Mistakes in the area of Culture

9. In our educational and social services, a person who suffers from ‘culture-blindness’ is bound to stumble from one mistake into another. If serving beef to Brahmin children in a missionary hostel is considered criminal, serving pork to Muslim employees will be fatal. The manner of dealing with people while organizing work or visiting families will have to be different according to different cultural traditions. Mistakes in such areas of life can be disastrous. The legitimate way of showing familiarity or respect will differ from community to community. The mode of consulting, and the measure of consensus expected will vary with traditions. What is important for us to do is to take note of differences not merely in dress, food and etiquette; but in styles of organization, perception of time, patterns of thought, hierarchy of values; understanding of God, of nature and the destiny of the human person, of her role in society; diverse worldviews; dissimilar meaning-systems.

10. It is difficult for us to accept another meaning-system when it differs totally from ours. It can look frightfully threatening. Nothing seems to make sense in your relationships with your colleagues, neighbours, students, patients of another culture. Are they unfriendly? Are they unintelligent? Not quite. It is not that they are hostile, unintelligent, uncooperative, cold or slow. Two systems of Cultural Unconscious are colliding. Bridges must be built.

11. Carl Jung posited the existence of a Collective Unconscious shared by all humankind. Anthropologists will find it easier to presuppose a Cultural Unconscious that governs the human behaviour of a particular ethnic group.

12. You have to redefine the boundaries of your own culture through self-awareness, translate your colleagues’ meaning into your own meaning-system and help them to understand your meaning through intelligible explanations. Many political problems, economic threats, operational deadlocks and personal clashes can be averted, purposeful dialogue initiated and cordial relationships re-established, merely by people learning to transcend their culture.

13. Even within the same culture, handling differences with skill has become a normal part of life in the modern world. We will have to learn to live with controversies. Only Conservatives who are critical of tradition and Progressives who recognize the value of a heritage and are on the guard against rootlessness contribute to dialogue. The same may be said about people upholding colliding ideologies or representing different classes, castes, political or economic views. Some are still struggling to come to terms with the concepts of Modernity while their society has moved on to Postmodernity.

14.When boarding children in a missionary school rebel, or the teaching staff goes on strike, or neighbourhood population throws stones at our institution, it is not always anti-Christian enthusiasts exhibiting their anger against missionary work. It may merely be an indication that our institutions have remained cultural ghettoes, closed in upon themselves, unrelated to the society around and unawake to various cultural sensitivities. It is not helpful for us to hold ourselves aloof, and remain cultural islands within the larger society. We must not allow distances to grow between ourselves and the surrounding people, and merely keep quoting ‘human rights’ against them. We need to insert ourselves further into their cultural world.

15. In fact, there may be mistakes from our side. We may be dealing with people, organizing our work, and declaiming our successes, in a legalistic, pedantic and distant manner in the cultural world in which we live, and yet be quite unconscious of it. In multi-ethnic nations, such mistakes can be made even by people of the same country, and surprisingly even by persons of the same ethnic group, if they have long remained uprooted from their own society. In the area of culture all need to be learners all the time, for culture is constantly evolving. You were right in referring to the “l’esigenza di vivere in stato di discernimento” (SL 109; also 85).

16. When organizing health camps and launching blood donation campaigns, we need to make sure that there are no in-built prejudice in the community against receiving injections or giving blood.

17. A good way to keep learning is to watch out for a negative feedback. Rather than feel humiliated and upset when you are hurt, look closer. Do not be satisfied with finding that a particular way of doing things is not acceptable. Ask why. Trace things to a value in the culture or an attitude in the ethnic group you are working with, and see whether you are able to reach some sort of generally applicable conclusions. Keep observing, evaluating, correcting. You may get closer, step by step, to the values that are most cherished in that culture and get a glimpse of the “soul of the community”. It is in that inner space that true dialogue and serious evangelization takes place.