Speaker 0 00:00:00 In my family, both my parents are educators. And when they were in school, there was a textbook series written by a Bengali educator named Sen. And his textbooks were known for endless footnotes and detailed explanations. So in my family, whenever someone over explains something, we might say something like, oh, there goes <unk>.
Speaker 2 00:00:41 Hello, this is Joseph Shaws and welcome to the Deep Culture Podcast where we explore culture and the science of mind. And I am here today with Ishi
Speaker 0 00:00:51 Terai. Hi Joseph. So Joseph, the title of this episode is The Complexity of Culture, the Season We are digging into ideas that may sound simple but are full of complexity.
Speaker 2 00:01:07 And so we decided that in this episode we'll look at the complexity of culture itself.
Speaker 0 00:01:14 This topic was also inspired by something that we both have noticed. There's a common tendency to talk about culture in very simple ways.
Speaker 2 00:01:25 Yes. For example, study abroad, students will tell me, oh, I'm interested in studying in China because I want to learn about the culture.
Speaker 0 00:01:35 I too hear things like the culture fascinates me. I want to experience the culture it makes, it sounds like culture is a single thing and that somehow you can understand the culture by simply going somewhere.
Speaker 2 00:01:51 But of course, a foreign culture is not an object, it's an experience, and it's a whole world of things that you have to make sense of and learn to navigate.
Speaker 0 00:02:04 For example, if you are going to China, you may need to learn how to use chopsticks or buy a ticket for the Shanghai Metro. But if you want to learn about quote unquote the culture in a deeper way, then that is just the beginning
Speaker 2 00:02:21 Because you will need to interact with people to learn how things work, how people think and learn. Chinese, and all of those things will depend on where you are in China and who you are with. There are many regions and cultural communities within China. And so of course there isn't really a single culture. And cultural learning is really a complex never ending challenge.
Speaker 0 00:02:49 And yet people talk about learning the culture in very simple, almost casual terms.
Speaker 2 00:02:57 And that does raise some questions. First of all, what does it mean to say that culture is complex? We will dig into that. And then when we are faced with this cultural complexity, why do we often talk about it or experience it in such simple terms?
Speaker 0 00:03:16 We are going to get a bit geekish. In this episode, we'll talk about complexity theory because understanding complexity can help in making sense of culture and because frankly, complexity theory is cool.
Speaker 2 00:03:31 And we'll also see that our intuitive mind, our unconscious autopilot of everyday life manages complexity by simplifying our experience of things. We have a sort of simplification bias.
Speaker 0 00:03:45 And that brings us to part one. It's not so simple. So we've said that culture is complex, but I think at least a few listeners must be thinking, well, what do you mean by culture?
Speaker 2 00:04:12 And there is a lot of debate about the meaning of this word culture, and many different definitions, whole books have been written about it.
Speaker 0 00:04:20 Still, I think it is safe to say that at the most basic level, culture refers to things that are first of all shared by a community, things like customs values, and secondly, these things that are shared, are learned and passed on. That is culture is not part of our biology.
Speaker 2 00:04:44 And the most basic insight about culture is that humans are cultural beings. We are collectively shaped by our social environment. And this was a revolutionary concept in say, the 19th century. In those days, people typically believed that there were physical differences that caused groups of people to act in a certain way,
Speaker 0 00:05:06 Right? The idea that one could have royal blood or that the color of your skin or the shape of your head could indicate your character.
Speaker 2 00:05:15 And early anthropologists like Margaret Maid for example, would argue that no, the diversity we find around the world is not because of race or blood. It is learned as we grow up in our community.
Speaker 0 00:05:30 But there is still plenty of debate about the word culture itself,
Speaker 2 00:05:36 Although I think those are kind of old debates now because we are coming to a more scientific understanding of how our social environment shapes our minds.
Speaker 0 00:05:48 And interestingly, people who study culture from the brain and mind perspective don't spend much time arguing about the definition of culture. In fact, their understanding of culture is pretty straightforward. It basically refers to shared patterns of mine.
