ibunka TB_U4

Make yourself at home The interaction styles that go together with these different “geographies” are also widely different. Americans expect their guests to help themselves, as Jeremy states on page 30: “Sure, I do (give a tour of my home to guests). I want them to be able to really relax. Once I’ve shown them around most of the rooms and where everything is, my guests are free to help themselves to any food or drink, and then they don’t need me to guide them. In this way, they can truly feel at home.” A French person, in contrast, will hesitate to help themselves to food or drink in another person’s fridge, even after being invited to do so. In British culture as well, this is “not the done thing.” Sometimes the gap in norms and expectations can cause some difYiculty. This was made acutely clear in the situation described on page 31 by Japanese respondent Masami, who went quite hungry for a week at the beginning of her homestay in Australia, since expectations about what hosts and guests should do were not completely clear. Host and guest responsibilities In the chapter on “The House” in her book Cultural Misunderstandings: The French-American Experience (University of Chicago Press, 1990), anthropologist Raymonde Carroll gives a clear explanation of these cultural patterns. She explains that in French culture the guest has the responsibility to know the rules, whereas in American culture the host is supposed to tell the guest if there are any limits on where they can go and what they can do. As we did in the Cultural Commentary of Unit 1 (Introducing Yourself), we can connect this with the concept of high/low context cultures. The renowned ethnologist Edward T. Hall characterizes American culture as a “low context culture”. This means that people rely comparatively less on the context to understand the meaning of situations and words. They prefer and need more explicitness. By contrast, Japanese culture is a comparatively high context culture: the social context provides many clues to communication, and less needs to be explicitly said. Many European cultures are said to fall somewhere between these two extremes. The survey responses in this unit are a particularly powerful demonstration of diversity amongst foreign cultures. One of the aims of this course is to steer students away from simplistic “them-versus-us” dichotomies (sometimes alarmingly reduced to “Japan is this way, and (all) other countries are another”.) Careful reading of the responses will reveal the crucial fact that not all Western cultures are the same . French culture is more like that of North America when it comes to the desire to invite friends to your home, but much more like Japanese culture in regards to guest behavior. References and further reading • Carroll, R. (1988), Cultural Misunderstandings : the French-American experience , Chicago : University of Chicago Press • Hall, E.T. (1976), Beyond Culture , Garden City, N.Y. : Anchor Press

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UNIT 4 | CULTURAL COMMENTARY