Anthropologist Gary Weaver suggested looking at culture as a kind of iceberg: one portion is clearly visible above the surface of the water, while the much larger chunk of ice is hidden below. The part above the water can be considered surface culture—what we can physically see or hear, including behavior, words, customs, language, and traditions. Underneath the water, invisible to all, is the deep culture.5 This place includes our beliefs, values, assumptions, worldview, and thought processes. Figure 4-1 depicts the cultural iceberg Weaver envisioned.
Figure 4-1 The Weaver Cultural Iceberg
(© Drs. Robert Kohls/Gary Weaver. Used with permission.)
The basic thesis behind this model is that the elements on the surface, or visible, layer of culture traditionally have been used to identify what is in the deeper, or invisible, layer. Conversely, the visible is where the invisible is expressed. Thus, what we see becomes our shorthand method to make early assessments and expectations of others. Is this person an “us” or a “them”? Will we relate from “likeness” or “difference”? The following are two examples of how this works.
• In some places, tribal markings make it clear whether strangers will interact as fellow tribespersons or foreigners from the first Moment of their meeting. Because of these symbols, they know immediately whether they can use their tribal dialect or must speak in a more universal language before either has said one word.
• When we watch a sporting event, we cheer or boo the players based solely on the color of their uniform. We look around the grandstands and assume those who wear the blue jerseys or bandanas like us share our hopes for a home team victory. We are equally confident that those with red jerseys have come to root for the opposing team. In each case, without knowing one other thing about the people surrounding us, we have made decisions about who they are and what they want based on something we can see.
Stereotypes and racism can form easily when we make assumptions about who another person is based on appearances alone. On the other hand, these assumptions based on the visible expressions of culture also help us create order and structure in our lives and social relationships. Imagine the chaos teams would face if they had no uniforms. What would happen if every time a basketball player wanted to pass the ball to a teammate, that player had to stop and ask the intended receiver what team he wanted to win?
Another danger lurks within the iceberg. The Titanic didn’t sink because it hit the visible portion of the iceberg. Disaster struck when the ship’s captain assumed he knew where the iceberg lay because of what he saw. He had no idea of its mammoth size below the surface. The same can happen with cultural clashes. We can make many allowances for differences we recognize, but when our values, beliefs, or worldviews are at odds with others in ways we haven’t stopped to consider and cannot see, our relationships can sink as the Titanic did without our knowing what we hit.6
Though the iceberg model explains many historical clashes as well as present-day situations, Weaver pointed out new challenges in our globalizing world. The advent of the Internet as well as TV, movies, and mass media of all kinds has made the visible layer of culture for people and groups around the world appear more similar than in previous eras. Because we initially base our expectations of likeness or difference on what we see, cultural clashes may increase, according to Weaver. He pointed out that we will assume we have commonality of thought, worldview, and beliefs when we look at another who appears very similar to ourselves in dress, manner, and even language. The reality is, however, that people change external cues of culture, such as dress and food, far more quickly than they alter their core values, manner of thinking, and belief system. Weaver stated that this developing discrepancy between who we expect others to be based on appearance and who they are in their invisible spaces will create more cultural clashes unless we find new ways to recognize and address this issue.7
The Importance of Cultural Balance
As mentioned earlier, understanding who we are and where we belong is a developmental task that takes place in the context of the surrounding community. It is there, while we are children, that we learn the basic rules and values by which our particular culture operates. As teenagers, we begin to test and challenge some of these assumptions and practices in the quest to establish our sense of individual identity as well. Ultimately, we internalize the practices and principles we have learned, challenged, and accepted. Then we can grow with confidence into adulthood because we know what is expected of us. Not only do we understand how the game is played, but we have had role models to watch in the age group just ahead of us and can follow in their paths.
At that point we experience what is called cultural balance—that almost unconscious knowledge of how things are and work in a particular community. Why is achieving this developmental state so important in establishing a sense of confidence and belonging?
When we are in cultural balance, we are like a concert pianist who, after practicing for years to master the basics, no longer thinks about how to touch the piano keys or do scales and trills. Those functions have become automatic responses to notations in the music score, and this freedom from conscious attention to details allows the pianist to use these very skills to create and express richer, fuller music for us all.
A sense of cultural balance allows that same freedom. Once we have stayed in a culture long enough to internalize its customs and underlying assumptions, we have an intuitive sense of what is right, humorous, appropriate, or offensive in any particular situation. Instead of spending excessive time worrying whether we are dressed appropriately for a business appointment, we concentrate on developing a new business plan. Being “in the know” gives us a sense of stability, deep security, and belonging, for we have been entrusted with the “secrets” of our tribe. We may not understand why cultural rules work as they do, but we know how our culture works.
