In our interviews, most people expressed the willingness of making friends across different cultures. However, our questionnaire results suggest that people are still more likely to make friends with people from similar cultural background. Moreover, our interviewees’ responses show that there seems to be a gap between the willingness of making cross-cultural friendships and the actual difficulty when doing so. In this essay, I will refer to two theories and explore what block people from making friends with people from different cultures.
Boas-Jakobson principle
One of our interviewees reports that she sometimes feels that cross-cultural friendship is not easy to achieve because of problems in communication: “German people are said to have a very direct communication style. When talking, we often come directly to the point, whereas other cultures only hint at the purpose of the conversation or even others might have a more superficial communication style.” (Ms L, 2014) This feeling seems to relate to Boas-Jakobson’s theory about language. They argue that the crucial differences between languages, are not in what each language allows its speakers to express but in what information each language obliges its speakers to express (Deutscher, 2011, p.151). It implies that if different languages influence their speakers’ mind, this is not because of what each language allow people to think but rather because of the kinds of information each language habitually obliges people to think about. It is then quite possible that even though a speaker is not speaking in his or her native language, for example, a German speaking English, his or her way of thinking has already shaped by the mother tongue, therefore, the information he or she provides is based on what the mother tongue obliges to give. So when talking to people from different culture where people are not obliged to provide much specific information in a sentence, such as tense and gender, German people might feel that the amount of information exchange is not equal and they have to guess the meaning of each reply, even they chat in English. Hence, this explain why our interviewee thinks cross-culture communication is difficult. Since an important part in friendship is forming an enjoyable discussion or chat, problem in communication could have a huge negative influence on cross-cultural friendship.
Cultural binary opposition
The idea of binary opposition was originally raised by Ferdinand de Saussure in a linguistic context. It was then developed by structuralists Levi-Strauss and Barthes who argue that meaning results from a complex association of ideas about the thing itself plus other ideas that are the thing’s ‘cultural opposite’, which is cultural ‘binary opposite’ (1963, 1972). When we interpret a thing, therefore, we arrive at an understanding of it not by any positive attribution of meaning to the thing it self but through a system of differences between culturally ‘opposing’ ideas. Barthes suggested that all meaning operates in this way but for our own purposes we often stick to those meanings that work only to reinforce our cultural and ideological mind-set. A later post-structuralism theorist, Jacques Derrida, taks Barthes and Levi-Strauss’s ideas a stage further by recognizing that these ‘binary pairs’ are never equal. He sees that within any particular culture, one ‘side’ of each binary pair tended to be valued or judged in a more privileged light. It was as if one half of each binary pair were somehow ‘culturally marked’ by a kind of ‘presence’ that made it more highly valued whereas its binary opposite was ‘marked’ by a kind of ‘absence’ that rendered it the less highly valued part of the binary pair (1972, p.42).The discussion of binary opposition was popular in the post-colonial world when discrimination of the Black and ‘’Orient’’ was not rare to see. It seems to be out of date in today’s context. I will argue that binary opposition still exist today, not in its most extreme form which Said describes in Orientalism as ‘a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric’ (1978, p.142)Today's cultural binary are more like mutual binary exisitng in day-to-day conversations, which causes problems in exchanging ideas and forming friendship. I will apply an extract from Forster’s A Passage to India (1924, p.64) and provide interpretation of the text.
The plot tells a story that an English visitor, Adela, came to India to see ‘the real India’. Her Indian host Aziz and his friend Professor Godbole (also an Indian) invite Adela to take a trip to the famous Marabar Caves and Professor Godbole is attempting to describe how great the Marabar Caves are to Adela. In this story, both Adela and Professor Godbole are friendly to each other. Adela wants to know more about India, suggesting that she holds an open attitude to a different culture and Professor Godbole is pleased to describe the caves to her in the first place. However, their conversation seems to be not very successful. Adela wants to know how the caves looks like in terms of their size, but Professor Godbole says they are not big. She then tries to relate the caves to places she has been to or heard of, however, this is still denied by Professor Godbole. Eventually, Adela only learns from the conversation that these caves are famous in India, but she does not get a clear idea why they are so important. Professor Godbole, on the other hand, struggles to explain the caves to Adela in an easily understandable way. Nevertheless, he feels it is difficult to explain to her the importance these caves. He feel his explanation can never be clear and straight to the point to let others to understand the uniqueness and importance of them. This is because Adela could only imagine the caves from her perspective in terms of size and places she is familiar with, which is influenced by her cultural experience. Finally Professor Godbole gives up and thinks the caves could only be some holes with stalactites after all.
This is a common problem in daily cross-culture communications. In this case, one’s ability to express and explain is not merely limited by language but also how people from different culture view things differently. One of our interviewees says that he feels cross-cultural friendship is not easy to achieve because he is never sure about whether his listeners get his point or not (Mr S, 2014). If everyone understand a sentence from their cultural system, then this could result in misunderstanding or difficulty in exchanging ideas. As a result, friendship across culture is not easy to form.
However this is not the end of the story. I am not suggesting that it is impossible to for people from different cultures to communicate and become friends. As post-structuralism suggests, culture binary could be deconstructed if differences are not stressed and distance is not arbitrarily created. If people want to build a close friendship with someone from a different culture, they should abandon the way of looking a different culture from their own perspectives. They should learn to view the culture as the natives do, so that both their friends and themselves would not feel the strong differences created by culture binary and they have more similarity to share. However, the learning process takes time and effort, therefore I suppose that is the reason why people still tend to make friends within their culture.
Works cited:
Barthes, R. Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972).
Derrita, J, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
Deutscher, G, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (London: Arrow, 2011), Chapter 6 ‘Crying Whorf’, pp. 129-156.
Forster, E.M. A passage to India (England: Edward Arnold, 1924).
Interview with Ms L (2014) http://qtproject2014.weebly.com/a-research-tradition.
Levi-Strauss, C. Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke (New York: Grundfest Schoepf, 1963)
Said, E. Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).