Photo Credit: D Sharon Pruitt

Oh yeah, I dated this international style! So, I’ve decided to start linking some of my favorite reads at the end of the week – there’s a million and one things I run across that seem like they’d be of interest to the readers of this blog, but I never have time to write a whole blog post about each one. Thus, Friday Connections. I’ll try to group links each week into subjects. Let me know what you guys think!

Children and Language

• Native language shapes the melody of a newborn baby’s cry – A recent study has shown that babies – at least German and French monolingual babies – cry differently. Moreover they cry differently from birth, suggesting that they’re already listening and responding to different language cues in the womb. Other studies regarding babies’ brains and languages can be found at the bottom of the page (apparently there are some really neat cognitive effects to raising a kid bilingual).
• The Bilingual Dilemma – This older article from the Indian-American magazine, Little India, discusses the particular difficulties South Asian parents have in raising their children bilingual in the U.S. The biggest thing I drew from the article is how difficult it is to raise children who both understand and respond in the non-English language in the US – even when both parents are perfectly fluent in both languages! I’ll definitely be looking into this further when Aditya and I start thinking about kids.
• Raising Bilingual Children series – While looking for information about learning Hindi, I stumbled across this series at Omniglot about raising children bilingual (or multilingual). It went straight into my bookmarks – the list it has at the end of other resources is great!
• Then there’s the following Dinosaur Comic:

Alt-Text: “Lots of languages have ‘ba’ sounds for dads too. ‘Baba’ in Persian, Swahili, Turkish, and Bangla, Mandarin Chinese, ‘abba’ in Aramaic, and ‘ba’ in !Kung. In other news, !Kung (the language AND the people) is/are too awesome to just be mentioned in the title-text here; their language uses CLICKS, that’s what the ‘!’ is!”

Alt Alt-Text: “the great things about babies is that you can never be racist against babies, because you were totally a baby once. the only difference is, YOU grew out of it.”

South Asian Fashion in the Home

• Using cotton saris as tablecloths – the right sari looks really great in a casual environment!
• Blankets stitched from multiple old saris in Calcutta slums – the price being charged here is a little outrageous, but the blankets are incredibly lovely.  Perhaps a good idea for DIYers…
• Vintage Hindu posters – I’ll admit that the majority of Hindu posters of Indian gods and goddess are a little too bright and colorful for the style of our home – they’d simply look out of place. However, some these vintage Hindu posters (available for purchase in NYC)are really striking, so I’ll be on the lookout this coming trip to India…
• Orange and gray color combos – a few striking rooms from Apartment Therapy. The rooms aren’t South Asian, exactly, but remind me very strongly of a modern look combined with South Asian colorfulness.
• How to: Paisley Wall Decoration – Aditya wasn’t a huge fan of the look, but I really like it (and would probably do it in a bathroom or another small space if Aditya didn’t object).

Cross-Cultural Controversy

• Let’s find the racist! And then let’s shame the racist! – A very considered, thoughtful response to the news regarding the Louisana judge who refused to marry a mixed-race couple because, well, he didn’t think it right. Jen Chau pushes us to think beyond the knee jerk “that’s so racist” response, and look at things a bit deeper.
• The Model Minority Image: Balancing Praise and Caution – Dr. Le digs into the “model minority” label that Asian Americans are often stuck with – it’s typically meant as praise, but does it also serve as a backhanded put-down to other minorities?
• The Painted Man – A blog about the making of a soon-to-be-released graphic novel of “a collection of coming of race memoirs that finds a dad confronted by racially charged questions posed directly by his young son and the people they come into contact with.” I’m really looking forward to reading the final product of the stories of this mixed-race family.

Finally, to lighten it up, I have a really cute video about an animial “odd couple”:

I was most struck by the first third of the documentary, which focused on the (negative) attitudes that the couples have experienced by being in an interracial marriage. My personal experience has been quite different from that of the couples’ in the film. I have had very few negative encounters regarding my relationship with Aditya. I have cared about very few of the negative encounters I’ve had regarding my relationship with Aditya.

This might be partially because of geography – the couples in the documentary are from Central Texas, I believe, while Aditya and I have spent the majority of our time as a couple living in Silicon Valley, metro D.C., and on a small college campus (albeit in rural Indiana). We simply haven’t had that many encounters where it seemed like people were negatively judging us because we were dating “across the races”.

