Prof. Fred Dervin University of Helsinki, Finland

Enhancing intercultural collaboration in the international

university: Aergia, Hormes or Morpheus?

Objectives

• Question the idea of interculturality in relation to internationalization • What positions to be ‘avoided’? • What to do instead?

Nathan Coley

“Renewed interculturality” • Shi-xu • Zhu Hua • Xiangyun Du • Adrian Holliday • Prue Holmes • Regis Machart • Malcolm MacDonald • Robyn Moloney • Ingrid Piller • Karen Risager • Karin Zotzmann • …

(Australia, China, Denmark, Finland, GB, Malaysia)

Principles

Positions to be avoided

*Love Thy Neighbour *Superman-Wonder Woman

*Procrustes *Undertaker

*”Don’t throw the baby with the bathwater”

Principles

Positions to be avoided

*Love Thy Neighbour *Superman-Wonder Woman

*Procrustes *Undertaker

*”Don’t throw the baby with the bathwater”

• “We cannot repeat too often that it is not by preaching love of our neighbor that we can achieve it…”

• (Bergson, 1932)

Easy, uncritical, safe and naïve positions…

• TROM: Tolerance, respect, open-mindedness • Still interesting? Active enough? • Automatic through contacts?

• “After my course my students usually have no stereotypes left on Finns”

• “My goal is to help students get rid of their stereotypes” • “If I have intercultural competence I can avoid stereotypes” • “I know their culture so well that I have no stereotypes”

Procrustes • bandit who physically attacked people by

stretching them or cutting off their legs, so as to force them to fit the size of an iron bed

• Believed humans were all the same size

• A word can have different meanings • A word is political • A word can be an empty signifier • A word can be used to mistreat the other • A word has a (complex) history • A word was not always developed in the ‘centre’

• These need to be negotiated with others…

Principles

Positions to be avoided

*Love Thy Neighbour (*Superman-Wonder Woman)

*Procrustes *Undertaker

*”Don’t throw the baby with the bathwater”

•“to treat others as you treat an object, a corpse—to behave with them like an undertaker”

•Emil Cioran

• “Whereas in many cultures

people are supposed to follow instructions of teachers and supervisors, Finns are encouraged to solve problems independently and take initiative when needed. Thus while young people in many cultures live in a very protected and supervised life, students in Finland are very independent and take responsibility for their studies. This is another area where foreign students also get easily confused”. (234)

• The lecturer asked him to demonstrate how Japanese people greet each other. Atsushi lifted his hand, wiggled his fingers, and said “hello”. Not satisfied, the lecturer insisted : “No, I mean how do you greet people in a formal situation ?” Atsushi shrugged and repeated that this was how he greeted people. Getting annoyed, the lecturer-who was of course expecting Atsushi to perform a bow-said “Okay then, how would you greet the Emperor?” Atsushi, feeling harassed, responded that he would prefer not to meet the emperor. Finally the lecturer was obliged to performed the bow herself, but Atsushi felt stereotyped and kept complaining about the incident for weeks.

“Don’t throw the baby with the bathwater”

Use, misuse and abuse of the word culture

• Debates around the concept in anthropology 1980s • “Whatever any ‘Asian’ informant was reported to have said or done was

interpreted with stunning regularity as a consequence of their ‘Asianness’, their ‘ethnic identity’, or the ‘culture’ of their ‘community’. All agency seemed to be absent, and culture an imprisoning cocoon or a determining force” (Baumann, 1996. Contesting Culture).

• “Culture is sometimes nothing more than a convenient and lazy explanation” (Piller, 2011: 172)

• Culture as an excuse / as an alibi

• “‘You will die now’: Mad Husband, 76, ‘tried to stab his wife to death because she hogged the bed sheets and left him with cold feet’”

• “Pictured: The Pakistani immigrant who beat his wife to death in their

New York apartment because she made him the wrong dinner – but his lawyer claims that’s just his culture”

• Xiaolu Guo

• In the West we are used to loneliness. I think it’s good for you to experience loneliness, to explore what it feels like to be on your won. After a while, you will start to enjoy solitude. You won’t be so scared of it anymore. (p. 222)

• Yes, we are maybe quieter than people in other countries. Why it is

such a big problem? It just belongs to Finnish culture. It doesn’t mean that we are depressed or something, it’s just in the habit of Finland.