Speaker 2 00:06:07 Yes, our cognitive systems are shaped by experience and in particular by social patterns. So growing up in a particular environment puts your mind in sync with the people around you. You learn what things mean, how to act, what's expected of
Speaker 0 00:06:24 You. And so when say a cultural neuroscientist talks about culture, they are referring to the cultural patterns in our minds and the cultural patterns in the world around us. And these patterns are so natural to us that we don't even notice them.
Speaker 2 00:06:41 And this is one reason that we think about culture in simple terms because we don't notice the cultural patterns of our own community. And that helps us understand the person who says, I want to learn about the culture. If they've never had to adjust to a new cultural world before, then they simply haven't noticed culture yet.
Speaker 0 00:07:04 But if you ask this person, what do you mean by the culture? They can come up with a lot of different things. They'll talk about the food that people eat, the clothes they wear, how people act, their values, the language, history, traditions, ceremonies, whatever.
Speaker 2 00:07:23 And all of those things are in effect complex cultural patterns. In other words, a single item on the list, let's say traditions, is actually a whole domain of knowledge. And it's interrelated with other items on that list such as history.
Speaker 0 00:07:41 And the sum total of all that knowledge goes beyond what any one individual could fully understand. So put simply everyday words we use to talk about culture represent highly complex patterns of knowledge with multiple domains. So let's get a bit geeky and talk about complexity and the nature of complex systems.
Speaker 2 00:08:17 Yes. So we've said that culture is a set of shared patterns that function as a complex system. And by that we mean that the patterns that we are calling culture emerge from the complex interaction of countless individuals.
Speaker 0 00:08:31 So let's unpack that a little bit. A complex system is one that emerges from interaction of simpler parts. The stock market, for example, individuals buy and sell stock simple interactions, but all those interactions together create the unpredictable ups and downs of the stock market. So simple interactions combined to create complex patterns.
Speaker 2 00:09:02 And this involves self-organization what is sometimes called an emergent property. No one decides how the markets will move. That fluctuation emerges from the interaction of all that buying and selling.
Speaker 0 00:09:15 And emergent properties are found in the natural world all the time, like the simple interaction of individual fish that combine to form complex patterns of a school of fish or atmospheric conditions interacting with land and water to create weather patterns.
Speaker 2 00:09:35 And in this same way, cultural patterns are a result of the interaction of countless individuals.
Speaker 0 00:09:42 And interaction creates shared experiences, shared meaning, shared ways to communicate shared expectations.
Speaker 2 00:09:52 For example, every family has its own culture and its own way of communicating. When I was growing up, instead of telling us I love you and my family, my mother would say, 1, 2, 3. That was our kind of our special code.
Speaker 0 00:10:06 Oh, that is adorable. In my family, both my parents are educators. And when they were in school, there was a textbook series written by a Bengali educator named Sen. And his textbooks were known for endless footnotes and detailed explanations. So in my family, whenever someone over explains something, we might say something like, oh, there goes sen. And we even do this sometimes in front of an oblivious outsider who doesn't get it while we share an insider chuckle. And this idea that culture emerges from interaction reflects an important lesson that complexity theory has for us. That culture emerges at different scales.
Speaker 2 00:11:01 So family interaction creates culture at a small scale, a kind of microculture and larger scale interaction creates culture at larger scales. Everything from the culture of a sports team or company culture or ethnic communities or a region or of course national cultures at the level of a country.
Speaker 0 00:11:23 And because we interact with different communities, culture overlaps and interacts in complex ways. I interact with other Indians in different parts of India. I also interact with Bengalis in Eastern India with Hindu believers in my local village.
Speaker 2 00:11:43 But somehow all this complexity feels normal to us as we navigate our interactions with people in different contexts.
Speaker 0 00:11:52 This is really true. In India, my cousin who is Bengali married a Canada woman from southern India, and the four year old daughter spoke in the English Canada and Bengali, and she knew exactly when, where, and with whom to use which language inside the family and outside.
Speaker 2 00:12:23 So this is one lesson from complexity theory that culture exists at different scales and interacts in complex ways, but we experience it as simply navigating different contexts.
Speaker 0 00:12:37 And there are other ways that culture exhibits the quality of complex systems, and this really does get geeky, but let's give a few examples.
Speaker 2 00:12:47 So first of all, complex systems have no clear boundaries,
Speaker 0 00:12:51 Which means culture isn't contained within national borders. It's hard to say exactly who is and isn't a member of a cultural community. Rather we participate in communities.
