Culture Quote of the Day - helping other cultures be like us?

“Cultural, political, economic, and religious ‘missionaries’ are particularly inclined to accept cultural evolution.  Even if adept at intercultural communication, they may nevertheless use those skills to further their own ethnocentrism by helping other cultures to be like them. The point here is not that there is anything wrong with cultural, social, and economic change but that the assumptions about how these changes should take shape are too easily derived from the values of foreigners.”

Stewart and Bennett, American Cultural Patterns

What Stewart and Bennett are getting at here is the phenomenon of people going abroad with their cultural, political, economic, religious, and other plans and programs, but in a way that is insensitive to the different cultural settings they are entering. Having found what "works" for us, we may easily assume universality, and be blind to the ways in which what "works" for us is bound up with our own cultural patterns. When we are operating from an ethnocentric perspective, we inevitably work to help others to be like us - because that's the way that what "works" for us will "work" for them. 

Note that Stewart and Bennett are not opposing change (they mention cultural, social, and economic change, but don't specify 'political' or 'religious,' which they do mention earlier in the quote - is there a significance to this?), but the way in which we attempt to bring it about.

What, then, would be a less ethnocentric way to go abroad, to be involved in change? By the DMIS model, moving into the stages of Acceptance, Adaptation and finally, Integration, we would hopefully encounter people of others cultures

• realizing that our ways are probably not as universal as we think they are, and not in the way we think they are,
• being aware that there will be significant cultural difference in another setting, regardless of what we might find to be the human similarities,
• pursuing knowledge of the cultural differences, i.e., seeking to understand,
• respecting cultural difference as we encounter it,
• adapting to the other setting, learning to see the world as they see it, and changing our behavior appropriately
• believing and acting on the belief that our purpose is not to change others to be like us, not to give them our “cultural baggage,” but to interact and exchange (a two-way street, in which we are likely to gain as much as we give), to offer what we have discovered (in whatever realm), and to allow those we are visiting to do what they like, in their context, with whatever they decide to receive from us.

For those who are confident in what they “have” (as Americans from the U.S. tend to be, but also many others in the world), it is hard to make this adjustment, to accept that our programs and insights and plans, etc., are not as universal as we think they are; to humbly enter another cultural setting as learners, listening, observing, and adapting as we go; and to allow others to accept what we bring – or not – and in accepting, to adapt whatever it is to their setting.

This is difficult, but if we want to have positive, effective intercultural relationships, and to benefit from going abroad, we need to grow out of our ethnocentric ways. And that’s one of the reasons that I spend so much time reflecting on Bennett’s DMIS.