• Unequal choice in using one’s culture in determining oneself?

Problems when comparing cultures

• “False fixing of boundaries” (Baumann, 1996) • Explicit/implicit moralistic judgments • Better and worse, more civilized • Hierarchies – politics of the closed door (insiders/outsiders) • Unjustified ethnocentrism – “racism without races” (ex. of the Chinese) • Ways of establishing power relations

Beyond culture • “Culture is what one sees with, but seldom what

one sees” (Holland & Quinn, 1987: 14)

• Hoskins and Sallah (2011, p. 114): “simplistic focus on culture hides unequal power relations, including poverty, violence, structural inequalities such as racism and the possibilities of multiple identities”

WHAT TO DO?

Daemones (personified spirits/concepts) of the human condition and abstract concepts • Aergia: spirit of idleness, laziness, indolence and sloth • Hormes: spirit personifying energetic activity, impulse or effort (to do

a thing), eagerness, setting oneself in motion, and starting an action, and particularly onrush in battle.

• Morpheus: god of dreams and sleep

• Intersectionality • Go beyond Culture, ethnicity, race • Socio-economic/politico-historical categories/etc.

• Undertones and nuances rather than generalizations • “Collective ego” (Maffesoli, 1993)

• I <-> Is-others • POWER • Individualistic approaches

• Commonalities-differences • Pornography of difference • unidiversalism (Maffesoli, 2016)

• Political ≠ neutral • Playfulness, imaginarIES • Failure

• Only success

Intersectionality

• an analytic framework that allows relating dimensions such as gender, ethnicity, race, class, status, language and sexuality, etc.

• intersectionality allows us to complicate identity

The instability of identity

• Education often contributes to making us believe that our identities are stable and constant. Yet, at the same time, what we experience when we meet other people is often inconstant and unpredictable. This is why we sometimes decide to hide behind a mask or reduce the other to a single identity. We all have different identities that are relevant depending on the context, our interlocutors but also our health, mood, readiness to speak, etc.

(Lifton, 1993)

Diverse diversities • She was aware of how different the Topraks [Pembe’s

Turkish surname] were from their English neighbours, and yet Turks and Kurds were different from one another too, and some Kurds were completely unlike other Kurds. Even in her tiny village by the Euphrates [name of river] every family had another story, and in every family no two children were ever the same. (p. 16)

• Shafak (2013)

• “If people were not different, they would have nothing to say to each other. And if they were not the same, they would not understand each other”.

(Hannah Arendt, 1958: 155)

• “cultural difference is more often read as cultural

hierarchy than cultural variation. There are said to be ‘better’ and ‘worse’, ‘more advanced’ and ‘more backward’ cultures”. (20)

• Phillips (2010)

• “socialization of the young in relation to inter-group relations should involve two stages. During the first stage, the omniculturalism imperative compels us to give priority to human commonalities, and requires that children are taught the important scientifically-established commonalities that characterize human beings”.

• “The end result of omniculturalism is a society in which people are knowledgeable about, and give priority to, human commonalities, but also leave some room for the recognition and further development of group distinctiveness”.

• Moghaddam, 2010, ch. 9

• “Upon meeting others and during interactions with them, first ask: what is it that I have in common with these other people?” (Modagham, 2010)

• More inter-! • Inter - cultural

Getting used to and accepting incoherence and diversities within diversity

• “I have female relations my age who

cover their heads, others who wear mini-skirts, some who are university professors or run businesses, others who choose rarely to leave their homes. I suspect if you were to ask them their religion, all would say ‘Islam’. But if you were to use that term to define their politics, careers, or values, you would struggle to come up with a coherent, unified view”.

