7.3 Example

Imagine the following situation:

Culture reflexivity approaches this situation by employing three types of assumptions and questions.

1. Assuming that social actions are meaningful to the interacting participants, which factors could be culturally typical here (e.g. relating to a country or region)?
2. The manifold cultural influences at play mean that there is a high level of complexity and interdependency. So, we could say that there is no single cause, and that possibilities for interpretation are limited. Nevertheless, we still need solutions for the situation: The question, therefore, becomes: 'What happens if we look for solutions without really knowing anything?'
3. Which privileges are pre-distributed and which power structures and collective experiences are potentially active in this situation? Which actions could lead to more justice?

Imagine you are a student just like Ada, Ben or Clarissa and you are looking for an interculturally competent answer. The culture reflexive analysis would thus be as follows:

The approach symbolised by the first question is the most familiar one. We either think we know or inquire about the meaning, reasons and motives behind the phenomenon. Maybe the Sabias are simply used to the tradition of removing shoes before entering a home and see this as a common act of politeness. Also, receiving visitors from friends and family while communicating wholeheartedly might be an important component of everyday life for them.

Secondly, we are aware that there are many other collectives that are involved. The Sabias, for example, are not only a family from Syria but are also members of a local sports club (soccer), are Christians, and belong to several other collectives that might be important, but of which we are unaware.

The culture and organisation of the housing community is also crucial here. Are there obligations and house rules? What about the implicit, i.e. unmodified rules, such as: Do the neighbours rarely talk to each other or help each other? Or do they sometimes get together and socialise at parties? What could be the best way of finding a peaceful solution considering all parties' needs and customs? After all, The Smiths' needs do not seem to be met by the new behaviour in the house. And what about the Sabias' needs?

With the third question, the view of the situation differs. Cultural explanations are not completely satisfactory here. Viewing the scenario from this angle, agents in interactions have different resources of social capital, which are pre-distributed unequally and function as hidden influencing factors, giving strength or weakness to the respective parties. Factors such as gender, race, ability, education, language skills, marital status and many more give greater or lesser "weight" to the words of each of the interlocutors. There are asymmetries: The Smiths have a long tradition in the house and are living in their home country (with the respective passport privileges, rights, networks and probably language skills), whilst the Sabias had to leave their home country involuntarily due to war, which probably threw their life into complete disarray, and are now living in a foreign environment with a precarious residence permit status and many other hurdles to tackle.

These are thoughts from the culture reflexive approach that might go through the heads of Ada, Ben and Clarissa. Hence, which reaction and reply to the students might give to the Smith family's complaints is not obvious. For the sake of exemplification, Ada will react according to the first set of questions, Ben according to the second and Clarissa according to the third set of questions.

The three students opted for different strategies based on different ideas which influenced the situation. The idea of a culture-reflexive approach is to multiply the perspectives on what we think is culture systematically, as shown in the example above. Ada goes for interpreting the situation from a cultural habit, a classical intercultural approach. Ben is aware that given so many collective belongings and the dynamic nature of cultures we cannot clearly know the reasons for actions which means we have to inquire, work with nescience or in other words with “not knowing” and jointly find solutions. Clarissa anticipates the power asymmetries in the situation. Compared to the new neighbours, those residents without a refugee background do have privileges i.e. knowing local rules, feeling safe or having a secure residence status. These meta-perspectives are accomplished by reflecting on and adopting all of these different possible perspectives in turn.