I tripped, stepping on a few books strewn along the “path” to the couch.

“Hey!” Aditya exclaimed. “Don’t step on the books! You’re never  step on books. It’s disrespectful.”

“Well, if you don’t want them stepped on you shouldn’t leave them on the ground. They’re just books – it’s not like I cracked the spine or anything. Wait… did you just mumble a prayer to the book?”

Cultural and religious differences

When I first started dating Aditya, I knew only a little about either Hinduism or general Indian culture. I certainly didn’t know about any prohibitions about stepping on books – at most, I had a vague notion that feet were considered unclean beyond just, you know, germs and dirt from walking around barefoot.

Learning about my husband’s culture and religious traditions has been a slow, albeit rewarding, experience. I’ve struggled with many of the concepts he considered completely normal – so normal, in fact, that the differences between our two expectations about proper behavior would only surface when one of us committed a faux pas in the other’s eyes.  This struggle goes beyond just memorizing what’s cool and what’s not – at times it has been difficult to understand the reasoning behind the rules, or to take the next step and accept the differences. Some of his cultural concepts I’ve been able to embrace as my own – but others not so much.

Today I’d like to discuss three good ways of dealing with differing cultural and religious traditions – understanding them, accepting them, or embracing them – and why it’s perfectly okay to not embrace – or even accept – any tradition you find difficult or troubling, as long as that works for your particular relationship.

Understanding differences – strive for it

“Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story”. – John Barth

There are very few people in this world who believe that their actions are without reason or justification. Certainly no culture or religion develops a custom just for the hell of it – there’s always a purpose. When you come across a cultural or religious difference, your first goal should always be to understand the reasoning behind,  the purpose to it.

Understanding the differing custom or behavior or attitude is not the same thing as accepting it as the right thing for you to do, or even the morally correct thing for anyone. I can understand the purpose behind a suicide bomber’s efforts to kill innocents, or the reasoning that leads to the barbaric custom of female infanticide without condoning either evil practice. Understanding a cultural difference isn’t the same as okaying it – it’s just a way to open up a dialogue with a person from a different background by acknowledging the humanness of their  actions and beliefs. If you can’t get beyond a “that’s nonsensical” reaction to a cultural difference that represents a failure on your part to stretch your mind fully. Of course, that doesn’t mean that it’s easy to understand the actions and traditions of cultures foreign to us. Stretching your mind is hard work!

I was completely baffled by Aditya’s reaction to my accidental stumble over his books. After all, they were just books – things, objects, items. Even after he explained that it was a matter of respect – respect over the knowledge the books contained, the wisdom we gain from the written word – I still didn’t find the whole scenario logical. Sure, respect learning, I got that – but why did he offer what looked like a prayer to an inanimate object? It wasn’t like the book cared it was stepped on! It was only after I  was told by Aditya that it was a pranam (respectful salutation), not a prayer that I realized – duh – it was a salutation to what the book symbolized, not the physical object itself. All right, I thought, I get it. By stepping on the book, you disrespected learning, and then you offer a pranam, and show that you actually do respect learning. Sounded a bit superstitious to me, but I understood the basic reasoning behind Aditya’s actions. And because I understood the basics it was something that I could tolerate, even if I didn’t think it worthwhile or logical.

Accepting differences – try for it

Accepting a cultural or religious difference goes beyond understanding the reasoning at play. Acceptance  means that you recognize that this cultural or religious difference is worthwhile and good  for the people who practice it.

Not all traditions are worthy of acceptance, of course – I’m not suggesting that you accept traditions that are obviously morally wrong, like honor killings, just because some culture  says that it’s a good thing. Even with more mundane cultural differences, though, it’s not always a simple jump from understanding the reasoning behind a cultural custom to accepting the cultural custom as a good thing for others. You could think it’s just a waste of time (my feelings on  most superstitions). Or that it’s a tradition that doesn’t solve the problem that is actually at hand – it just distracts from it (my feelings on most faith-based healing shticks you see on late-night tv).

While I believe that we should all strive to understand the cultural differences we come across in our intercultural relationships, I don’t think it’s necessary – or even possible – to accept all cultural differences. What’s important is that the level of acceptance of each others’ differences works for your relationship. This means that you’re both comfortable with each other’s differences, and neither person feels pressured to accept that which that which they find troubling, morally or otherwise.

Over time I did move from simply understanding Aditya’s tradition of not stepping on books to accepting it as a worthwhile endeavor.  As he explained the tradition more – and as I learned more about Hinduism in a class I was taking – I learned what Aditya got out of the pranams to “offended” books. For him, at least, the short practice wasn’t about superstition or righting some cosmic tally against him. Instead, it was a occasional reminder of why learning was valuable. A moment to pause and reflect.

