What happens when Something Crosses a Cultural Barrier?
Culture—that red-hot question as of late. Our thoughts about it so full of purpose, so intent on vaguery, so telling of what little we can tell about it! Well I intend to delve into it, with all the gumption and revelation of Michelangelo striking into marble, and ask the very specific question of mechanism. What happens at that moment when two cultures interact, and something is passed from one to the other? When any manifestation of culture—communications, items, actions—crosses the barrier of understanding between them?
Each of us plays host to culture like a thread plays host to dye. And, like threads, we weave ourselves tightly into societies, pulling, rearranging, and recoloring ourselves and each other until we begin to share common qualities of pattern and color. But at the edges of these tapestries? That if not solidly blocked, fray, mix and interact? And those threads that leap, in great stitches, to burrow themselves into other tapestries and enter their weave? Or that merely skim their surface before flying off again? At these points of interaction, where threads of different types meet, the space between them becomes an interchange of manifested culture. What becomes of those manifestations in their new and different cultural environment? I answer by looking to the level of value—that level that overflows into actions, feelings, and perceptions. When something crosses from one culture into another it is revalued by the culture of the observer who then sees, treats, and even adjusts it accordingly.
What (and where…) is culture?
The resolution of culture is the person. We may speak of them having an American culture, a Chinese culture, a Korean culture, a French culture, a Dinka culture, even a “corporate culture” or “cross-country culture,” or Parisian culture… But in this we are merely identifying the common traits of different species of culture. Culture itself, culture the creature, lives only inside the individual person—in their thoughts and feelings. The things that come from the person into the space between people—that manifest them and their culture—are not themselves the culture. They merely re-present what is inside and cannot be understood by someone who does not have the same, or some part of the same, culture inside them. This, however, opens up the door to misunderstanding at every turn. Between people playing host to sufficiently different cultures, every manifestation balances between being a chance to share the wonders of a culture and a chance for misunderstanding and re-valuation.
But what is this dye, this guest, this culture? that most interesting, most insidious, most valuable thing…? The slippery, undefinable, word that the venerable Merriam-Webster has no fewer than seven different definitions of that could suite our purposes—not to mention the whole world of properly specific definitions beyond… perhaps it will suffice to condense them thus: culture is a set of customs, practices, attitudes, beliefs, and material traits associated with a social group and manifested by and within its members.[1] A definition that I would promptly like to turn backwards so that it reads: culture is a common set of values shared by people associated with a social group that then manifests into customs, practices, attitudes, beliefs, and material traits. Each culture is a system of values, with hierarchies and focuses, and it is these values that give them their interpretation of the world that pushes them to manifest it in all of these indicating words such as “practices” or “material traits.” The hierarchies (the order of importance of things) and focuses (what things are to be thought of at all), create a view of what parts of the world are valuable and how they should be assembled to create a better world—a world as it should be. Which, of course, motivates not only how familiar things are treated, but how foreign ones are as well.
Crossing Cultural Barriers
When something, such as an object, crosses over from one system of value to another—from where the observers have one type of culture inside them to where they have another—a basic conceptual exchange occurs:
To you, this object has certain qualities that are apparent and valuable. This food is meant to taste a certain way with these ingredients, be eaten at a certain occasion. This statue is of this god, meant to communicate certain key features. Yet as you hand it to me, what am I to think? Certainly not the same things as you. My first reaction will be to perform a reevaluation of what you have shown or given to me, to say “what is this?” to take my own system of values, with its hierarchies and focal points, and apply it onto the object to identify its most important, best, and worst features. “This food is quite nice, but we should add some of this ingredient.” “You put what in here?” “My, that statue has a large posterior.” “Oh, that looks like this deity of mine.” And even once you explain to me what I am capable of understanding, implanting some tiny crumbs of your culture’s richness into my mind, I will still not see it as you do. These thoughts may creep back in.
As long as you are present—or a representative of your larger culture—and you deign to speak and correct me on these matters on which you are an expert, my culture may be kept in check and the object from your culture will be protected from my culture’s machinations. Yet after you leave or turn your attention away… if the object is still with me, or if I happen upon it by itself and decide to keep it (or even to steal it, or reproduce it…), or even if my thoughts about it are left undisturbed, then my system of values will begin incessantly and unchallenged to ask me to incorporate that object. To judge it, assign my own important qualities to it, to “understand” it, and to begin to think of what is good and bad about it; what is ultimately best for it. How does it compare to the ideals that activate when I behold it? What can I do to make it good? What is its purpose…
So I may seek to incorporate it, and make it into a piece of my own culture by imprinting that culture over its original one. To fight against this, special barriers are often erected: cultural centers, museums, neighborhoods, restaurants, where cultural artifacts can have some protection from incorporation. But even this protection is simply another form of incorporation: I may claim to be protecting another culture, yet in these spaces I also change it. I make it into my idea of what that other culture should be. So the food of China in America is not the food of China in China.[2] The food of America in China is not the food of America in America. The Parthenon in London is not the same as the Parthenon in Greece.[3] And all of these remind me of my own culture by comparison and reduces the other culture to an exoticism, an occasional enjoyment, an other for being-better-than… and though some semblance of the culture can truly survive this way, the effects of it being enclosed by another culture, of being something that has crossed a cultural barrier and is being revalued, are absolutely apparent.
