being marginalised at her friend’s home and dealing generally with conflicts throughout her life – and apparent conflicts in culturally distant places.

This is all about the threads of hybridity that flow seamlessly in every direction within the varicultural flow. This and the experience in the materiality of the hotel breakfast room also has implication for ‘what is the foreign’.

‘Foreignness’ is a reality. Someone will feel more ‘foreign’ in the breakfast room if they are unfamiliar with the food items – appearance, names, where and how they are sourced, and other things – because it’s ‘not their country’. They might not have the language to ask.

This is however relative. At the same time there’s something about this relativity that we all share. We all know what it’s like not to have the right language even if its ‘our’ language, not to be like ‘those people’ at the next table even if we share nationality, not to be familiar with hotels or particular types of hotels. Also what it’s like to have personal and civilisational histories that deeply inform how we do things, and to therefore do things that ‘they’ can’t – but then to realise that our histories can be the same sorts of things as their histories.

It is this commonality of feeling that is the thread of hybridity.

The reference here to intercultural imagination is inspired by C W Mills’s Sociological imagination, Oxford, 1959, which is about how we locate ourselves within the wider forces of society.