Episode 61 - Is Culture Real?

[00:00:01] Speaker A: I moved to Italy as a child and in many ways my body became Italian. My Italian hands are probably the most deeply cultural part of me. When I speak Italian, my hands take off like they've had too much espresso. [00:00:25] Speaker B: Hello, this is Joseph Scholz, and welcome to the Deep Culture Experience, the podcast that dives deep into the psychology of intercultural understanding. And I am here with Ishita Rai. Great to be recording with you on this cool Tokyo fall evening. [00:00:41] Speaker C: Hi, Joseph. The weather here has been rather erratic, but I'm really happy to be recording this podcast with you. So the title of this episode is Is Culture Real? [00:00:54] Speaker B: There is some background to this question. It was inspired by a statement by Geert Hofstadter, maybe the single most influential cross cult researcher. And famously, he said, quote, culture does not exist. [00:01:09] Speaker C: And this is an interesting statement for us because we are both intercultural educators. Our job is to help people gain cultural insights. And experiencing a foreign culture is psychologically super powerful. And if so, why does the biggest name in cross cultural comparison say that culture doesn't exist? [00:01:33] Speaker B: And so in this episode, we will be exploring this contrast, culture as a powerful experience, something that is deeply embodied versus culture as it is often conceptualized as an abstraction, a group tendency. [00:01:50] Speaker C: But first, a bit more about what's behind that statement. Hofstader was interested in measuring culture using psychometric instruments, most typically surveys. His approach was statistical. He was the first one to create cultural rankings for countries, like saying that Australia scores high in individualism, whereas Pakistan scores low. [00:02:17] Speaker B: And I think understanding Hofstadter's thinking is important because his way of talking about culture has been so influential. [00:02:25] Speaker C: But his story is also just interesting. He was not a specialist in culture per se, but he was the one who created a dominant paradigm for studying cultural difference. [00:02:39] Speaker B: But the flip side of that is that for educators, foreign experiences are more important than statistics. And all of this boils down to how you think about culture as something abstract or something that is embodied literally in your body. [00:02:57] Speaker C: You know, this makes for a kind of odd episode. We are going to geek out on Goethe Hofstrader's story. We'll talk about things like exploratory factor analysis or latent constructs. But we're also going to hear stories from the podcast team that remind us just how how real an embodied culture is. We look at embodied cognition and why this is important for educators to understand. [00:03:26] Speaker B: And that brings us to part one. Culture isn't real. [00:03:44] Speaker C: So let's start with the story of culture as a concept. Let's go Back in time, before our modern concept of culture existed. [00:03:55] Speaker B: We'll go back to the late 18th century, early 19th century in Germany, a time when there were romantic notions about the common people. And there were intellectuals like Wilhelm von Humboldt who talked about the people, the Volk of a particular region. And he said that each community had its own culture. [00:04:18] Speaker C: And this is kind of an aside, but these romantic notions were one of the main reason that the Grimm's brothers were collecting fairy tales like Cinderella or Snow White, which were of course greatly modified by Disney. [00:04:35] Speaker B: That is so true. The originals were so gruesome. Anyway, the Oxford English Dictionary dates the adjective cultured back to the 18th century. It referred to someone who was refined, educated, sophisticated. And this was related to the Enlightenment, which promoted the idea of human perfectibility, self improvement. In other words, one could become cultured as opposed to one's character being determined by blood or race. So at the time it was really a progressive notion of. [00:05:08] Speaker C: But our more modern sense of culture or cultures didn't really appear until the end of the 19th century. And this was when Europeans and Americans were sailing to so called exotic places, trying to understand the so called natives. [00:05:28] Speaker D: Right? [00:05:28] Speaker B: And this is when people first attempted to study culture scientifically. Anthropologists like Franz Boas, Branislaw Malinowski and later Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead. And they most often used ethnography, like Margaret Mead's famous study of teenagers in American samoa in the 1920s. She wanted to know if teenage rebellion was biologically innate or primarily cultural. [00:05:56] Speaker C: And for more on that period, definitely check out episode 40, which tells us the story of Franz Boas, a massively important figure who pioneered methods for studying culture empirically. And the other person we should mention is Edward Tylor, one of the founders of the field of anthropology. In 1871 he published his book Primitive Culture, in which he gives one of the first formal definitions of culture. He says culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. [00:07:07] Speaker B: And maybe you hear this and think, well, this definition sounds pretty standard, but he was one of the first people to talk about culture as a singular thing, as a complex whole. But that creates a problem because it makes culture a very abstract entity. And so how do you study all of those things scientifically? [00:07:30] Speaker C: And for anthropologists, ethnography was a standard methodology. Going to a cultural community and asking people about their lives and society. Studying culture meant describing it as seen by the so called natives. [00:07:49] Speaker B: But Next, we Fast forward to 1959 when there's a breakthrough by Edward Hall. And we love Edward hall on his podcast. He was an anthropologist by training. He is considered a founder of the field of intercultural communication. [00:08:05] Speaker C: Definitely check out episodes three and 36, which focus on Edward Hall. And he had a fundamental insight about how culture could be studied that Goethe, Hofstade later built on. Hall believed that we could compare culture by creating categories of comparison, something that would let you compare culture A with cultures B and C. For example, hall. [00:08:35] Speaker B: Compared cultures by communication style. He created the categories of high and low context cultures. He would say that Japan is a high context culture where communication is very subtle and you read between the lines. Whereas Germany is a low context culture where you say precisely what you mean. [00:08:56] Speaker C: And that was the approach that Hofstader took, comparing multiple cultural communities along the same dimension, like individualism and collectivism. It's what allowed him to make country rankings. [00:09:11] Speaker B: Well, I think his story is interesting because he was really different from anthropologists who might study culture by, say, visiting remote tribes in the Amazon. First of all, he was a psychologist and he was working at IBM Europe in the late 1960s. In those days, IBM was huge, one of the first truly multinational companies. They had 250,000 employees in 60 countries. And they had done a massive company wide employee attitude survey. They were trying to improve management practices because, like, how do you keep employees from all over the world happy and productive? [00:10:04] Speaker C: But these surveys didn't ask about culture directly. The items were about management related topics like work goals, decision making, group loyalty. And as a staff psychologist, Hofstader had access to a data set of 100,000 respondents from 40 countries. And with his background in statistics, he had a key insight. Because the survey was identical, he could compare the answers to see if employees from different countries had different preferences. He could look for cultural differences in the data. [00:10:46] Speaker B: And this brings us back to his statement that culture does not exist because it's key to understanding his methodological approach. [00:10:55] Speaker C: Let's hear a longer quote to give a fuller picture. He says, what I tell my students is dimensions do not exist. Culture does not exist either. Dimensions and culture in general are constructs, products of our minds that help us to simplify the overwhelming complexity of the real world so as to understand and predict it. They are useful as long as they do this and redundant when they don't. [00:11:33] Speaker B: And that is a mouthful, I have to say, and it is a pretty tall claim. But to really understand what he means, we need to look at this from the perspective of psychometrics, the branch of psychology that specializes in measuring things. [00:11:52] Speaker C: Wikipedia describes psychometrics as the objective measurement of latent constructs that cannot be directly observed. This is getting a bit geeky, but a latent construct is a hidden variable that helps explain a phenomenon. For example, if you take an IQ test, the latent variable is your iq, something that cannot be observed directly, so it has to be identified indirectly through the items on the IQ test. [00:12:29] Speaker B: So how does this relate to Hofstadter? He had a data set with a variety of questions, and in order to find constructs related to culture, he did exploratory factor analysis. And that is a statistical tool to find associations within the data. So, for example, people who agree that managers should make decisions alone often also say that subordinates should not question their bosses. There's a pattern there. That's the latent construct, which in this case Hofstede labeled as power distance. How comfortable people are with hierarchy. [00:13:20] Speaker C: And so with this initial data set, he found four latent constructs, what we now call cultural dimensions. Power distance, individualism versus collectivism, masculine versus feminine, and uncertainty avoidance. And then two more dimensions which were added much later. And with that, Hofstadter could compare scores for different countries. For example, the employees from more egalitarian societies like Denmark or New Zealand had on average a lower power distance score than countries like Mexico or India. [00:14:05] Speaker B: And this approach was really new and it had a huge impact. After leaving IBM, Hofstadter