Culture is stubborn but flexible. It seeks to survive, to be realized, yet with every interaction it erodes. It becomes just that little bit more like what is interacted with, as it learns and adapts new traits. With enough time, outside influence can wear away at it entirely. Unless I can throw up walls, defensive lines, and barriers of geography and language to protect it—and then allow the threads inside those to mix, weave, and conglomerate… Then I can engage in tolerance; yet a tolerance that truly is not interested in the other as more than a reflection. An orient for my occident.[4]
Revaluing People
Yet there are more than objects at stake here. The person themselves, at least the direct external manifestations of their self, can also cross cultural barriers. They can be put out into the neutral space of observation and, surrounded by a different culture, become subject to reevaluation. The clothes they wear, the words they speak and the actions they take, all are imprinted with their culture yet deeply connected to the person themselves. And when you revalue all of these, you revalue the person themselves and the whispering voice of morality, of culture, begins to ask you to change them. At the very least to treat them in a way that will change them. And they, absorbing this treatment, will have to consider changing themselves and their culture on the inside too. And so goes the natural process of assimilation that makes culture so insidious. The process that either kills the culture, forces the person into retreat, or damages the person so severely they are practically killed.[5]
Such is the mechanism that enacts itself when cultural barriers are crossed. Insidious is it not? Surely there must be more than a conflict of values being fought unconsciously and constantly? Of course! There is great beauty to be found in the honest interchange of culture—much of value and interest to learn. But there is also, as I have made careful note of here, an insidious tendency to be kept carefully under scrutiny. And if we are careful with it, we can create something even more beautiful than tolerance—a small piece of the culture inside us that is really interested in other cultures and considers them and understanding them valuable in itself. With this, and with vigilance, we can have open conversation and interchange between very different people and so build lives and worlds fuller of beauty.
[1] A generally serviceable interpretation of the definitions. I did, however, choose to exclude the implication that culture itself exists in its manifestations. It is more accurate, in my view, to say that these manifestations have an imprint of culture, being recognizably of the culture that lives inside the people that created them, but not themselves being hosts to the culture—since they are static reflections of culture at a moment in time, but are not actively producing new manifestations of that culture. Merriam Webster’s many definitions to be found here.
[2] An interesting article entitled “Chop Suey as Imagined Authentic Chinese Food: The Culinary Identity of Chinese Restaurants in the United States” by Haiming Liu (2009) details a little bit of how Chinese food has had to adapt to western tastes and how the new cultural environment, with its new values pertaining to the taste of food, has shaped Chinese-American cuisine. Read it here.
[3] The Parthenon has been split since ~1800 when a British ambassador had about half of the sculptures that made up the iconic carvings of the building shipped to England (see: the Elgin Marbles). They are now on display in the British Museum, though there are various arguments for their return to stand in a museum in Greece alongside their fellow carvings. James Bereford in his article “Museum of Light: The New Acropolis Museum and the Campaign to Repatriate the Elgin Marbles” (2015) details some of these arguments, though offers a rebuttal. Read it here.
[4] Orientalism is a broadly used term. Here I look specifically to the tendency noted by Edward Said in his book Orientalism for Europeans during the height of colonialism to view the east (a.k.a the “orient”) as merely a point of comparison for the west (a.k.a the “occident”). I look particularly towards his Introduction.
[5] Of interest may be an episode of Robert Evan’s podcast Behind the Bastards, “Canada’s Dark Secret: Residential Schools” (2020). Where he goes in depth on the horrors of Canada’s “Residential School” system whereby young first nations people were taken from their tribes and homes and forced into underfunded prison-like schools with the eventual goal of total assimilation and the elimination of Native cultures. This extreme case of revaluation of the person resulted in an extremely high suicide rate among the people subjected to this system—the result of the horrible conditions of course, but also of the attempt to kill the culture inside the person. Essentially all aspects of the person, especially their culture, were stripped away until there was nothing left… it is then not so surprising that the body and the remaining fragments of the person would follow also into the void. Listen here
In better situations, such as people living abroad, there is the possibility of retreat—of going back into some version of the person’s original culture; and this is often seen.
