BY: Michelle LeBaron
Culture is an essential part of conflict and conflict resolution. Cultures are like underground rivers that run through our lives and relationships, giving us messages that shape our perceptions, attributions, judgments, and ideas of self and other. Though cultures are powerful, they are often unconscious, influencing conflict and attempts to resolve conflict in imperceptible ways.
Culture is more than language, dress, and food customs. Cultural groups may share race, ethnicity, or nationality, but they also arise from cleavages of generation, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation, ability and disability, political and religious affiliation, language, and gender -to name only a few.
Two things are essential to remember about cultures: they are always changing, and they relate to the symbolic dimension of life. The symbolic dimension is the place where we are always making meaning and enacting our identities. Cultural messages from the groups we belong to give us information about what is meaningful or important, and who we are in the world and relate to others — our identities.
Cultural messages, simply, are what everyone in a group knows which outsiders do not know. They are the water fish swim in, unaware of its effect on their vision. They are a series of lenses that shape what we see and don’t see, how we perceive and interpret, and where we draw boundaries. In shaping our values, cultures contain starting points and perceptions. Starting points are those places it is natural to begin, whether with individual or group concerns, with the big picture or particularities. Perceptions are those things we care about that influence and shape our interactions with others.
How Cultures Work
Though largely below the surface, cultures are a shifting, dynamic set of starting points that orient us in particular ways and away from other directions. Each of us belongs to multiple cultures that give us messages about what is normal, appropriate, and expected. When others do not meet our expectations, it is often a cue that our cultural expectations are different. We may mistake differences between others and us for evidence of bad faith or lack of common sense on the part of others, not realising that common sense is also cultural. What is common to one group may seem strange, counterintuitive, or wrong to another.
Cultural messages shape our understandings of relationships and of how to deal with the conflict and harmony that are always present whenever two or more people come together. Writing about or working across cultures is complicated, but not impossible. Here are some complications in working with cultural dimensions of conflict, and the implications that flow from them:
Culture is multi-layered — what you see on the surface may mask differences below the surface.
Therefore, cultural generalisations are not the whole story, and there is no substitute for building relationships and sharing experiences, coming to know others more deeply over time.
Culture is constantly in flux as conditions change, cultural groups adapt in dynamic and sometimes unpredictable ways.
Therefore, no comprehensive description can ever be formulated about a particular group. Any attempt to understand a group must take the dimensions of time, context, and individual differences into account.
Culture is elastic, knowing the cultural norms of a given group does not predict the behaviour of a member of that group, who may not conform to norms for individual or contextual reasons.
Therefore, taxonomies (e.g. “Italians think this way,” or “Buddhists prefer that”) have limited use and can lead to error if not checked with experience.
Culture is largely below the surface, influencing identities and meaning-making, or who we believe ourselves to be and what we care about. It is not easy to access these symbolic levels since they are largely outside our awareness.
Therefore, it is important to use many ways of learning about the cultural dimensions of those involved in a conflict, especially indirect ways, including stories, metaphors, and rituals.
Cultural influences and identities become important depending on context. When an aspect of cultural identity is threatened or misunderstood, it may become relatively more important than other cultural identities and this fixed, narrow identity may become the focus of stereotyping, negative projection, and conflict. This is a very typical situation in intractable conflicts.
Since culture is so closely related to our identities (who we think we are), and the ways we make meaning (what is important to us and how), it is always a factor in conflict.
Therefore, it is useful for people in conflict to have interactive experiences that help them see each other as broadly as possible, experiences that foster the recognition of shared identities as well as those that are different.