I think it is also partially because, to a large extent, I just don’t notice or care about other’s reactions to me unless they get in my face about it. I had a discussion regarding this a couple of weeks ago on a post at Gori Wife’s blog. She was writing about how she and her Pakistani husband get stared at all the time when they go out together, especially by other South Asians. I commented that I never notice stares when my husband & I are running around town together – and it turns out that Aditya & I live only a mile away from the mall where Gori Wife gets stared at! (This may be the final proof that Aditya needs to prove that I am socially incompetent & oblivious.)

Reflecting on this, I’ve come to wonder how much awareness is a good thing when it comes to the social tensions that intercultural relationships often bring up. Generally my stance on intercultural issues is that more thought and awareness is better. If you don’t know about a problem, you can’t fix it or be ready for complications arising from it. Yet I don’t think my obliviousness to getting stared at by strangers (if it does, in fact, occur) has been a bad thing. I can’t imagine any negative consequences – only positive things like less stress and annoyance. Now I’m wondering – should I be caring more? Should I notice more?

Anyways, the rest of the documentary is quite interesting, and it slowly becomes more upbeat. The middle portion has a few excellent notes from Dr. Rebecca Bigler of the Gender and Racial Attitudes Lab at U of T on the race perceptions of young children and how media affects our attitudes on the matter. The documentary concludes with the couples telling of how they met – it’s beautiful to see how varied and filled with love the relationships are.

My husband and I don’t speak a common language. Never have, never will. Sure, I’m a native English-speaker, born & raised in America, and Aditya grew up speaking English both in the home and at school – and he even majored in English Literature at the Midwestern university we both attended. Nonetheless, we will always be shouting to each other across a ravine – a gap created by our different cultures.

Those of your who are in an intercultural relationship – or who interact regularly with people from a different culture, as I discussed last post – know that this gap goes far beyond the ones created by so-called gender wars, “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” talk, the accents or incomplete vocabularies of non-fluent speakers , or even the basic idea from philosophy of language that no person can know exactly what you’re thinking in your head. The culture we grew up with inevitably affects the framework of the world we perceive – and thus the world we communicate to and with. Lest I end up sounding too pessimistic, however, let me hasten to add that that the difference in world views created by dissimilar cultures isn’t insurmountable. Sure, you’re never going to completely conquer the gap between two cultures – but every little bit helps!

Today’s post is on one of those little bits that help. Or maybe it’s a big bit – I’ll let you decide.Before we get going too far, I admit that my dear husband would probably laugh his socks off if he thought I was claiming expertise in the arena of communication. So, to spare his socks, let’s be clear: I’m no professional communicator. What I am, however, is a reliably trained research monkey whose idea of fun is skimming through academic journals and books on all manner of things. And today I’m writing about something I found in one of those books – a framework put forth by Dr. Michael Bryam that has helped me tremendously in thinking about – and doing – intercultural communication. This framework organizes the six interrelated skills, attitudes, and knowledge sets – each a savoir – which together make up intercultural communicative competence. The first three are preconditions for any true cross-cultural communication – without them you’re lost. The last three are necessary for the successful development of intercultural competence. Let’s dig in!

Savoirs: knowledge, plain and simple

Savoir - without the plural ‘s’ – means “to be aware” or “to know” in French. Savoirs - with the ‘s’ – is the knowledge dimension of our framework of intercultural communication. This is the background information about a culture or nation  you need to know in order to have a snowball’s chance of understanding subtle references or remarks. In the US, for example, you often hear the phrase “he hit that one out of the park” when someone answers a question particularly eloquently, or otherwise performs well. If your foreign friend didn’t know the first thing about baseball and home runs, that idiom would make little to no sense to him – and communication stops when you use it. And thus you fail savoirs in not one, but two ways – not knowing what his culture consists of, and failing to realize the unique facets of your own. There’s two cultures being represented in the conversation, and you need to know about both.

However, savoirs is more than just that. Beyond knowing the nitty gritty about a culture – the gestures, symbols, values, “high” culture,”low” culture and so forth of the person you’re trying to communicate interculturally with, savoirs also requires you to understand meta-culture. What are the things that make up any culture? Where are the areas you’re most likely to misstep with the particular person you’re talking to? What are the things you don’t know about this person’s culture? Or, as Bryam defines it,  savoirs is “knowledge about social groups and their cultures in one’s own country, and similar knowledge of the interlocutor’s country on one hand, and similar knowledge of the processes and interaction at the individual and societal levels, on the other hand.”

