中西文化之鉴 跨文化交际教程

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1、Chapter 3: Making GeneralizationsWhen people have little information about a group of people they are likely to think of them in a very general way. If the other people with whom they interact also lack information about that group, they are likely to share an overly generalizing based on limited or

2、 inaccurate information is called stereotyping.We all make generalizations Everyone generalizes every day just to make sense of his experience. No one can respond to every situation as if it were entirely new and unique. A student anticipating a class taught by a teacher he has never met, generalize

3、s from his experience that teachers have certain typical behaviors, opinions, and expectations. The student interacts with the new teacher he meets based on the generalizations he has made from his previous teachers. This is normal and sensible. The student may have a problem, however, if the genera

4、lization he makes is too broad or is based on inadequate or outdated information. Such an inappropriate generalization can get him into trouble.Some generalizations are too broad, out-of date, or inaccurateWhen I was asked to give a lecture to a second year intensive reading class about the American

5、 character I was faced with a complex problem of generalization. First of all, are all Americans alike? Do they all have the same character? Of course not, but it is possible to say that Americans tend to have this or that attitude or speak in this or that way. People with a shared experience and sh

6、ared history do have things in common.The students had been reading an essay by the respected American historian Henry Steele Commager. In my lecture I was supposed to expand on what Commager had said about the American character. The essay was written in the 1960s and I was lecturing in the 1990s.

7、Surely much had changed in that time. Another problem was that Commager was comparing American culture to European cultures. While his generalizations may have been appropriate at the time the essay was written and for his intended audience, it was not as useful a generalization for Chinese universi

8、ty students reading it in the 1990s.A further problem was that Commager was describing what have come to be called dominant culture Americans. There was no mention of subcultures, regional or social class differences. I realized that Chinese students who formed their generalizations about Americans

9、from Commagers essay would have many misconceptions.A generalization that was too broadWhen I first arrived in hong kong I was invited to a family home for dinner. I had read about leaving food in the bowl to indicate that you have had enough, so after having may fill I left about half an inch of ri

10、ces at the bottom of my bowl. To my horror the lady of the house gave me a real mouthful, in Cantonese of course. Not speaking the language myself at that time, I had no idea what I had done wrong. I asked my new Chinese friend why his mother had shouted at me so angrily, and I was told that she was

11、 upset because I had left some rice in ny bowl. Apparently leaving food in your bowl is not the correct thing to do in the South of China.Some generalizations include positive or negative judgmentsIn my lecture I tried to point out these problems and caution the students about making generalizations

12、, but usually that does not happen. Thousands, if not millions, of Chinese university students have read that essay and consider it a reliable source. If was reliable for its time and for its intended audience, but it isnt necessary reliable for all time and for all audiences. Undoubtedly students i

13、n other cultures read similar essays about China.Another problem with generalizations is that sometimes the information we receive about other cultures contains biases. These can be positive biases or negative biases. A reader might think the information is purely factual, while in reality it is int

14、ended to encourage a particular attitude toward a specific group or culture. Sometimes even the authors are not aware of their own biases. A few years ago the prestigious Asia Society in the used in the United States did a study of how Asian cultures were described in textbooks used in American scho

15、ols. They found that American books “often present Asian cultures negatively, regarding them as hindrances to progress or as primitive trappings that will become outmoded when change has taken place.” Students using these textbooks are subtly learning that Western culture is superior to Asian cultur

16、e.Such short comings in cross-cultural education on both sides of the Pacific should make us cautious Avoiding generalizations that are too broadIn a popular book Joel Garreau put forth the idea that the region of North America are so different from one another that they can best understood as separ

17、ate cultures or nations.The Nine Nations of North AmericaConsider the way North America really works. It is Nine Nations. Each has is capital and its distinctive web of power and influence. Several have readily acknowledged national poets, and many have characteristic dialects and mannerisms. Some a

18、re close to being raw frontiers; others have four centuries of history. Each has a peculiar economy; each commands a certain emotional allegiance from its citizens. These nations look different, feel different, and sound different from each other, and few of their boundaries match the political line

19、s drawn on current maps. Some are clearly divided topographically by mountains, deserts, and rivers. Others are separated by architecture, music, language, and ways of making a living. Each nation has its own list of desires. Each nation knows how it plans to get what it needs from whoevers got it.

