The Week Eleven Lecture

Week eleven lecture about Cross Cultural Communication

Assessable e-Portfolio Work
For Dr Zoe Pearce’s PYB007: Interpersonal Processes and Skills
Personal REFLECTIONS of each week’s lecture and tutorial material
By Rebekah Copas


In the context of all my other reflections, there is an obvious set of experiences I have which I may be able to relate to this lecture. Yet while listening to the lecture, I found myself having an adverse response to the idea of reflecting openly here on my individual experiences of cross cultural communication between mainstream Australian culture and varieties of indigenous Australian culture. My aversion is perhaps connected to not wanting to enter into any academic discourse about communication generally between indigenous Australians and mainstream Australians, from the point of view of how two cultures co-exist, but rather is about being sensitive to a number of issues seldom openly acknowledged. These issues are: in respect of how indigenous culture, in the ways it has changed in various places, to adapt to invasion and the modern world, has a few discrete pan-Australian paradigms of how that adaptation has manifested, but these days, it is blatantly unfashionable to offer any opinion about any pan-Australian indigenous cultural outlook existing, not even aligned with the most basic ideas of being initiated into animist cult lodges within which all human beings are taught to transform into the shape of an animal; also in respect of how some of those patterns of adaptation have proven to be more successful than others, in which those individuals whom were imposed upon to accept a less successful pattern of cultural adaptation, are still now suffering more, and the recovery of those persons is what needs to pre-empt all serious academic discourse about the various patterns of adaptation; and third, it is also the case that it is rather unfashionable within the indigenous community, when outside of the contexts of traditionally oriented people, to openly investigate any ways in which indigenous cultures have already long made a very distinct and marked impression on the whole Australian experience, through having deeply influenced the mainstream Australian culture, and that through the large percentage of the Australian population in the 1800’s whom were born to indigenous mothers. So I am proceeding in this reflection with all due caution.

Something which interested me during the lecture, was the exercise we were set, of immediately reflecting upon what kinds of cultural experience we may have in common with a person sitting close to us, and then in talking to that person, orienting also into what sorts of cultural experiences and understandings we do not share. What was very obvious to my own response in the directions we were given, was that when first looking at the person nearby me, I immediately wondered if she had some Greek ancestry, then when I moved near to her to ask about differences, I had to ask what her ancestry is, and found that she has the same experience as my mother, of having a father born in Australia, whose parents are Greek. She and I had both been to Greece also. So we oriented in talking towards the commonality which the first instruction had opened up the possibility of finding. It was not until we had established commonality, that I myself felt safe in needing to follow through with the whole exercise, and orient towards our differences. In fact, we talked about how her own immediate responses are more aligned with Greek culture than mine are, and that her mother is of Swiss origin, while I am nowadays more oriented towards sustaining myself within indigenous cultural concepts. So we had the feeling of being alien to one another, within having an overt, discreet, and non-Australian originated, set of shared cultural concepts.

The way I responded to that exercise, had me wondering about whether it might be true that every culture has a way of seeking common ground with persons from within other cultures, prior to expecting that any other communication, (for example, about differences), can be conducted. The exception to that rule, is when the social conditions are those of warfare.

I oriented very readily into the ideas that culture is: learned; multifaceted; shared; dynamic and therefore changeable; that sharing culture enables safety through sharing conditioning into, and knowledge of, socially appropriate behaviour; and that each of us individually, have aspects of our cultural conditioning which are shared, and other aspects which are individualist. What I immediately thought of in respect of being both collective and individualist, is that my approach to studying the Business degree units I am undertaking, is almost diametrically opposed to my approach to studying the Psychology degree units I am in. Even my choice of words here reveals that, in choosing to define myself as “undertaking” Business study, and be “in” psychology study. Yet simultaneously, there are other ways in which the difference in my approach, can seem to be more formal for Business, and less formal for Psychology. This interests me about myself. Anthropology was the first undergraduate university subject I studied, and that was in 1992, in the Aboriginal studies major and UNE, however I did not do more than first year of anthropology, but because I was then still young, my mind oriented into that academic discipline neatly, despite being in disagreement with the approach of many anthropologists. These days I find it much more difficult to adapt to different discreet academic disciplines which are new to me, if I want also to disagree with some of the ideas being sponsored within that discipline, and find myself rather more likely to want to reject the whole discipline. I think that this change is a change that happens with age, and that it is relevant that most cultures have a considered approach to enabling people in different age groups, discreet areas of culture to be accommodated within. For example, in commencing a degree at the age of forty now, it would seem both to myself, and to teachers, that it might be foolish of me to attempt to put myself into any discipline which I had not already had an experience of interest in. Whereas, a younger student, can approach a new discipline from being interested in the ideas alone, and is not expected to be able to show that they have life experiences which are relevant.