In the days when most people lived in a basically monocultural environment and community, members shared essentially the same values, assumptions, behavioral styles, and traditional practices with one another. Achieving cultural balance wasn’t hard because everyone reinforced what lay in the deeper layer of culture as well as the seen layer. Patterns of the past were repeated for generations and change came slowly enough to be absorbed without rocking the cultural boat too wildly.
Perhaps one of the best illustrations of this type of traditional cultural community is seen in Fiddler on the Roof, the musical about a farmer named Tevye and his Russian Jewish village of Anatevka. For years Tevye’s culture had remained basically the same. Everyone knew where he or she fit, both in relating to one another and to God. There had been no major outside influences. The way things had always been was the way things still worked—with the milkman, matchmaker, farmer, and all others clearly aware of their assigned roles within the village. Roles assigned by whom? By tradition—another word for how cultural beliefs are worked out in practice. As Tevye says,
Because of our traditions, we’ve kept our balance for many, many years. Here in Anatevka we have traditions for everything—how to eat, how to sleep, how to wear clothes. For instance, we always keep our heads covered and always wear a little prayer shawl. This shows our constant devotion to God. You may ask, how did this tradition start? I’ll tell you—i don’t know! But it’s a tradition. Because of our traditions, everyone knows who he is and what God expects him to do . . . . Without our traditions, our lives would be as shaky as—as a fiddler on the roof!8
Tevye then laments that tradition is breaking down. As the old ways he knew rapidly begin to change, he loses his former sense of balance. His grip on life slips and his comfortable world is shattered. Mentally and emotionally, Tevye can’t keep up and he becomes disoriented and alienated, even from his own children.
This story serves as a great metaphor for what is happening in our world at an ever quickening pace. The ways we have known and taken for granted as defining and “doing” life, complete with their neat little boxes of race, nationalit
y, or ethnicity, are quickly breaking down. Cultural mixing and matching in every country is happening faster than we can understand. The normal feeling of many is to retrench and, like Tevye, long for the good old days when things seemed more in our control. We feel more comfortable and safer when we understand what’s going on based on how things have always been.
A World of Changing Cultures
Now that we’ve looked at cultural balance and how important it is, we must admit one thing: most TCKs often feel quite out of cultural balance. Why? Because for many, the world of rapid cultural change has been their norm as they exchange complete sets of worldviews, expectations of behavior, and even languages with an overnight airplane ride. Before they know how they are to behave, they must figure out where they are. Through the years, many have wondered what is wrong with them because they never seem to “get it.” Consider this story one ATCK told us:
The Edleys had lived and worked in a remote village in Africa for ten years. The parents wanted to make sure their children would fit back into their passport culture with little notice when it came time to return. They bought the latest fashions they could find, dressed their four children carefully, and flew back to New York. The family collected its luggage and the parents led the family procession to the line for customs.
Suddenly they realized people throughout the baggage claim area were looking at them. They wondered why when they had worked so hard to make their children appear “normal.” They turned and then understood the stares. There, behind them in perfect single file, walked each of their children carrying a suitcase on their heads. A perfectly common, sensible way to transport things in their village, but not a common sight at JFK airport in New York.
In countless stories we’ve heard similar to this one, TCKs and ATCKs tell us that no matter what situation they are in or how hard they try, they often find themselves making what others see as a dumb remark or mistake. They unknowingly transgress standard cultural procedures at the very time they think they are doing exactly the appropriate thing, such as carrying suitcases on their heads because the suitcases are heavy. How were these kids to know this isn’t the way people did it in the United States? Everyone they knew had been carrying heavy loads like this wherever they went. Those around the TCKs wonder at their apparent stupidity, and the TCKs and ATCKs are left with feeling shame that once more they are somehow so “out of sync” socially. Like the Ugly Duckling, they have accepted the judgment of the community that something is wrong with them and they definitely don’t belong.
Perhaps ironically, the struggle many TCKs face in trying to find a sense of cultural balance and identity is not because they learn culture differently from the way others do. In fact, the real challenge comes because they learn culture as everyone does—by “catching it” from their environment rather than by reading a book or getting a master’s degree in cultural anthropology. The point isn’t the process of how they learn cultural balance, but the environment in which they are trying to learn it—a world filled with many cultures. In addition, the truth is that while many TCKs do, indeed, find a deep sense of belonging and cultural balance in a culturally mixed setting, they and others may invalidate that since it doesn’t match our traditional expectations of how people find personal and group identity.
What TCKs and those who know them seem to forget is that their very life experiences have been different from those who grow up in a basically stable,traditional, monocultural community such as Tevye’s. As TCKs move with their parents from place to place, the cultural values and practices of the communities they live in often change radically. What was acceptable behavior and thinking in one place is seen as crude or ridiculous in the next. Which culture are they supposed to catch? Do they belong to all of them, none of them, or some of each of them? And, as we said, the world they do fit in—the world of a global lifestyle—is so ephemeral no one validates it. Where in the world (literally) do they fit?
