What the grammar of culture can do for us – knowledge and practice

My grammar of culture has been with me in various forms since my 1999 small cultures article. I’m still working out how it works and what it can be used for. Then a recent event helped me with this. It is to do with a basic set of knowledge about the intercultural, which parallels C W Mills’s notion of the ‘sociological imagination’ – about who we are in a wider world of political and historical forces.

The grammar provides a map of the varying and opposing forces acting on any intercultural experience. There are essentialist blocks (red) that pull us apart, and non-essentialist threads (blue) that bring us together. This is a dynamic process that I’ve referred to as small culture formation on the go.

Intercultural experiences are everyday occurrences – whenever we find ourselves in settings that present cultural practices that challenge our think­ing-as-usual. This can be from visiting the family next door and going to school for the first time to travelling to distant places.

My example here is having an MRI scan in hospital outpatients. The two health professionals who were doing the scan had to give instructions to me about how and when to breath. They had what I initially perceived to be strong accents that made them difficult to understand, especially against the loud noise of the machine as it moved over me. This perception was partly due to me having already decided, from their appearance, that they were somehow ‘foreign’. This was the first block.

Especially because I felt anxious about the scan working and giving results that would help my health condition, I began to panic a bit and allowed myself to be taken in by the ‘us’-‘them’ grand narrative that surrounds me in the media and in the histories of my upbringing – that the health professionals are ‘foreign’ and ‘Other’ and have a ‘non-native speaker’ English that also carries inability in criticality, problem-solving and being able to do the job properly. 

The essentialist state­ments about culture – ‘they don’t … don’t know how … can’t …’ follow from this – our personal narratives that splinter down from the grand narratives. All the dreadful cultural stereotypes come into play here.

The grammar shows how these blocks circulate and surround, culminating in Centre structures being confirmed – those dominant forces that deny and marginalise who people really are.

The power and easy nature of these blocks are such that I really have to work hard to put them aside and find the threads – to take individual action to combat the Centre structures. This might be harder if I’m a white Western male who feels naturally complacent in a false self-belief that I’m already high on the individualism scale. This arrogant and false self-belief might itself be a driver for these blocks. I therefore need to take deCentred individual action.

Taking action does though also require knowledge. Knowing that all of us have rich personal cultural trajectories that provide a store of intercultural experience that we can bring to any new setting might not be so difficult if we just open our minds. Whenever I suggest to students that we have all in one way or another managed the intercultural when we encountered the family next door, they seem very quickly to see this and can find their own examples, and can relate them to new events.

However, understanding that we all have cultural resources from whatever our cultural upbringing that enable us to understand the workings of society and language wherever we find them might require a more specialist knowledge. To shake myself out of the prejudicial cultural block that makes me suspect the ability of the health professionals largely on the basis of their accent, does I fear require some sociological knowledge.

When I think to myself that I need to calm down, it’s to enable me to find the space to access this knowledge – that whatever the nature of their English and it’s cultural and personal background, this doesn’t prevent, and indeed might enhance, perhaps with the experience of further cultural travel, to do a good job. When I manage to to this, then, amazingly, I begin to understand everything that they say.

I might though be wrong in thinking that recognising and putting aside blocks and finding threads requires specialist knowledge. Perhaps we all do have this knowledge from our everyday lives, though not in such technical terms – if we are able not to be tempted by the blocking rumours that always surround us and rely instead on the deeper qualities of human nature.

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