• Hamid (2014: 31)

• “As a story teller I am less interested in generalizations than in undertones and nuances. These may not be visible at first glance, but they are out there, lurking beneath the surface, durable and distinct”.

• (Elif Shafak, p. 133)

• Interaction is always between two individuals a minima and “we

cannot give an undistorted account of ‘a person’ without giving an account of his relation with others. (…) No one acts or experiences in a vacuum” (Laing, 1961: 81-82).

• “When two people, A and B, talk to each other, six persons participate: in addition to A and B, also A’s image of B, B’s image of A, A’s image of B’s image of A and B’s image of A’s image of B”

• (Bauman, 2016)

• Lakoff (1990: 17) “our every interaction is political, whether we intent it to be or not; everything we do in the course of a day communicates our relative power, our desire for a particular sort of connection, our identification of the other as one who needs something from us, or vice versa. Often, perhaps usually, we are unaware of these choices; we don’t realize that we are playing for high stakes even in the smallest of small talk”.

The playful, imaginarIES

• “The best thing would be a comparison of Eastern and Western cultures. That’s a fashionable topic nowadays, and it doesn’t matter particularly whether what you write’s correct or not. As long as you say something with conviction, anything at all, you’ll be able to sell it”

(Er Ma, Lao She, 1929)

• “You never know how the experiment will turn out. It can be great, it can be really bad, but failure is so important, because it involves a learning process and it enables you to get to a new level and to other ways of seeing your work.”

• Marina Abramovic (2014)

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” S. Beckett

• Intersectionality • Go beyond Culture, ethnicity, race • Socio-economic/politico-historical categories/etc.

• Undertones and nuances rather than generalizations • “Collective ego” (Maffesoli, 1993)

• I <-> Is-others • POWER • Individualistic approaches

• Commonalities-differences • Pornography of difference • unidiversalism (Maffesoli, 2016)

• Political ≠ neutral • Playfulness, imaginarIES • Failure

• Only success

Proposal: IC?

• “Performing IC is: Becoming aware

of, recognizing, pushing through, presenting/defending and questioning (assumptions about) one’s identification and diverse diversities, as well as those of others, and

• (re)negotiating them in a ‘satisfactory’ manner with and for particular interlocutors in specific contexts and ad infinitum…”

• Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic (2014) • Марина Абрамовић

512 Hours – Serpentine Gallery

• 10am to 6pm, • 6 days a week, • a total of 129,916 visitors. • simplest of environments in the Gallery spaces, Abramović’s only materials

were herself, the audience and a selection of props. • On arrival, visitors both literally and metaphorically left their baggage

behind in order to enter the exhibition: bags, jackets, electronic equipment, watches and cameras were not permitted to accompany them.

• The public became the performing body, participating in the delivery of an unprecedented moment in the history of performance art.

• “Friday 13 June. At the end of the day something happened so incredible that it opened my heart and made me cry, cry, cry. I was coming to the middle space and I was seeing people like some sort of strange magnetic force, they are coming to the centre of the room and they are filling this podium and there was no space anymore. They are turning and making a circle around and around and around and at one point all of the people came in all spaces to the centre and they closed their eyes with a smile in their face and just stood there. It was so overwhelming. It was so magical.”

• “You see, what is my purpose of performance artist is to stage certain difficulties and stage the fear the primordial fear of pain, of dying, all of which we have in our lives, and then stage them in front of audience and go through them and tell the audience, 'I'm your mirror; if I can do this in my life, you can do it in yours.’”

• “When you have a nonverbal conversation with a

total stranger, then he can't cover himself with words, he can't create a wall”.

• “You never know how the experiment will turn out. It can be great, it can be really bad, but failure is so important, because it involves a learning process and it enables you to get to a new level and to other ways of seeing your work.”

Prof. Fred Dervin University of Helsinki, Finland