In this
blog I would like to explain my own perspective, the same Scott raised in this
blog too: “If we come from a different cultural background, how can we ever
know what motivates a person from another culture?”
I've always been fascinated with international relations, mostly because it always
impacted my own growing up and perspectives I've gained during the past 15
years. When I moved to the United States 10 years ago, I had no real idea of
how different we are from each other even though both Germany and the US are
considered as Western states.
My initial questions were “How do you learn about people's cultures?” and more importantly “How do you build relationships with people from other cultures?” To me, the only way to do that was to open my mind and try to understand where people come from, their experience and history.
My initial questions were “How do you learn about people's cultures?” and more importantly “How do you build relationships with people from other cultures?” To me, the only way to do that was to open my mind and try to understand where people come from, their experience and history.
Building
relationships across cultures was key to me. I traveled the world and my goal
was to understand other cultures and bring in my perspective as well. Relationships
are powerful. Our one-to-one connections with each other are the foundation for
change. And building relationships with people from different cultures, often
many different cultures, widens our horizons and makes us more receptive to
necessities for world change, peace, and global projects.
I
believe that having an open mind to any conflict situation and listening to all
the different perspectives has made me more versatile and receptive in the job
I am working in today. I work with different cultures every day and understand
their backgrounds, gender dynamics, work ethics and attitudes much better.
However,
the most interesting and to me unexpected quality I’ve learned during my time
in the US and my travels was to become aware of my own culture. It never occurred
to me that I myself had a gap in my knowledge about myself and where I come
from. When we study in high school, we are most likely to learn about our own
countries in a biased way. When I took political science and history in the
United States I realized that the first step in learning about other people's culture
is to know my own.
It took
my years to do that and understand. Now I assimilate with both the US and
Germany and I can still see tremendous difference in policy decision making
strategy, relevance of issues and the idea of living per se. I think we learn
more every day and we should never be certain that we are complete in terms of
understanding where people come from and why they act in a certain way.
Heiti,
ReplyDeleteBoth you and Scott raise some interesting points about the question from class, Can we know the motivations of those from another culture? Like you, I think that education is the most important and first step in beginning to understand other cultures. However, are there any universal's that are true no matter the society? If not, then IR might be really limited in making any kind of theory. Your example of the difference between Germany and the US policy decisions and Scott's English to Italian "Lost in Translation", highlight the differences between even Western societies. What can we hope to understand of vastly different cultures?
Good question Amit. And I believe this will be the puzzle. I think we can hope to understand what we want to understand. In the other class I have we talked about the psychology of leaders and decision makers and during that class I came up with a quote for myself: "People tend to see what they expect to see. Our preexisting images are the product of our past experiences. And sometimes we need to change those, to go beyond our boundaries and to see further than our expectations permit". I feel like this can be applied to everything and how we see the things in life. We need to limit our expectations, so we can open up for understanding more than that and ourselves.
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