20、Most important, each nation has a distinct prism through which it views the world.Its valuable to recognize these divergent realities; san Francisco and Los Angeles are not just two cities. They represent two value structures. Indeed they are the capitals of two different nations Los Angeles the cap

21、ital of MexAmerica, and san Francisco that of Ecotopia. Chicago is not a capital city, because there is no such thing as the “Midwest”. Chicago is properly an important border metropolis directing the trade in values and enterprise between the Foundry and the Breadbasket.Yet the existence of interst

22、ate highways, dense air connections, cheap long distance rates, ubiquitous television and the celebrated franchised hamburger has lulled many, incorrectly, into some sense that North America has become utterly homogenized, if not bland.Joel Garreau, Houghton Mifflin, 1981The excerpt from Nine Nation

23、s of North America reminds us that many subcultures exist within most national cultures. In this case cultural differences are described in terms of regional economies and characteristics of the populations living in those regions. This is a rather unconventional way of categorizing cultural differe

24、nces in the U.S. People are more accustomed to thinking of American subcultures in terms of race and ethnic groups. In other countries language differences define the boundaries between subcultures as in the case of French speaking and English speaking Canada.To avoid overgeneralizations, pay attent

25、ion to levels of cultureIn China people also define themselves as different from one another. Living in Jiangsu Province I have found that people make distinctions between people from the east and those from south of the Yangtze River and those from the North (economic differences). People also defi

26、ne others as similar or different from themselves on the basis of urban or rural residence, occupation (professionals and workers), ethnicity (Han or one of the national minorities) and age.Levels of CultureAs almost everyone belongs to a number of different groups and categories of people at the sa

27、me time, people unavoidably carry several layers of mental programming within themselves, corresponding to different levels of culture. For example:l A national level according to ones country (or countries for people who migrated during their lifetime)l A regional and/ or ethnic and/or religious an

28、d/or linguistic affiliation level, as most nations are composed of culturally different regions and/ or ethnic and/ or religious and/ or language groups;l A gender level, according to whether a person was born as a girl or as a boy;l A generation level, which separates grandparents from parents from

29、 children;l A social class level associated with educational opportunities and with a persons occupation or profession.By Geert Hofstede，Culture and Organizations, 1991Paying attention to the many levels of culture is one way to avoid overgeneralizing. People do not usually think of people who are d

30、ifferent from them in age, gender or social class as belonging to different cultures. If, however, they realize that people who are different in various ways experience the world somewhat differently from the way they experience it.For instance, a Chinese urban dweller may be sympathetic to the prob

31、lems of a farmer in the countrtyside. He or she may admire the farmer and advocate social policies that would benefit him and his family. At the same time the urban dweller might feel unable to fully understand the experience of that farmer, and it is likely that he would not want his daughter to ma

32、rry the farmers son. When differences in levels of culture involve age differences, people talk about the generation gap; when they involve differences between mens and womens attitudes or values, people refer to it as the gender gap. The use of the word “gap” is revealing, because if indicates that

33、 people in these different categories often have difficulty understanding each other. They do not fully share meanings with one another.Negative StereotypesWhen I conducted this survey in a class of third year English majors, I found that students gave quite low scores to people from Arab and Moslem

34、 cultures, so I told them this story.I feel at home hereOne day I met a man from Lebanon who was working for a foreign company in Nanjing. “How do you like living in China?” I asked.“I like living in China very much. I feel comfortable here,” he said, “because Chinese culture is so much like my home

35、 culture in the Middle East.”The students were very surprised and wanted to know what these similarities were, because their images of his culture did not in clued any similarities. The man told me that his culture and Chinese culture shared a strong emphasis on family values including respect for e

36、lders and unquestioning loyalty to family alike in their conservative attitudes regarding relationships between men and women as compared to Western cultures. In China as at home, people understood his values including his obligations and feelings about family and respected them. This made him feel

37、more at home in China than in America or Europe.The students then told me the images they had of Moslem cultures. The people are fanatic religious believers; women are submissive and oppressed by men; they are sometimes featured in news reports of terrorism. It became clear that the students had lit

38、tle information about Middle Eastern cultures beyond what they knew from news reports and that this accounted for their negative bias or prejudice.We want to be close to people who are alike usThe survey results showed that most important for a perception of similarity was Chinese culture followed b

39、y education, residence in a developed country and ethnicity or race. In essays that explained their responses, many students explained their choices by saying that there is an “echo of the heart” when two people share culture. They felt there was something intangible and non-verbal about the intimac

40、y that was possible only with a foreigner. Many students, however, rated educated foreigners higher than less educated members of their own culture.Gender differences also proved to be important. Some students said that a Chinese man might marry a Japanese woman but a Chinese woman would not marry a

41、 Japanese man. Students who answered in this way believe that Chinese men treat women better than Japanese women. Many others did not feel that intimate friendships were possible with members of the opposite sex. (T/his is another similarity between Middle Eastern cultures and Chinese culture.)Stere

42、otypes and prejudices A generalization that goes beyond the existing evidence, and inaccurate or overgeneralization, is a stereotype. We might have positive stereotypes (members of a certain group have good qualities) as well as negative stereotypes (members of the group have undesirable characteris

43、tics). In either case it is the inaccuracy or overgeneralization of the characteristics that we attribute to a group that is the problem. Stereotypes that include negative feelings and attitudes toward a group are prejudices. Strong prejudices are sometimes described as racism, ageism and extreme na

44、tionalism. A stereotype involves a persons thinking while a prejudice includes negative feelings as well as negative beliefs about members of a group. Prejudice takes many forms:Severe prejudiceSome people believe that members of a particular group are inferior according to some standard. For instan