Speaker 2 00:13:05 Also, complex systems can be both very dynamic, yet highly stable.
Speaker 0 00:13:11 For example, a tropical storm is very dynamic, but also moves in a predictable fashion. Cultural communities are constantly evolving over time, but can have great continuity.
Speaker 2 00:13:25 And the behavior of complex systems are very hard to predict and can't be described perfectly in cause and effect terms. And this is why culture cannot be reduced to etiquette rules. Culture is just far too dynamic for that.
Speaker 0 00:13:41 And we have to mention the fractal nature of some complex systems,
Speaker 2 00:13:45 And this is also a bit abstract, but fractals describe things that are self-similar at different scales.
Speaker 0 00:13:53 For example, at the microscale of our cognitive processes, you find that East Asians process information more holistically and westerners more in terms of objects and categories. And that difference can be found at the larger scale of how people act. Asian societies are more collectivistic while westerners are more individualist.
Speaker 2 00:14:18 So the cultural patterns we find in people's minds are reflected at larger scales in how people act and even the structures of the society at large.
Speaker 0 00:14:29 Wow, we have put a lot of complexity in part one of this episode, but we've also said that culture is experienced as something simple,
Speaker 2 00:14:40 Which brings us to part two, simply complex. We've been saying that culture is complex, but we've also said that our experience of culture can be quite simple.
Speaker 0 00:15:02 This shouldn't surprise us at all. Weather is complex, but our experience of weather is often simple.
Speaker 2 00:15:10 Sure, we'll say, oh, it's hot today, or it looks like a storm is coming.
Speaker 0 00:15:15 We may have no idea of the atmospheric conditions that have led to that storm. We just experience it from our perspective. We participate in weather and we often don't even notice it because it's just in the background.
Speaker 2 00:15:30 And the same is true about culture, isn't it? We swim in our culture like a fish and water without ever noticing all its complexity because we are so used to navigating those waters
Speaker 0 00:15:41 Until of course we have a foreign, an experience in a new country, we have to navigate in different waters.
Speaker 2 00:15:49 And this brings us to another simple but important insight from complexity theory. Because cultural patterns are complex, they can only be explained in context,
Speaker 0 00:16:02 And that is why it's an oversimplification to say she did that because of her culture. We need to know the context to understand the reasons someone might give for doing something.
Speaker 2 00:16:14 And this is also why cultural trainings that focus on dos and don'ts or cultural etiquette will never be fully effective. Understanding behavior requires being able to look at a situation from a particular cultural point of view.
Speaker 0 00:16:30 But when I was working as a training consultant in international business, we often got requests for cultural trainings to cover those things.
Speaker 2 00:16:40 So that's another example of how we have this tendency to simplify our experience of culture.
Speaker 0 00:16:47 But there are many other ways that our minds simplify our experience of culture. We asked our podcast team about this, and this is what Zena Madar had to say.
Speaker 3 00:17:01 The first thing that comes to my mind when I think how people simplify things when talking about culture is stereotyping. I remember when growing up in Lebanon that in April and May, expats from European countries and the US would start going to the beach, while the Lebanese usually find it's still too cool for them. The Lebanese, the beach season doesn't really start before June. So you would hear people say, oh, well those foreigners do that. Although it's crazy, a certain behavior would be explained by stereotyping. And I suppose people felt better, felt they were right, while those crazy foreigners were not easy, simple, reassuring. Do I understand the complexity of culture? No, I feel that I'm ever exploring getting surprised again and again. But if you realize that you can never quote unquote learn a culture, then you recognize and acknowledge its complexity. And this is a big step forward towards becoming curious and wanting to go further or not.
Speaker 0 00:18:18 I like that she says stereotyping is reassuring. It's like a cushioning for the brain. It reduces uncertainty.
Speaker 2 00:18:26 And we talked about the need to reduce uncertainty. In episode nine, bias is not bias,
Speaker 0 00:18:33 But simply stereotypes are simplified images of a complex reality. Stereotyping is one way our mind handles information overload, or when we encounter something unusual, like foreign tourists going into the ocean in May, and we use a very simple category to explain our experience.