I don’t think this particular tradition of his was one that I had to understand and accept in order for our relationship to succeed. Perhaps he wouldn’t have appreciated the eye-rolling I inevitably do when I think someone is being silly, but our relationship would survive. It’s a bit hypothetical, though, as I have come to accept this tradition. However, other cultural differences were deal-breakers. For example, it’s very important to Aditya that his parents be able and welcome to visit us for months at a time, or even move in with us, as is common in his culture.If I could not have accepted this value of his, than I doubt we’d be together today – it’s just too important to him. He communicated this to me very early in our relationship, and I learned to accept this foreign tradition.

How does one go about accepting alien customs, traditions, and beliefs as worthwhile and good – and a part of your life now? Well, for me, it’s taken mostly time and thought.  I’ve had to radically retool my understanding of what a good child-parent relationship is to get to the point of being comfortable with the idea & reality of long visits from Maa and Baba.  With the book thing, well, I’ve thought a fair bit on what it means to respect an abstract concept, and how one shows those sorts of values in everyday life.  (Yes, I was raised a heathen child without religion or much spirituality.) I’ve come to realize the value of these small, symbolic gestures of Aditya’s, how it allows for a redirection of one’s mind to the more important things of life, a little reminder of what matters. In fact, not only do I accept the idea of pranam to knowledge in Aditya’s life, I’ve come to desire it in my own. Which brings us to the final section…

Embracing differences, ending differences

The third and final way you can deal with cultural and religious differences is not just understand, not just accept, but embrace the differences and make them part of your own personal culture or religion. I think you see this most often when one half an interfaith partnership converts to his significant other’s religion – thus ending the interfaithiness. In some ways I’ve done that by embracing parts of Aditya’s Hindu practices and faith – I too now avoid stepping on books out of a respect for the knowledge they contain.

However, embracing all – or even most – of your partner’s cultural or religious beliefs should not be your main goal in dealing with differences. I mean, if you both completely embrace the other’s traditions, you just end up flipping sides! Nor should one person try to give up their culture entirely and embrace the other’s – you don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of pulling it off, and if you somehow did, I suspect you’d find you’d lost a large part of the core part of yourself in the process.

No, I firmly believe that you should embrace the parts of another culture that strongly call out to you, and just try to understand and accept the other cultural differences. Think of whole-heartedly embracing some of your partner’s traditions as a bonus, but not a goal. Be open-minded enough to understand the purposes of different customs, and try to see and accept the good in these cultural and religious differences. But remember: it’s okay to not love, or even like, all parts of your partner’s culture. After all, it’s the differences between the two of you, in part, that brought you together.

This is a pretty sensitive topic. In talking about cultural differences, I’m careful to not make too strict generalizations – I’ll hedge what I say by emphasizing I’m talking about my own, personal experiences, or suggest that a group seems to act in a certain way, or that some (but not all!) people from a particular culture do a particular thing. But it’s impossible to avoid making any generalizations at all about cultures or to keep from categorizing people – and silly to even try.

Human beings thrive on making categories and developing generalizations. Evolution equipped us with these abilities for our own good. Any caveman hunter who couldn’t figure out that the grazing animals & the sharp-toothed animals belonged in different categories, one labeled hunt and the other avoid wouldn’t last very long. And the gatherer who used his experience with the different categories of plants to generalize about what was tasty and what was poisonous tended to survive a bit longer. This is a good thing! We’re talking about the beginning of science!

So we can’t avoid making generalizations, and, anyways, they seem pretty darn helpful. However, when we move onto categorizing and generalizing people & cultures, we run into a bit more of a problem. People are just so… complicated. And there’s so many of ‘em! Do you really think that any of us can easily make a generalization that will, for example, apply to all one billion Indians in the world? Really? Even Indians have major trouble with it – most anthologies about the subcontinent have at least one or two essays devoted to just trying to describe what, besides birthplace, connects this vast, diverse group of people. (My money’s on cricket, but I’m just guessing from my personal experience.)

The rest of this post is on how we can use our little analytical minds for the forces of good generalizations, rather than for the evils of stereotypes. How can we create useful categories for the different people we meet? And then how can we accurately and fairly generalize about these groups, given that we’re going to generalize some anyways? And finally, how can we avoid from moving from a generalization to an unfair stereotype?

Creating categories – blonds & brunettes should suffice, right?

When my Indian husband, Aditya, first came to the US, he had difficulty identifying differences in white faces, particularly with girls. To solve this problem, he ended up lumping all the young women on his dorm room floor first semester into one of two categories: “blond” or “brunette”, and leaving it at that. I’m not sure if there weren’t any redheads on his floor, or if there were so few that he could manage to tell them apart without the need for another category. Either way, he was definitely missing out on, oh, about 95% of the “subtle” differences that any American who’d lived through high school could see in his floormates – that one dresses preppy, this one is the classic girl-next-door, here’s a girl jock. Forget about noticing the “tells” of each type – Aditya didn’t know half these social categories existed!