Savoir s’engager: critical engagement

Critical engagement – or savoir s’engager - is the second of the requirements for any sort of true intercultural communication. It’s defined as “a critical engagement with the foreign culture under consideration and one’s own” by Bryam, but I like to think of it as being willing to jump off the high dive – and hope you stick the landing. Basically, it’s holding the general disposition that you’re going into a discussion with a person from another culture with eyes wide open and ready to critically think about whatever gets tossed up to you.  Generally, I think this attitude is one that everyone should make an effort to have everyday – but it’s especially important in a cross-cultural setting where closing your eyes to the true differences – and similarities – in cultures will mean inevitable confusion and failure to understand one another.

Savoir être: critical openness

Bryam defines savoir être as “the capacity and willingness to abandon ethnocentric attitudes and perceptions and the ability to establish and maintain a relationship between one’s own and the foreign culture”. Quite the mouthful, eh? I initially had some difficulty understanding – and accepting – this savoir, as I very much believe in a concrete right & wrong, independent of culture. I thought that Bryam’s definition was calling for me to give up this view. But then I realized that savoir être is really just the other side of the coin from savoir s’engager – where one calls for you to be critically engaged in the idea of culture while communicating interculturally, the other calls for you to be open to the ideas of the other culture. Savoir s’engager says to look about yourself sharply, but savoir être requires you to not look about so sharply that all you see is things to criticize.  That doesn’t mean that there might not be some things worthy of criticism in a foreign culture (there’s no such thing as a perfect culture, just like there’s no such thing as a perfect human) – but you should also open to the good things that every culture holds. If all you can express is criticism, the problem lies  with you and your lack of savoir être, not the culture. And you can expect that your unwillingness to budge away from your ethnocentrism will stop members of that culture from even attempting to communicate with you.

Savoir apprendre: skill of discovery

Apprendre is better translated as “learn” or “learning”, I believe, but discovery better fits the flavor of the idea that Bryam is trying to get across. He defines savoir apprendre as “the capacity to learn cultures and assign meaning to cultural phenomena in an independent way.” In other words, kicking yourself in the butt to explore a culture actively, rather than wanting things spoon-fed to you. Of course, if you somehow manage to get some basic knowledge, and you have the critical attitudes I discussed above, you don’t have to independently explore a new culture to hold a reasonable discourse. But you aren’t going to improve your communications skills by sitting like a stick in the mud either. If your goal is to be a truly competent intercultural communicator, you have to be able – and willing – to explore foreign terrain on your own, to engage others through interaction. Your significant other, friend, or teacher won’t always be there to translate new-to-you cultural phenomena.

Savoir comprendre: skill of understanding

This is likely the simplest of the savoirs in definition – “the capacity to interpret and relate cultures” – but one of the hardest to master. Luckily, it’s also what you’re taught to do in your formal education – take information, and then interpret it, analyze it, and place it within a larger context. Basically, it’s a research paper, but applied to the culture you’re interacting with, not your English lit text. Of course, in order to have material to ponder, you’ll first need to discover it through savoir apprendre. But the payoff of learning to learn in a new setting is always worth it – as you understand a culture and then incorporate your understanding of a culture into your communications, they discussion you have will grow much, much richer.

Savoir faire: knowing what to do

Finally, we’re left with the one that wraps it all up: savior faire, which is “the overall ability to act in an interculturally competent way in intercultural contact situations.” Other possible translations are “don’t put your foot in your mouth”, “don’t freeze” and above else, “be cool.” If you’ve developed the five other savoirs in your quest to be a good intercultural communicator, savoir faire is applying them to an actual, real-time interaction with others from another culture, and succeding beautifully.

So there we all are – the six components. Going through these, step-by-step, has helped me realize what areas I need to work on in order to improve my interactions with both my Indian husband, Aditya, and all my crazy non-American coworkers (I’m totally a freezer! Also not big on going out into the wilds to discover new stuff!). I hope it’s helped you a bit too. And I’d love to hear what others think of this framework – it’s not the only one the intercultural academics have come up with, but it’s certainly the most detailed one. So, valid? Not valid? Missing a key part of the way you think of intercultural communication? Too theoretical?