Thursday, November 8, 2007

On Being Flapped

I was talking to my friend Eleuthera, of Dumbledore theory renown, about culture shock the other night. Before this fall, I thought I was fairly immune to culture shock(The term I used was unflappable, but I might have spelled it unflaapable.) This may seem like a naïve thing to think, but I had a few fairly hard-core travel experiences in Tanzania, including washing myself in a bucket of water heated over a fire and hiding in the trunk of an armed car as we drove near the Burundian border because there had been reports of Congolese bandit activity. In Tanzania, I was never confronted by my difference so much as my privilege. I ended every day heart-broken by how hard the lives of the people I met were, how optimistic about the future they were, and how little I could do for them. My time in Tanzania was a period of emotional growth but it didn’t force me to reevaluate the way I saw the world in the same way.

I’m learning a (obvious) lesson— differences between cultures aren’t about different foods or different languages or holidays so much as about different ideas. I knew this in principle, but it feels a little different than criticizing the oversimplification of multiculturalism in practice. On the one hand, I feel like I’m getting to learn what my country does well (public radio!) and what it fails at (public transit!) better. On the other hand, I think I sometimes wind up being more judgmental than I mean to be.

I'm not sure how to capture this, so I'm going to focus on two areas: one is gender and sex, and the other is civic engagement. Both really deserve more attention than I’m about to give them, but I want to hold off till the end of this trip.
I posted a little bit about this before, but I feel like at this point, I’ve gotten a handle on the things I like and don’t like about the way we handle gender and sexuality in the United States and I feel ready to dish out judgments. I struggle with the things that are unfamiliar in other places—from homosexuality and flirting being illegal in the UAE to twelve year old porn stars in Japan. Are those laws enforced? Is the U15 idols just a special case? Do the extremes say something about society as a whole or are they just extremes?

One thing I’m coming to believe is that one thing that is very special about the United States (I can’t say unique, because I think I might observe the same thing in parts of Europe or India or Latin America, and I won’t say immature, but it’s what I grew up with and I love it) is our belief in fairness and our capacity for outrage. I know we’re apparently in a quarter-century long civic engagement slump, but I do think we live in a country where people get angry when bad things happen to them—or to others-- and want to act on those things. It’s not about actually rioting, protesting, writing a letter to the paper, walking out, or running for office, but even contemplating taking those actions in a fit of anger. In the UAE, people can’t do that because they are afraid, and in Japan, harmony is assigned the highest value. The acceptance that you can’t change your world is a challenge for me to swallow, and I never know where to take the conversation next.

I understand why my trips to Europe didn’t force me to reassess my views in the same ways as being in the UAE or Japan has. Views about smoking in public places aside, liberal Democrats make great Europeans. I can’t really figure out why being in Tanzania didn’t challenge me in the same way, though.

In some ways, Tanzania was much more ‘western” than either Japan or the UAE—they may have been occupied and drilled for oil, respectively, but they never were anyone’s colony. Another factor was probably being there with three friends, and being able to experience and talk over the differences with them as we all encountered them. A third variable may be that I had studied Africa—especially Tanzania—for years, and obsessively read travel accounts and Peace Corps memoirs—so was prepared for the things that had surprised others. Although Japan and the Middle East are both pretty popular obsessions—and pretty amazing places-- I never caught that bug and went to both places armed with just what I could cram.

I think the biggest difference may be that I saw the differences in Tanzania as “differences in level of development” rather than “alternative choices.” In a way, I think this is an accurate lens, but I also wonder if it reflects my own bias. Was I unwilling to see Tanzania as deliberately different?

That’s a dangerous type of jingoism. ‘Everyone would be like us if only they could afford to be.”

Overall, I’m really enjoying this feeling of being flapped. There was a moment in 10th grade history when we learned about Locke’s treatises on government and the social contract and it felt like my whole head was exploding. I thought I suddenly understood the foundation for revolution and rebellion and legitimate government. In a great college class, you can count on a moment like that every two weeks. Now, I feel like I get a moment like that almost every day.

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