worked in academia. He published books and articles. He became kind of a cross cultural research guru. People in business schools all over the world learn his cultural categories, and you'll find him in intercultural communication textbooks. [00:14:28] Speaker C: And the point is that Hofstadter's statement that culture is not real is grounded in a view of culture as a statistical entity. [00:14:39] Speaker B: Oh, I like that phrase, culture as a statistical entity. But even if people don't use those words, I think this basic idea has become the standard way of thinking about culture. For example, it would be really normal for a teacher to define culture by saying culture is the customs and values that a community shares. It's the general tendency of a group of people. [00:15:04] Speaker C: But here's the thing. That definition leads to some complications. If culture is a general shared tendency, then there are exceptions, right? After all, no one is typical of their culture. Does that make them less cultural? You might say that Americans are individualistic, but I know an American who is very community minded. [00:15:31] Speaker B: And if you push that logic one step further, using the kind of instruments that Hofstadter created. You could say, for example, India ranks as a highly collectivist society much more than, say, Norway. But if you survey Indians and Norwegians about their attitudes, you will certainly find some Indians who choose very individualistic responses and some Norwegians who choose collectivist responses. So does that mean that certain Indians are more individualistic than certain Norwegians? [00:16:04] Speaker C: Well, statistically, yes. [00:16:07] Speaker B: But honestly, this is just confusing because. Just because an Indian chooses an individualist response on a survey, does that make them individualist? Is it meaningful to compare them to people from Norway who choose a more collectivist response? I think it's a bit of a mess. [00:16:26] Speaker C: And that's because those surveys don't measure the cultural knowledge that we use to navigate everyday life. Someone raised in India is culturally Indian. They speak Hindi or Bengali or Marathi. They have internalized the customs and values found in India. They navigate expectations and relationships in India. And if you set them down in Norway and tell them to start speaking Norwegian and interacting with Norwegians, the fact that they chose an individualist response on a survey will not help them. [00:17:04] Speaker B: And that's one thing we mean when we say that culture is embodied in a familiar environment. We know how things work. We know how to interpret the things that other people do. And this cultural knowledge operates intuitively. And this is something that cultural bridge people know in their guts, so to speak. Culture is deep within us. It's part of who we are. [00:17:29] Speaker C: And that brings us to part two. Culture is real. [00:17:44] Speaker B: Okay, so we've talked about dimensions of culture as an abstraction, but let's shift gears and talk about the opposite, the embodied experience of culture. [00:17:54] Speaker C: There is a bunch of research that measures how culture shapes cognitive function. Basically, our experience of the world, like how we process information, how we regulate emotion, what motivates us, our identity. And those things go hand in glove with the society you grow up in. And we are thinking of researchers like Shinobu Kitayama or Richard Nisbett, and more broadly, research in cross cultural psychology. [00:18:28] Speaker B: So let's take a concrete example. American parents often sleep separately from their children. But that's not just a custom. It affects your sense of self, your connection with others. I think, Ishita, you and I once had a conversation about how comfortable it would be to sleep in the same bed with our mothers. And for you it was totally comfortable. But for me, unimaginable. [00:18:53] Speaker C: And I am doing research about women's education in India. And one woman told me that when her son is at elementary school, she feels unsettled because she's physically separated from him. And no Indian will find that shocking. [00:19:13] Speaker B: And so, to explore all of this a bit more, we asked the podcast team members about this gap between culture as an abstraction and as something embodied. [00:19:25] Speaker C: Let's start with podcast co producer Sane Bosma, who talks about one of Hofstadter's dimensions, collectivism, and how it went from being an abstraction to being something embodied because of raising children with her Armenian husband and his family. Let's listen. [00:19:49] Speaker E: Culture is more of an abstraction to me when I cannot link it to my own experiences. For example, I had studied and read about collectivism, but collectivism didn't become fully real for me until I started raising children with my Armenian partner and his parents. As a parent, I am focused on teaching our daughters how to be independent. Putting on their clothes, going to the bathroom, teaching them to come up with their own arguments. But my partner and my in laws have a different approach. They show their affection through the roles they play. So as grandparents, of course, they help my daughters put on their