Who on Earth are we? Part 10

Callum: Hello and welcome to Talk about English and the tenth programme in our
series on culture, Who on Earth are we? Today, with the help of Rebecca Fong,
a teacher of inter-cultural communication at the University of the West of
England, Marc Beeby looks at what is probably the main difficulty we face
when we try to communicate with people from other cultures. What is this
difficulty? Here’s Marc.
Marc: Quite simply, our own culture gets in the way. We’ve already heard, in earlier
programmes, that communication problems can arise because of the different
ways cultures use language, gesture, non-verbal communication - and we’ve
learnt that the way a culture chooses to communicate is the product of its
environment, and of its values, beliefs and attitudes. As members of a culture,
we carry our culture’s attitudes with us - they’re part of who we are. And so,
when we talk to people from different cultures, or visit foreign countries, we’ll
probably be faced with different attitudes, and different ways of doing things.
And it’s at this point that we can meet some serious intercultural difficulties.
Rebecca Fong guides us through these difficulties now, with help and
comments from people from around the world. Rebecca begins with food…
Rebecca Fong
Let’s just take the business of eating as an example. What we eat - whether or not we eat dog
or raw fish or snake or pork or beef or rice or potatoes - all of these things arise from different
conditions for different agricultural or environmental or religious or social reasons and what
about when we eat and how much we eat and food rituals such as whether we eat noisily or
quietly or whether it’s OK to eat in public or not and the people that we eat with and the status
of different types of food in our cultures - all of these things aren’t just simple acts that we all do exactly the same everywhere - in fact they all have culture specific norms and rules and
values attached to them.
Mounia el Kouche
In many Western countries I’ve been in I’ve seen that people just rush out, grab a sandwich
for lunch. It’s almost a hassle to eat. However, in Morocco it’s completely the opposite. typical family’s lunch will be much larger than western countries are used to. It will be the
main meal of the day so it’ll be huge. It’ll be one big plate in the middle usually, with meat,
vegetables, a sauce. Everybody has bread to dip inside and take what they want to eat. So I
think usually there’ll be about six, on average seven people round one plate, and the meals
could take a whole morning to prepare. that’s why often the women stay home and they cook
and it’s a very big thing.
Rebecca Fong
Not surprisingly we find it much easier to get on with cultures who do things in a similar way
to us than with cultures who do things very differently. And so we’re actively looking for
things that we have in common with them all the time and that means that we tend to equate
sameness and similarity positively, whereas difference and especially extreme difference is
perceived negatively because we are unable to understand really why people would choose to
do or choose to organise things differently from the way that we have chosen to do them or
organise them.
Emma Kambangula
It was quite difficult to live with Angolans the same way we live with Namibians. First
there’s the language difference, secondly our cultures are quite far different from each other.
Take for example the first time when we met with a group of Angolans going to a funeral.
They were kind of dancing and you thought they were happy or something. We thought how
can you mourn somebody like this because in Namibia it’s a serious mourning and you can
see it.
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Группа Learning English. Продолжение текста здесь: [bad word] /downloads.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/webcast/scripts/whoonearth/tae_whoonearth_10_080703.pdf