Another challenge for TCKs as they seek to find a sense of cultural balance is that not only do the overall cultural rules often change overnight, but equally often the various individuals around them may hold markedly different world and life views from one another. Norma McCaig, founder of Global Nomads, designed the model in Figure 4-2 to express this multiplicity of communities in which TCKs (aka global nomads) learn culture.9
The following sections look at how the normal process of learning cultural balance may be complicated by all of these cultural groups in a TCK’s life.
Figure 4-2 Possible Multiple Cultures in a TCK’s World
(© 1998 Norma McCraig adapted. Used with permission.)
PARENTS
Parents communicate both the “above water” and “below water” cultural norms in various ways. They do it by example, dressing differently for a business meeting than for a tennis match, or when speaking respectfully of others. They do it by correction: “Don’t chew with your mouth open.” “If you don’t stop hitting your brother, you’ll have to take a time-out.” Or they do it by praise: “What a good boy you are to share your toys with your sister!”
Wherever TCKs are being raised, their families’ cultural practices and values are usually rooted in the parents’ home culture or cultures and may be markedly different from the practices of the surrounding culture. This includes something as simple as the style of clothing. Girls from the Middle East may continue wearing a head covering no matter which country they live in. Dutch children wear Western dress in the forests of Brazil. Of course, it’s more than that as well. Telling the truth at all costs may be a prime value at home, while shading the truth to avoid shaming another person may be the paramount value in the host culture.
As we noted in chapter 3, an increasing numbers of TCKs like President Ba-rack Obama are also being born to parents who are in an intercultural marriage or relationship. This is another reason why looking at the multiplicity and layering of the CCK experiences mentioned in chapter 3 is important. In 1960, one-quarter of American children living overseas had parents from two cultures, according to Ruth Hill Useem.10 In 1995, Helen Fail found that 42 percent of her ATCK survey respondents had grown up in bicultural families.11 One young man, for example, was born in the Philippines to a German father married to a Cambodian mother, and they speak French as their common family language. That’s a lot of cultures for a young child to learn, and it complicates this most elemental step of learning cultural rules and practices from parents.
COMMUNITY
In a community like Tevye’s, other adults reinforce what the parents teach at home because the rules are uniform. The same characteristics—such as honesty, hard work, and respect for adults—bring approval (or, in their absence, disapproval) from the community as well as from parents. No one stops to question by whose standards some cultural behaviors and customs are defined as proper and others as improper. But everyone knows what they are.
TCKs interface with different local communities, each having different cultural expectations, from the Moment they begin their odyssey in the third culture experience. Unless they are isolated in a military, embassy, mission, or company compound and never go into the surrounding community, the host culture certainly affects them. They learn to drop in on friends without calling ahead. They call adults by their first names. When TCKs return to their passport culture, they usually have to switch to a different set of cultural customs and practices. Now an unexpected visit becomes an intrusion. Addressing a playmate’s mother or father by her or his first name is rude enough to be a punishable offense. Woe to the TCK who forgets where he or she is.
But their community also includes this expat subculture the Useems first noted. It is here where they learn the norms of the third culture lifestyle, just as people in the past have learned their cultural norms in a community like Tevye’s. When TCKs live in this third culture lifestyle, their peers also understand what it is to jet from place to place. They know what it is to say good-bye over and over. Just think of the powerful song wr
itten by one military ATCK, John Denver. “I’m leaving on a jet plane. Don’t know when I’ll be back again. Oh, babe, I hate to go. . . .”12
How many TCKs and ATCKs claim this as their theme song? A lot we know do! The truth is TCKs do have a community, an “interstitial culture” that is there, but because it is not defined by place, nor is it understood by many who have not lived it, many TCKs have never recognized it as, in fact, their “tribe.”
SCHOOL
Although culture isn’t taught from a book, no educational system develops in a cultural vacuum. Teachers learn a particular style of teaching based on the philosophy of how that culture believes children should be taught. A curriculum, along with the teaching method, is a direct reflection of the cultural values and beliefs of the society. Those who believe in the curriculum do so because they feel the values and practices it emphasizes are correct. In a traditional monocultural community, both school and home reinforce what the other is unconsciously teaching at the “under water” level of culture.
For many TCKs, however, what and how things are taught at school may be vastly different as they shift from school to school while moving from one place to another. In addition, in an international community the individual teachers themselves often come from many different cultures. This can add significant complexity to a TCK’s cultural development—let alone his or her academic achievement. Joe’s story is an excellent example.
My siblings and I found ourselves the only Americans in an Anglo-Argentine culture and we went to British schools. But the Argentines also thought their education was pretty good, so Peron mandated an Argentine curriculum for every private school and, with what time was left over, the school could do what it wanted. We went to school from 8:00 to 4:00 with four hours in Spanish in the morning and four hours in an English public school in the afternoon.
Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds Page 7