Of course, he can pick out a North Indian from a South Indian with ease. And he’s very good about guessing which caste an Indian belongs to, just off of a person’s name, language, clothing, and the like. See, these are the categories that often matter in India, so these are the ones he learned about. We all make categories based off of our needs in the society we live in. Or, to put it another way, the sociologist Joel Charon*** says

… we isolate a chunk out of our environment, distinguish that chunk from all other parts of the environment, give it a name, and associate certain ideas with it. Our chunks — or categories — arise in interaction; they are socially created… Much of our learning is simply aimed at understanding what various categories mean, and this involves understanding the qualities that make up those categories and the ideas associated with them.

So what does this mean for those of us who discuss cultural differences?

1. We should be aware of the limitations – and strengths – of our personal categories. When I first started dating Aditya I didn’t realize just how diverse Indian culture is – Indians, Nepalis, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis were all pretty much the same group of people in my mind. And it’s not just me: consider the use of the pejorative Paki used in Great Britain for all South Asians.
2. Categories are not absolute things; instead they develop as our social needs change. Since meeting Aditya, I don’t group all South Asians together. Instead, I have many different categories for Indians – Calcuttans, Bengalis, Mumbaiers, urban folk, village folk, the different castes, and so forth. I’m not saying that I know all about these groups, or that I can even distinguish between one and another, but I do know enough to recognize that they’re different enough to need separate mental categories.
3. A category is a tool for understanding & organizing knowledge, and nothing more. You shouldn’t judge a person based on which category he does or does not fit into. Duh! Categorizing is only a good thing if you use it to understand why people have different qualities. Knowing that Aditya was an Army brat who moved around a lot, for instance, helps me understand both his need for travel, and his desire to put down roots somewhere.
4. Categories are unlikely to all-important for understanding any individual. This is basic statistics – even if you develop good categories, and accurate generalizations about that category, that information will likely be of only some help in understanding any particular individual. Sure, most people who grow up moving from place to place (like Army brats) tend to enjoy travel – but I’m sure there’s a decent number who hate it. And, when dealing with any one specific individual, how are you to know which type you’ve got on your hands? Everyone belongs to multiple categories, and even the sum of all those categories doesn’t tell you everything about a person. (I suspect there’s a whole post just in this point.)

Generalizing about generalizations – the good, the bad, and the ugly

We’re all individuals, right? So isn’t generalizing about people always a bad thing, since it denies people’s individuality?

Well, yes and no.

Bad generalizations - aka stereotypes – are worse than plain ignorance. Accurate, nonjudgmental generalizations can be a useful tool in understanding others.

The problem with generalizations based on categories is that it is very, very difficult to do them right. As I pointed out above, humans are so complicated, and humanity is so diverse that it will never be possible to make an absolute claim about any group of people. And it’s difficult for individuals to even make a fairly accurate generalizations, given their limited personal experiences with any particular group. I think Dr. Charon goes to the heart of the matter when he defines what, exactly, a generalization is:

A generalization describes the category. It is a statement that characterizes objects within the category and defines similarities and differences with other categories. “This is what an educated person is!” (in contrast to an uneducated person)… When it comes to people, generalization is very difficult to do well. The principle reason for this is that we are judgmental, and too often it is much easier for us to generalize for the purpose of evaluating (condemning or praising) others than for the purpose of understanding them.

So how should you deal with cultural generalizations?

