UNDERSTANDING OTHER CULTURES AT HOME AND ABROAD

Megan Biesele, Ph.D., President

School of Expressive Culture

College Station and Austin, TX

Introduction: Cultures in the United States

Because of its history as a recently-populated area of the world, the United States has provided a huge experiment in multicultural understanding. This country’s indigenous inhabitants have been joined by settlers from literally every continent and ethnic group on earth. For a long time, it was said that America would be a “melting pot” where diverse cultures would mingle and lose their distinctness as they came together. Instead, though cultures have mixed here, they have never “melted”: some have even been strengthened in their distinctiveness.

So, instead of as a melting pot, we could see the United States as a kind of tile mosaic. On its useful surface, the bright focus of each culture contributes to a pattern in which all elements work together. It appears that this is how cultures work all over the world. They have a power in themselves which resists dilution and homogenization. This power is based on the close relationship between the cultures and their members’ definitions of themselves. In this identity lies strength; this strength is the reason we should celebrate, rather than challenge, diversity of culture in every group and individual.

Anthropologists say that culture is adaptive, integrated, and always changing. It shares these characteristics with organic life--in other words, with systems oriented towards survival. Customs that diminish the survival chances of a given society are not likely to persist. Those which enhance survival chances are adaptive, and likely to endure. As customs are tried and honed as aids to survival, the mechanisms of human understanding move them constantly into integration with other facets of society. Thus change occurs in culture in an organic way. As human beings we share with all other human beings the selfsame capacity for culture and its adaptive, integrative, power of change.

The Humanities and Cultural Understanding

The humanities are involved in cultural understanding in ways with roots as deep as humankind. The mental capacities of humans today link us absolutely with the mental capacities of our remotest ancestors. We share not only our ability to think and reason, but also the capacity for aesthetic and moral sensibilities. The humanities—the storehouse of values and traditions that form the foundation of our society—work to make clear these shared capacities, these shared understandings.

The humanities, in effect, humanize our understanding of other cultures, including the cultures of the past. They do this by showing the shared intellectual and artistic heritage with which people of all cultures have made sense of the world. For that is indeed what human beings do in culture: they make particular kinds of sense of the world, and they share it through expressive forms—for enjoyment as well as for survival.

A good name for the toolkit by which the humanities operate is expressive culture. Expressive culture is the communication of ideas and feelings about the world through an artistic medium. Whatever the form – painting, sculpture, dance, music, or folklore – its intention is communication. Expressing ourselves culturally is part of what makes us human beings. Immensely flexible, ever-changing and vital to the continuation of self and society, expressive culture lives in the varied languages of the spirit and the aesthetic sense we share with others.

We can know other cultures best through their own expressions. These include communications in their own languages, art in their own idioms, dance and music and patterned words in their own history-enriched haloes of meaning. This assumption of the humanities—that expressive culture is the path to understanding among people of different cultures—is exemplified in this website through THRC exhibits such as Voces Americanas: Latino Literature; Literary East Texas; and Black Art: Ancestral Legacy. Each of these, using diverse voices and traditions, brings us closer to another culture coexisting with our own.

Anthropology and the Humanities

The anthropological perspective makes this assumption of cultural appreciation too. It is part and parcel of an attitude of cultural tolerance that makes for good understanding. Attitudes that foster respect, such as outwardly focused interest, control of ego in favor of others (in short, social maturity) are useful in relating to members of one’s own community, as well as to other members of the world community. We can think of the whole world as our dignified, valued family.

Attitudes that hinder cultural understanding include stereotyping, pre-judging, and ethnocentrism. There is nothing sadder than the missed opportunities for good communication created by these attitudes. All three involve unwarranted assumptions about other cultures which can disappear like morning mist if exposed to the light of genuine experience.

Anthropological approaches to other cultures have illuminated fascinating differences in what may be called “cultures of communication.” These differences lie not only in the ways that people express mundane facts to each other, but in the many ways they may convey respect, tread lightly on difficult topics, or shield each other from social pain. Communicative culture also touches on the myriad differing facets of culture in general, such as ways of sharing, attitudes towards relatives, age and gender observances, sexual customs and preferences, and religious belief and practice.

Culture and Cultures in Texas and the United States

In Texas, there is a multitude of different cultures, ranging from small, indigenous Native American groups such as the Tigua to the majority Hispanic, Black and Anglo. There are immigrants from every country in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The history of the settlement of Texas is an important part of the story of this cultural diversity. THRC exhibits such as Alamo Images, Annexation: Celebrating Texas Statehood, Border Studies, Lone Star & Eagle, and New Spain: Frontiers of Faith explore the cultures of early Texas and provide background to its current diversity.

In the US in general, history brought a similar mixing of cultures, and similar demands for mutual understanding. THRC provides exhibits such as Africa in the Americas, American Anthem, Between Friends (US/Canadian Border), The Blessings of Liberty (US Constitution), and Martin Luther King, Jr,. & the Civil Rfghts Movement, to promote understanding of the challenges of unifying a diverse nation.

Understanding Other Cultures Abroad

Many of the materials offered by the THRC cover the cultures of other lands. They range from general regional or local profiles such as Unknown Mexico, Peru Mestizo, Legacy of the Middle East, Istanbul and Life on the Nile (about Nubian culture in Sudan) to explorations of locations of artistic and cultural richness such as Mexico: Splendors of 30 Centuries, The Shogun Age, Treasures of Tutankhamun, and The Treasury of San Marco, Venice. An example of the way Life on the Nile introduces Nubian culture is as follows:

“Close your eyes and imagine flying from Texas east across the United States, across the Atlantic, over Europe and into Africa, where you land in Sudan two days later. Imagine getting out of the plane in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. You feel a hot, dry wind against your skin. You hear people all around you speaking a language that you cannot understand. You see brown-skinned men dressed in long white robes and turbans and women wearing clothes made of silky cloth in brightly colored patterns.

“Now imagine getting into the back of a big truck which drives on an unpaved, rough, dusty road through the desert, near the River Nile. For twenty-four hours, you take a slow, bumpy ride through the desert. The truck even gets stuck in the sand a few times. Finally, the truck leaves the desert road and turns toward palm trees that stand on the bank of the Nile River. You approach a small, peaceful village under the palm trees. This beautiful little village is Az-Zawrat, the Nubian village you will visit in the exhibit.”

As part of this exhibit, the THRC is proud to present an actual resident of Az-Zawrat, Mr. Awad Abdelgadir, to introduce a presentation on daily life in his village. The presentation includes African wildlife and different tribes, as well as village activities, and it includes storytelling, weaving, and drumming. Mr. Abdelgadir is a resident of Austin, Texas and has for many years contributed to cultural understanding there.

Cultural Experience Online

www.humanities-interactive.org is a wonderful new THRC tool to support humanities curriculums at many levels. Because not all exhibits can be accompanied by local experts like Awad Abdelgadir, this interactive site has been designed to provide virtual expertise and experience. Students and teachers alike may visit Interactive Exhibition Halls, a virtual Reading Room, a Learning Activities center, a Game Room and an Audio-Visual Theater. Border Studies is already online, with 9 interactive humanities exhibits on Mexico, Texas, and Canada. Under construction is Texas History, Texas Culture, consisting of 14 exhibits. The Ancient World and The New World are available also, with many more images and ideas planned to stretch the understanding and spark the creative imagination. Like the exhibits mentioned throughout this essay, THRC’s interactive exhibits combine to provide clear windows and open paths to cultural understanding—at home and abroad. Taken together, they form a dazzling mosaic: a most humane approach to understanding and appreciating the vivid cultures of our world.

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