clothes. And as grandchildren, it's natural that my daughters fetch household items like the remote control, phones or glasses. Sometimes I see the beauty in such mutual support, but at other times, it can irritate me on a very deep level. So, yes, culture becomes real when you have lived it, but it's not always easy. [00:21:11] Speaker B: So, Ishida, is this something you can relate to? [00:21:15] Speaker C: Oh, of course. I totally get the grandparents expecting the children to fetch things for them. Bring me the remote. That would totally happen in India, but it's just a natural product of the relationship that children have with their elders. [00:21:32] Speaker B: Well, I love Sane's honesty when she says that. It can irritate her on a very deep level because clearly Sane understands collectivism intellectually. She teaches intercultural communication, and she has been raising children with her husband and his family for years. But these things run deep, and culture as an abstraction is just no match for culture in your body. [00:21:59] Speaker C: And you can also really feel this in the story we heard from podcast contributor Hashini Madrasinghe. She was born in Sri Lanka and moved to Italy as a child. And like many people in that situation, she has embodied culture in very complex ways. Let's listen. [00:22:23] Speaker A: I moved to Italy as a child, and in many ways, my body became Italian. My Italian hands are probably the most deeply cultural part of me. When I speak Italian, my hands take off like they've had too much espresso. But being a woman of color, people expect me to act foreign when I speak and gesture like a local. Suddenly, their mental box for me doesn't fit. Anymore. A hand gesture isn't just a gesture when it becomes racialized. Wait, how can you do that if you're not Italian? It still catches me off guard that such a natural part of me unsettles others so much. It makes me realize just how embodied culture is, both for me and them. And then when I go back to Sri Lanka and switch to Sinhalese, my body slips back into its old rhythms. My body calms down, I'm softer, my head tilts more and my movements shrink a little. My head wobble is back. It can mean yes, no, maybe, or all three at once. Switching from one language to the other feels like switching bodies because I'm stepping into a whole different cultural rhythm. I don't think about, just happens. That's when culture feels most alive to me. Now I'm living in New Zealand. Here, gestures don't carry the same weight. People stop listening to my words and just watch my hands. In theory, culture might be abstract. You can't hold it in your hands like an object. But in practice, it's alive in every gesture, in every tilt of my head, and in every pause as people try to follow what my hands are saying. [00:24:52] Speaker B: You know, my favorite line is my hands take off like they've had too much espresso. I love how that's so automatic for her. [00:25:02] Speaker C: And I love her statement that switching from one language to another was like switching bodies. A lot of people that grew up biculturally experience that, but even just moving to a foreign country can mean making huge body adjustments. Like having people kiss me on the cheek when I moved to France. [00:25:25] Speaker B: Well, I was also struck by her saying that Italians were surprised when they saw someone who looks like her, a person of color, as she says, that was speaking perfect Italian. So they experienced her as the other. And that's another darker side of embodied culture. And if you haven't heard it already, check out episode 37, to gore empathy in the Other, where we talk about how natural it is to feel that someone is the quote unquote other. [00:25:57] Speaker C: And podcast contributor Albert Mangami, who grew up in Zimbabwe, shared his experience of being put in the category of the out of place other because of the color of his skin. Let's listen. [00:26:18] Speaker D: As a black man in the Netherlands, if I see another black man walking by, I give a nod and he returns it. The black nod is rooted in the experience of black men in spaces where they are not necessarily welcome, both in the African American experience and in the anti colonial experience. The silence or the short greeting that follows the eye contact are subtle and nuanced, rich with symbolic meaning. The Black Nod is a deeply embodied cultural practice. I remember arriving at a particularly amazing five star hotel in Amsterdam in the Netherlands to give an intercultural competence training to their staff. It's part of the consultancy we do at our research center. I arrived suited up, carrying myself with the sort of excellent posture and mindset that we teach our students. I was aware that, appearance wise, I looked like a guest, but I could feel that I was missing the embodied sense of belonging that a typical luxury guest might feel. While I climbed the steps to the entrance, I felt someone watching me. I instinctively thought it was negative attention, but turned to find a black man who looked like a premium taxi driver or valet standing by his car, observing me from the corner of his eye. I nodded just subtly enough to not distract from his work or bring attention to our interaction. He nodded back with the same energy. The