Episode 66 - Well Cultured

When we talk about being well cultured, we often talk about going to the theatre or listening to the opera. It’s often about the arts and what past times we enjoy, but this of course is not the true depth of culture. Culture is much more than that. Culture is a set of ideas and customs within a society that form a foundation for the behaviour of those people. It’s like a list of (sometimes seemingly arbitrary) unwritten rules for how to behave. The funny thing is that as well as these unwritten rules that are placed upon us by our society, we also have these inbuilt tendencies for behaviour in our character or personality, and there is nothing to say that the two will match up at all. I sometime find it a cruel irony as I watch people I know struggle with their own culture when it fits so ill around them. There are many aspects to British culture, but one of the most famous is our inability to ever say what we actually mean. We are very rarely direct, we have a habit of skirting an issue and can often be can quite figurative in the way we speak. I find this quite poetic. My sister on the other hand is a times the most literal person I know. The other day she was talking about having  a very frustrating conversation when her husband asked her if she had to bite her lip. She looked at him bewildered for a while before simply asking, “how would that help anything?” As for myself, I’m not sure that I have ever felt like I particularly identified with my culture, but nor that it was ever a hindrance either. My relationship with my host culture changed dramatically however when I moved to Papua New Guinea.

 

His reflexes are to fast, he would catch it...

Unsurprisingly, Papua New Guinean culture is different to British culture in most aspects of life. I have to say that overall this new culture matched my character much more closely than my British culture. That felt rather strange to me, but it was incredible to be in a place where everyone said hello to you and you didn’t get strange looks when you smiled at strangers and that relationships came before everything – even work. Those things had never been seen as normal before (not that that ever stopped me). And so with this in mind you might think that I felt much more comfortable and at ease in this new culture, but the strange thing is, that I didn’t. At least to begin with that is, it should be said that I grew more comfortable with every passing day, and please don’t get me wrong, I adore much of Papua New Guinean culture, so why then did this new culture feel so strange to me if it came so much more naturally to me? The answer was simple, because it was new. Whilst much of what was acceptable behaviour in Papua New Guinea came naturally to me, it was not normal to me for this to be the acceptable thing to do and so I had to keep checking myself because the unwritten rules had changed. I’ll be honest, up to this point in my life I think I had always seen culture as a hindrance that stopped people behaving as they wanted to, but this gave me a new found appreciation for culture. You see regardless of whether it comes naturally to us or not, culture provides us with a framework to build relationships upon which help prevent us from making others uncomfortable. And so from now I will continue to try to make people feel more free to act according to their natural character, but I will also endeavour to respect the foundations for relationship we call culture a little bit more.