45、ce, people who believe that women are inferior in mental ability to men are often called sexists, while people that blacks are genetically inferior to whites are called racists. Such people deeply believe that members or the group are not worthy of equal or even decent treatment. This kind of severe

46、 prejudice was expressed by many Euro-Americans in their relationship to Native Americans when they agreed with the slogan, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Today we are repelled by such terrible feelings, but we all know that such severe prejudice still exists in the world. A number of rece

47、nt regional wars have been accompanied by words and deeds described by horrified observers as genocide, the attempt to kill all members of the opposing group. Research on prejudice shows that this kind of severe prejudice decreases with education. More educated people are less likely to think that p

48、eople from another group are inferior or in some way less than fully human.Symbolic prejudiceSome people have negative feelings about a particular group because they feel that the group is a threat to them in some way. They do not dislike the group itself but feel that the group is a threat to a way

49、 of life that they value. For instance, in explaining their responses on the survey students often said that rural relatively uneducated Han Chinese have a “low cultural level”. In discussing their opinions, it became clear that my educated students felt that uneducated people, especially those comi

50、ng to the city from the countryside, threatened their way of life. They might become criminal, might cheat, might live in an unsanitary way or otherwise make the city less civilized. Those with symbolic prejudice may feel that members of a group (women, rural migrants, immigrants from a particular c

51、ountry, etc.) are making unreasonable demands on the society. They may feel the group is costing them money, driving down wages, putting too great a burden on the public schools or causing overcrowding, crime or a decline in family values. This type of prejudice is more common members of the educate

52、d middle class in various countries than the first type.Tokenism Some people have negative feelings about members of a particular group but do not want to admit this, even to themselves. Such people do not view themselves as prejudiced and to prove this to themselves and others they often participat

53、e in unimportant but positive behavior toward members of the group. For instance, a person can convince himself or herself that he or she is a small amount of money to a cause of a minority group by donating the same time the person is likely to pass up opportunities to engage in more important beha

54、viors relative to the group, such as giving a significant amount of time and energy to a project that would benefit the group. We might show our lack of prejudice toward the disabled by helping someone in a wheelchair to cross the street, but we may be unwilling to work to make sure that city street

55、s and public buildings are accessible to everyone who must use a wheelchair.Subtle prejudiceSome people behave toward members of a group in a positive and friendly way in relatively distant social situations but show their prejudice in more personal or intimate social situations. For instance, at a

56、banquet, in the office or at any public social event, the person will be polite and respectful, even friendly, toward someone from the group he or she feels prejudice against. In more personal situations such as a dinner at someones home or in a group of close friends, the person with subtle prejudi

57、ce may be uneasy or unfriendly toward the person from the group he does not like. He or she is showing that they want to keep members of this group at a distance and not include them in more personal relationships.Real likes and dislikesSome people may have negative feelings about members of a group

58、 because they dont like some of the behavior of members of that group. For instance, someone may really be bothered by loud music and knows from experience that members of one group are more likely to play loud music. The person may respect the musical tradition of that group but still may not like

59、it. If the older people in your area are very fond of Chinese opera and like to play their music in a disturbing way in a less than pleasant manner. Westerners visiting China sometimes comment on their dislike of spitting or the standard of cleanliness in public toilets. When they meet these conditi

60、ons, their interactions with the local people involved will probably be negatively influenced by their dislike, even if they fully understand the reasons for the unpleasant situation they find themselves in.Preference for the familiarIt is more relaxing and comfortable to interact with people with w

61、hom we share culture, language, level of education, beliefs, style of communication and experience. What looks like prejudice may, in fact, be a preference for non-stressful and enjoyable interactions. Lack of familiarity with a group or lack of fluency in a language can make it difficult for people

62、 to communicate and the risk of making a mistake is higher. If someone is unwilling to make the extra effort needed, he or she may appear to be insensitive to members of a particular group. It may be that it is only unfamiliarity that causes the insensitivity and misunderstanding. In these instances

63、 improved communication and more familiarity with the group may help to improve the situation.Attitudes of cultural superiority Attitudes and opinions about another culture may be positive or negative, accurate or inaccurate, but what about our opinions about our own culture? It is normal and natura

64、l for each of us to be proud of our own cultures achievements, values and characteristics, but sometimes we go too far. We allow our pride to turn into an attitude that others are not as good as we are. Here are attitudes of superiority often associated with specific nationalities:l Americans might

65、think that America is the biggest the best, the newest and the richest, and all others are a bit slow, old fashioned, rather poor and somewhat on the small side. Visitors to the US have commented that many Americans think all newcomers want to become Americans.l Some Chinese think they have the highest civilization in the world, that their present relative poverty is the result of historical forces that will soon be corrected, and that the world will one day recognize the superiority of Chinese civilization.l Spaniards may take pride in being especially brave.l The French may be