1. Never, never, never use them to judge, only to understand. The moment you start to view a cultural generalization as a good or bad thing is the moment you fall into stereotyping. This doesn’t mean you can’t judge actions that other cultures sometimes take: I have no problem taking a firm stance against female infanticide (a fairly major problem in some Indian states), and I’ll condemn any Indian that does such a horrible act. However, it’s a big jump from saying “Indians who commit infanticide are horrible” to saying “Since Indian culture in some circles encourages female infanticide, Indian culture is horrible and all Indians are horrible.” Doing so would be ignoring the numerous Indians who speaks out against this social problem.
2. Try not to base your generalizations on personal experience alone. There are a million and one reasons why you shouldn’t try to make cultural generalizations from personal experiences, but they mostly boil down to the fact that people are biased. You’re biased, I’m biased, all the children of the world are biased. As I point out in my About Page, I’ve had significant contact with exactly one extended Indian family of one ethnicity from one region (and I have a few good Indian friends, but still…). I’m lucky if I can predict what Aditya will be doing tomorrow – I’ve got a snowball’s chance in heck of making any accurate sweeping pronouncements about Indian culture in general. I do have some mental generalizations, of course – as I pointed out above, it’s impossible not to. But, whenever possible, I try to base my generalizations on things other than just personal experience…
3. Look to the social sciences for accurate generalizations. There’s a whole army of sociologists, anthropologists, economists, and the like who make it their lives’ work to scientifically study different nations and cultures. While they don’t always get it right, as an insider I can tell you that most of ‘em try awfully hard to develop theories based off of accurate, unbiased data. I don’t expect you to read academic journals to understand everything the world, but if you’re really interested in a subject, try, say, reading blogs by the experts in those fields to make sure your generalizations have at least a passing familiarity with the real world.
4. Recognize that any generalization is tentative and subject to reevaluation as new evidence comes in. There’s an economist at Harvard, Emily Oster, who made her career a few years back by showing that some of the “missing girls” in Asian countries – suspected of being the victims of female infanticide – were actually “missing” because of the effect of Hepatitis B on the reproduction system. It was suggested that the virus changed the expected gender balance of fetuses, although the exact biological connection was unknown. Well, the big story in economic circles this week is Dr. Oster’s newest paper, where she shows that Hep B actually can’t be a major factor in the “missing girls” problem. I say major kudos to Emily Oster for admitting her error, and changing her stance in light of the new evidence. Try to emulate her, and accept that all generalizations are subject to change with new data.

Stereotypes – how to recognize them

I think that you all are smart enough (and I’ve harped on it long enough) that I don’t need to tell you why stereotyping is a bad thing. But because I’m really the type to harp on these things – and I want everyone to be absolutely clear on this matter, I’ll give it one more go, by once again using the clear prose of Joel Charon:

Stereotypes are highly oversimplified, exaggerated views of reality. They are especially attractive to people who are judgmental of others and who are quick to condemn people who are different from them. They have been used to justify ethnic discrimination, war, and systematic murder of whole categories of people. Far from arising out of careful and systematic analysis, stereotypes arise out of hearsay and culture, and instead of aiding our understanding of the human being, they always stand in the way of accurate understanding.

Okay, that’s the last time I talk about why stereotypes are bad (in this post, at least!). But now that we all know exactly why they’re so horrible, let’s discuss exactly what is a stereotype. As Charon points out, a stereotype is a specific kind of generalization, one that is likely to lead to bad & inaccurate beliefs about the category being generalized. The things that separate out the s-word from regular generalizations include the following:

1. A stereotype is judgmental. The person who holds a stereotype about a category believes that people belonging to that category are somehow better or worse than others because of certain characteristics they hold. If I said “Asians are generally shorter than other ethnicities” I’m not indulging in a stereotype unless I’m somehow attaching a badness or goodness to this fact.
2. A stereotype tends to be an absolute category. By this what I (and Charon) mean is that people who hold stereotypes rarely recognize that there are exceptions – perhaps many exceptions – to the rule. Rather than using a generalization as a tool to understanding, they use a stereotype as an ultimate statement.
3. The stereotype tends to be a category that overshadows all others in the mind of the observer. That is, the sterotyper fails to recognize that we all belong to many categories, some of which are more important to our personal identity than others.
4. A stereotype doesn’t change with new evidence. This goes back to bullet point number 2 – even when you point out many counterexamples to the stereotype, the person holding it will still believe that the stereotype is generally true & useful. It’s like arguing with a wall.
5. The stereotype wasn’t created carefully in the first place. Most people who hold stereotypes base them off of limited personal experience, or what they’ve learned from others who aren’t informed by data either.
6. The stereotype doesn’t encourage a search for understanding why human beings are different from each other. Stereotypes focus on increasing the chasms between people, rather than making bridging the differences through understanding. Obviously, this sort of attitude does not bode well for intercultural communication and relationships.

The bottom line

You can’t help generalizing about cultural differences, as it’s the main way humans organize knowledge. What you can do is recognize how and when you’re generalizing, and take steps to make them as accurate and useful as possible.

Think about the way you categorize different groups of people. Are there big swaths of populations that you group under one heading? Why? You can’t break every population down into tiny categories, but recognize where you have good, distinct categories, and where they’re a bit fuzzier. Be open to developing more categories as you learn that what you thought was one large group is actually a number of small, interrelated groups. And be aware that others have different categories from you – so they’re understanding the world in a fundamentally different way from you.

Think about the way you form generalizations. Always question them. If you don’t know much about a group, consider doing a little scientific research, rather than relying on what you heard a few years ago from some dude at a party. Emulate Emily Oster, and be open to reevaluation as new data & experiences come in. Remember that your generalizations are only one small tool when dealing with individuals.

And, finally, always challenge stereotypes. That’s the only way progress happens in intercultural understanding.

*** A great deal of the theory behind this post should be credited to Dr. Charon, and his excellent essay Should We Generalize about People? from his introductory sociology textbook Ten Questions (1995).