Speaker 2 00:18:57 And one of the points made in episode nine was that biases like stereotyping are a natural part of how our minds work, but they can lead us to wrong conclusions. As podcast team member Emory seven explains,
Speaker 4 00:19:16 International students come to Turkey from different countries. And when I ask them what things they find different, they say the culture is different. I had a similar experience with a friend of mine from Mexico who was an exchange student when I was in high school, and people were always asking him, why did you choose Turkey for your stay? And he would say, because I searched for Turkey and I saw that Mexico and Turkey have a similar culture in Mexico. We have spicy food and you have spicy food here too. So he traveled tens of thousands of kilometers to Turkey just to have similar food. And of course, Turkish food is really different from Mexican food. Ultimately, I think culture is simplified because our brains filter information around us in familiar surroundings. Cultural patterns are totally taken for granted. And in foreign environments, we are forced to simplify the things that we don't understand.
Speaker 2 00:20:27 This story is a great example of how we simplify things by comparing something new with something we already know.
Speaker 0 00:20:35 And this idea that our mind uses simple experiential categories when we have little experience is an important element in the work of Milton Bennett.
Speaker 2 00:20:47 So Turkey was a very simple category in this Mexican student's mind. And so for Bennett, the process of cultural learning involves differentiation, making our perceptual categories more complex.
Speaker 0 00:21:01 He talks about the process of cultural learning as incorporating cultural difference into one's worldview. The challenge is to enrich our perceptual categories to accept that things are different and to gradually learn to look at things from a new cultural perspective. And we do that by experiencing cultural difference and making sense of it, in effect, a process of developing a more complex worldview.
Speaker 2 00:21:32 And Yvonne and I talked about this in episode 26 when we discussed the variety of ways that people talk about cultural difference. One of the simplest ways is to talk about culture as being, seeing culture as an essential quality or a simple fact like I'm a San Diego
Speaker 0 00:21:50 And somewhat more complex is talking about culture as doing, seeing culture as a set of behaviors. The idea that culture makes us act in a certain way, like Hindus celebrate the valley, the festival of lights, to honor the triumph of good over evil.
Speaker 2 00:22:10 And an even more complex way of looking at culture is as seeing the idea that culture provides us with a way of looking at the world. So for example, let's look at this from the Tunisian perspective.
Speaker 0 00:22:23 And you and Yvonne made the point that none of those different ways of viewing culture is wrong, but some are more sophisticated, more complex than others.
Speaker 2 00:22:36 And this brings us back to our tendency to simplify things. One way we do that is through essentializing looking at culture as some singular internal quality. Oh, you are so Californian
Speaker 0 00:22:49 As though being a Californian is a single thing. And centralizing leads to another simplistic way of looking at culture in terms of cause and effect.
Speaker 2 00:23:02 For example, many times I've had Japanese people express surprise that I can use chopsticks even if they know I've been in Japan for many years.
Speaker 0 00:23:11 So in their minds, the fact of being a foreigner equals can't use chopsticks. Simple cause and effect thinking
Speaker 2 00:23:20 Their mind is taking a shortcut using a simple image of foreigners who don't use chopsticks and drawing a quick conclusion.
Speaker 0 00:23:29 And so we can add this to the list of ways our simplifies, our experience of culture, what we could call a simplification bias, stereotyping, essentializing, simplistic cause and effect reasoning, jumping to conclusions.
Speaker 2 00:23:45 And for better or for worse, these biases are simply how our minds work, which is a reminder that cultural learning requires going against some very natural tendencies.
Speaker 0 00:23:57 And that brings us to part three against the tide. So Joseph, we've been talking about complexity in a couple of different ways. In this episode, we talked about culture being a context phenomenon created by interaction. And so it can't be understood with simple cause and effect thinking. It happens at different scales. And cultural communities have no clear boundaries.
Speaker 2 00:24:37 And we've also talked about our minds simplification biases.
Speaker 0 00:24:43 So let's bring those two things together. Culture is a complex phenomenon, and cultural learning requires that we make sense of that complexity, but at the same time, our mind naturally simplifies things.
Speaker 2 00:24:59 But as cultural bridge people, our goal is to have a more complex understanding of culture and cultural difference. So our challenge is to go beyond this simplistic thinking, we're swimming against the tide, so to speak, because our tendency to simplify is so powerful.
