Now that you've had a chance to look at some cultural differences like fast food preferences, smiling, orientation to time, firing, and even presentation of the self, it's time to get into the methods for dealing with them. The central concept we'll look at in this lecture is cultural relativity and, more specifically, methodological cultural relativity. We said earlier, way back in unit one, that so much of culture goes on beneath our conscious awareness. That's certainly true of a phenomenon like the presentation of self in the Danish American case. It's true, for that matter, of smiling. We aren't really aware of when we smile, and we can even mistake firing as just a natural aspect of business, not a culturally inflected one. So the first problem in dealing with cultural differences is simply to find them. When we're dealing with teams, these kinds of differences are usually noticed when a problem arises. For example when you feel something isn't going right, or someone else feels you are not behaving the way you are supposed to. Or that you don't have the attitude you're supposed to have. Or the team's performance is suffering. In those cases you should analyze the situation to see whether culture is involved. Ask yourself, is there a socially acquired way of acting or speaking, or of reasoning, or any goals or values that might be contributing to the problem? If the answer is yes, then it's time to make use of what anthropologists call methodological cultural relativity. What is this, anyway? Well, it's kind of like Einsteinian relativity, but in the cultural realm. It means, trying to understand an aspect of culture on its own terms, not in terms of your own culture. You try to look at the problematic aspect or situation in teams of the others, who you think are the problem or who think you are the problem. It's really a matter of frames of reference. Sometimes even just recognizing the cultural character of a problem helps to lessen it. Here's an example. Back in the 1980s a Brazilian friend of ours was attending Stanford University for graduate study. Well, the woman happened to be strikingly beautiful. When she visited us, she was feeling down in the dumps. Not totally depressed, but also not her usual positive self. She explained that she was feeling ugly. Then, she noted that at Stanford, she was not getting any attention from men. As we discussed the situation, my wife noted that in Brazil, the amount of attention she got, that is, my wife, from men had made her feel uncomfortable. In Rio especially, men would make various noises, I won't try to reproduce them here, and gestures of a fairly suggestive sort. These contrasting experiences seem two sides of the same coin. Was there a cultural difference here? Was it the case that on the streets of Rio, men were more demonstrative in their expressions of appreciation than in Stanford, California? Hypothesis seemed plausible enough, and it went a long way towards helping our friend deal with what we came to understand was her culture shock. I want to stress that cultural relativity as we are discussing it here is a methodological principle. You should make the effort to understand another culture on its own terms. And we distinguish the methodological principle from epistemological relativity and moral relativity. Epistemological relativity is the claim that knowledge and beliefs are relative to the culture, period. No culture is closer to the truth than any other. We're not making that claim here. We could argue it back and forth, but that's not the point of this lecture. Moral relativity in turn means that values are relative to the culture. No cultural system has the one ultimately correct set of values. Again, we are not making that claim here. My suggestion is rather that you think of cultural relativity as a tool in your kit. A way to help you understand and cope with the power of team culture. Incidentally, the opposite of cultural relativity is what we call ethnocentrism. That is judging another cultural element in terms of your own culture.