whole thing took just seconds, but man, the effect was so filling. I knew he saw me and I saw him. Perhaps he recognized that I was not a native to luxury culture. Or maybe not. Either way, the fact that the black nod could pierce through deeply ingrained perceptions of socioeconomic status was profound proof of the realness of black culture within me. [00:28:29] Speaker B: Wow, there's so much here. Hard to know where to start. One thing that strikes me is that Albert talks about instinctively expecting negative attention, which means that he experienced so many negative reactions that he has developed this automatic embodied response. [00:28:47] Speaker C: And this reminds me again of the Indian women that I have interviewed. They say things like there is no such thing as a good woman, or that people don't dissect men under a microscope in the same way as women and this reflects the attitudes towards women in Indian society. [00:29:12] Speaker B: Well, I found it fascinating how Albert talked about the Black nod as being subtle, nuanced and rich with symbolic meaning. Which means on the one hand this gesture is the slightest of body movements, but it's grounded in a shared experience that has just layers and layers of meaning. [00:29:34] Speaker C: And that's something we'll talk about in part three, how even abstract ideas are embodied within us. [00:29:43] Speaker B: But let's listen to another story from podcast contributor Yuto Aki, a story that reminds us how both language and culture are embodied together within us. Let's listen. [00:29:59] Speaker F: Once I signed up for an economics class at my university in Tokyo, but didn't realize until I entered the classroom that the course was part of an academic program in English with many so called native speakers. Once the class began, I was surprised to see how much interaction there was students shared their opinions and freely interrupted the lecturer when they had a question. Having gone through an educational culture in Japan from elementary all the way up to high school, I was used to classes where you are expected to be silent unless the professor allows you to talk. Interrupting the professor or sharing ideas spontaneously could be seen as disrespectful. This new environment was different for me, but not shocking. I had loved learning English for a long time, and in fact I found that interacting in this way felt natural, like something that I had always wanted. I was in a foreign environment, but I somehow felt that finally I was where I belonged. [00:31:26] Speaker B: Well, I love his story because I've heard so many times from Japanese learners that when speaking English, they have to learn a whole new way of communicating. It's a very embodied thing. [00:31:38] Speaker C: But what about for you as an English speaker learning Japanese? [00:31:43] Speaker B: On a recent trip to California, I realized that when I crossed the street, I bowed to the car that stopped to let me go. And of course, there are all kinds of things that are deeply embodied in Japan that I've had to internalize in one way or another. Like the Japanese sense of hierarchy, or distinguishing between inside and outside spaces, down regulating emotion, not interacting much with strangers, just all kinds of stuff. [00:32:13] Speaker C: And we heard another way that language is embodied from Emre7. Let's listen. [00:32:22] Speaker G: In Turkey, there is an informal tradition of teaching foreigners some swear words in Turkish and asking them to repeat it to other Turks just for fun. This is not something I do, but I know people who do it. On one occasion, I remember a foreign student of mine, he had learned a really bad swear word, literally an F word, and he used it to my face. It was a great shock for me. I felt my whole body shiver. Of course, rationally I knew that the student did not even know the meaning of what he said. He was simply taught to repeat the sounds by someone. And I knew it was just for fun. But despite all that, I couldn't stop my body from reacting strongly to what I had embodied as a bad behavior. [00:33:20] Speaker B: Well, I have to admit that I am also guilty of experimenting with so called bad words in Spanish and French because they just don't feel bad in the same way. [00:33:30] Speaker C: And that brings us to part three in Body and Mind. [00:33:43] Speaker B: So in part one, we talked about culture as a statistical entity. And then in part two, we heard how culture is experienced deeply within us. So how do we bring these two things together? Let's start by talking about embodied cognition, because that's the key to understanding why culture is such a Deep part of us. So let's go back in time. [00:34:10] Speaker C: In the 17th century, Rene Descartes, the French philosopher, famously said, I think, therefore I am. His point was that we can't trust our senses, but we know our own thoughts. This was a clear distinction between the body and the mind, thought and feeling, sometimes called Cartesian thinking. And a lot of people just kind of assume that thought exists in some kind of mental space, but this simply. [00:34:45] Speaker B: Isn'T how it works. In the broadest sense, embodied cognition refers to the way that perception and cognition are a product of our body. For example, the world looks the way it does because of how our eyes are structured. Dogs, they see the world in shades of blue and yellow because they have different color receptors, but they are better at detecting motion than we are. Horses, they have a blind spot in front of their nose. Eagles, they see things eight times more sharply than we do. And pigeons, they can see colors that we can't, including ultraviolet light. [00:35:26] Speaker C: But of course, humans don't just see things and hear things. We also think thoughts. And research in cognitive neuroscience has taught us that thoughts in our head are also rooted in our experience of the body. [00:35:43] Speaker B: And that's why we use metaphors to talk about abstract ideas. For example, we talk about the future like it's in front of us. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. If I respect you, I look up to you. So our experience of the world is very much grounded in our physical organism. [00:36:03] Speaker C: And this connects directly to culture. Humans are cultural. We live in a symbolic world. Humans started placing objects like jewelry or tools into grave sites around 50,000 years ago. We can guess that people were thinking about an afterlife, thinking about the world in symbolic terms. [00:36:27] Speaker B: And this is something that Albert brought up in the brainstorming. He quoted the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who defined culture as a system of symbols. And I think Albert's point was that we experience our cultural symbols in an embodied way. When I explain this to my students, I ask them, is money real? And some of them say, no, money is not real. Money is just an idea. It's a symbol that we all agree on, right? [00:36:59] Speaker C: Otherwise, money is just paper or numbers on the screen of an atmosphere. [00:37:04] Speaker B: But then there are other students who say, okay, you say, money's not real. Then give me the cash in your wallet. [00:37:11] Speaker C: And the larger point is that for humans, there is no clear distinction between the physical world and the symbolic one. Some people are ready to die for their country. Try telling a devout believer that their faith is just an abstraction. So culture is just as real as money, as country, as religion. [00:37:36] Speaker B: But I want to circle back to where we started. We said that many people define culture as a collection of general tendencies that a group shares, but we haven't offered an alternative definition, one that includes the idea that culture is embodied within us. [00:37:54] Speaker C: One definition of culture that I like is by evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrik. He argues that culture is, most, simply put, shared knowledge in our neural networks. From an evolutionary perspective, culture is our survival mechanism. We pass on cultural knowledge like no other species. We build our societies on this shared knowledge. So if human beings are real, then culture is real. [00:38:27] Speaker B: And I think we shouldn't mistake the constructs we use to talk about cultural patterns labels like individualism or power distance with the embodied reality of those cultural patterns within us. [00:38:42] Speaker C: And on this podcast we focus much more on research that looks at culture from an embodied perspective because we think it's a great starting place for education and because what we are really interested in is the power of foreign experiences and how they can transform us. [00:39:03] Speaker B: And that's about all we have time for today. But let's say a final word or two about our sources. The Hofstadter quote about culture not existing comes from a chapter in the 2004 book Epidialogue titled Comparing Dimensions of Culture in a Computer Comparative Perspective. For a deeper look at Hofstadter's approach to cultural comparison and what made it so pioneering, check out Commemorating Geert Hofstadter, a pioneer in the study of culture and institutions. And that's in the Journal of Institutional Economics. And finally, if you want to learn more about paradigms in cross cultural research that have developed more recently, definitely check out Episode Episode 26, the Trouble with Cultural Difference. The Deep Culture Podcast is sponsored by the Japan Intercultural Institute, an NPO dedicated to intercultural education and research. I'm the director of jii. If you are interested in culture and the mind, check out jii's Brain, Mind and Culture Masterclass. It is a blended learning course and online community of cultural bridge people. Starting soon, just do a web search for the Japan Intercultural Institute and if you liked today's episode, we'd really like to hear from you. Leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or write us at dcpodcastapanintercultural.org thanks to Sane. [00:40:29] Speaker C: Bozma, MREs7, Albert Mangami, Hashini Madrasinghe and Yuto Aki for sharing their thoughts about how culture is real for them. And to Turhil, Liana Hars, Karnas Skirmante Cairns, Vanessa Eisenberg, our sound engineer Robinson Fritz, Ikumi, Fritz and everyone at jii. [00:40:54] Speaker B: And thanks to you, Ishita. For this deep culture journey. I have learned a lot. [00:41:00] Speaker C: Thank you, Joseph. [00:41:01] Speaker H: As always, it was a lot of fun, Sam.