Speaker 0 00:25:19 And one way to go against the tide is to continue to integrate new cultural experiences into our view of the world. We need to develop new cultural glasses, and we can't do it all at once because the patterns we must learn are often not obvious. It takes time and experience for them to make sense to us.
Speaker 2 00:25:42 And that's a never ending process. There are always new patterns to recognize and uncover, and that's just another sign that cultural patterns are complex.
Speaker 0 00:25:53 This brings us to one final point. We've been talking about complexity, and that will give the impression of things being abstract or mentally complicated. But from the brain and mind perspective, complex knowledge is experienced intuitively.
Speaker 2 00:26:12 And an everyday example is language. Language is enormously complex, but we use language without really being able to explain its structures. We just have a feel for how to use it.
Speaker 0 00:26:25 But we do get a taste of that complexity when we try to learn a new language. And the mark of using a new language well is to do so spontaneously and creatively without a need for conscious thinking.
Speaker 2 00:26:40 So at the highest levels, complex skills can be experienced as something simple, which is something that I think our fellow podcast team member, Zena Matar can appreciate.
Speaker 3 00:26:55 Keep in mind that simplicity can be very deep. A simple poem or song can be profoundly moving and meaningful in the same way, even supposedly. Simple intercultural experiences can move us at deep levels of the self. And as educators, we need to keep this in mind. What we need aren't more abstract theories, but ways to help learners find the aha moments that come from making sense of complex experiences.
Speaker 0 00:27:30 That is beautiful.
Speaker 2 00:27:32 It is. And when I spoke to her about this, it, it made me curious, you know, does she see her own life as complex? She was raised in Lebanon, but was forced away from home because of war and political conflict. She has lived in Australia, the United States, Germany has a multinational career and a multicultural family. And through it all has said that she remains deeply attached to her roots in Lebanon. So I asked her, do you experience your life as being complex?
Speaker 3 00:28:06 Certain parts of it, yes, definitely. The complexity comes from the fact that there are so many things which are interrelated, so it becomes complex. But I prefer to use the word rich. I find that my life has been extremely rich, and I'm thankful for this.
Speaker 2 00:28:35 And so given all this complexity, all this richness, I asked Zena, what anchors her,
Speaker 3 00:28:46 The love of the people that are in my life. It's not only family, it's also very good friends. I mean, it's people I care for who care for me, who, and it's, it's the knowledge that I love them and they love me. And yeah, and every now and then, you have proofs of this extraordinary love and yeah, it makes life a good, good life. <laugh>,
Speaker 0 00:29:15 Wow, what she says is so moving and it brings together so much of what we are talking about here. Being a cultural bridge person, navigating the complexity of different cultural worlds. These things aren't always easy, but can bring rich rewards, new connections, and caring about others.
Speaker 2 00:29:40 And we hope this podcast will help us connect to you, our dear listeners. And on that note, I think that may be a good place to bring this episode to a close, but first, we'll share some of our sources. Today we talked about the work of Milton Bennett. You can check out towards ethno relativism, a developmental model of intercultural sensitivity. And you can find that in education for the intercultural experience. Also, the Deep culture podcasts we referenced in this episode are episode nine, bias Is Not Bias. And Episode 26, the Trouble with Cultural Difference. And you can find those on the website of the Japan Intercultural Institute. The Deep Culture Podcast is sponsored by the Japan Intercultural Institute and N P O dedicated to intercultural education and research. I am the director of GI I. If you are interested in Culture and the Mind, check out J'S Brain Mind and Culture Masterclass. Also, j i I has a learning circle where we share research and best practices. To find out more, just do a web search for the Japan Intercultural Institute, and please spread the word about this podcast, post it on your favorite media platform. And as always, you can write us at DC
[email protected].
Speaker 2 00:31:07 A special thanks to Zena Matar and Emory seven for sharing their wisdom with us. And thanks as usual. To everyone on the podcast team, Yvonne VanderPol, Danielle Linz, IKO, Fritz, and of course our sound engineer Robinson Fritz. And thanks to you so much Ista for sharing this time with me today. It is always so much fun.