I like the example Leith provided, of how, (not sure whose quote she used here) “in cross cultural communication settings even simple interaction can become complex”. The example she provided is really good, but I find myself wanting to say that it is actually simpler in cross cultural communication contexts, if only we let it be that. When we are finding it complicated, I believe it is because we are not wanting to, or able to, let go of our habits of original cultural expectations, and that the ways of the culture we are not in, then need to be woven through the ways of our original culture, and that can be very very complicating. However, if we feel safe enough to let ourselves exist in the role of a learner in the culture we are not yet familiar with, then the whole situation is simplified. Leith’s example demonstrated that impeccably, in that it resolved into another person taking it on as his social responsibility to lead her around like a child for the duration of her experience of his society. Aboriginal society is very strictly controlled in this respect, and everybody is instructed repetitively, to consider themselves to be a child like learner until notified at some later time, and an inadvisable point in future, of having attained some credible status as having accommodated any set of cultural concepts with competency. Within Traditional cultural contexts, both non-Aboriginal persons, and Aboriginal persons whom have been raised without life all being held to the rules of a hunter-gatherer economy controlled by initiates, can be often heard to say that we are like babies, or young children, towards those whom are our teachers in culture. This makes learning how to engage in cross cultural communication much simpler.

I have often had dreams of the old women in traditional communities who know me, grouping me in among their children, or as a much younger, and unmarried sister; and it is in those dreams which I have received very clear instructions in indigenous culture, about which I then, after receiving the dream, have the individual responsibility to corroborate in the real world. For a considerable time now, I have had to go to one of the big libraries, (or the AIATSIS library when I still lived down in Canberra), and find some research which verifies my dreaming, whenever I have not had the social contacts, or travel money, to enable me. But even after corroborating what I have dreamed is the way to behave within indigenous contexts, I always then need face to face interactions also, to adjust letting those ideas of belief, become able engage myself in the habits of indigenous culture. There is a very basic principal of indigenous culture, that before owning, or managing, (those are two discrete ideas of how we might related to the responsibility for knowledge, which equate with discrete social roles with discrete functions, but in both this is true), any cultural knowledge, one must both receive a dream of it, and be given a story for it. Whether the story you are given is given by one process or another, and the dream dreamed in one role or another, is what defines if you own or manage the knowledge. If I had not had the dreams I have had, and had not also engaged in overt interactions of committing to cultural exchange, with traditional people, I would not be allowed by them to write about indigenous culture in these reflections. This is true as far as to say that there is a Pitjintjatjara man in Brisbane at the moment, (by allocating him the name of being a “Pitjintjatjara Man”, I am also identifying that he is an initiate into his culture, because in Pitjintjatjara way, he could not be a man without), whom I have previously been in a temporary marriage with, and whom I see occasionally, because he can “sing” me, but at this time, I have asked him to give me to another indigenous fellow, and so he is not “singing” me a love story, but singing me so that he can monitor what I am writing. However the cultural concept of being “sung” by another person, is not one I want to try to explain, since any definition I could give the explanation, is already pre-empted by the work of psychologists having defined that process as one which is not normally taken to be able to be considered as sanity within the mainstream cultural paradigm. I think I could explain it as sanity, but do not want to try now, and my explanation would need to be very complex, and need to impart also, many other cultural concepts, not all of which it are open to all of the Aboriginal community, little own to outsiders. There is one level of understanding what it is when a man sings somebody, (normally it is a husband who sings a wife, and it is understood as men’s love magic, but the instances where evidence of belief in having been “sung” come to the attention of the psychiatric profession, are normally only when a man has “sung” that person into having to become identified as insane), in which it must be only possible for the story to sound insane outside of Aboriginal cultural concepts, because of how heavily protected aspects of culture still are today. Yet in a different level of cultural understanding, it is a less mysterious process, however, to accept it without any mystery, within which it could be explained within a scientific oriented cultural paradigm, requires conceptualisation of a number of other cultural concepts, and provision of evidence of those cultural concepts, but that sort of evidence normally takes many years of experience of human relationships being tested by specific methods belonging to Aboriginal culture, before being able to be believed in. At this time how traditional people are teaching me, is as though I am still only in my late teens, (an age approximately equivalent to the number of years since I started to be conditioned into Aboriginal traditional culture, minus the two years I lived overseas; but also conveniently, an age equivalent to how my emotional age in the mainstream culture is still much younger than my biological age, due to having experienced trauma), at the age at which a girl might be learning to experience being “sung” from within a positive outlook of a promise of a good future.

It is often difficult for me to prove to my friends and acquaintances in the mainstream culture, that my level of acceptance of Aboriginal cultural beliefs, is soundly and adequately, embedded in experiences which are true to Aboriginal systems of belief, and embedded in the capacity to apply a reasoning mind to behavioural choices; and I am normally at a total loss as to how to start to provide an explanation, short of asking the person whom asks me, whether they are prepared to experience a similarly difficult life story as mine is, of having to learn to live in both cultures, because that is the only way to explain myself, by engaging with who receives the explanation, through its experiential lessons. Much of the cultural habits of both cultures are not ever put into words. That may be another reason for cross cultural communication manifesting as complex, if we have to try to put it into words, when it is most often best not to. Or at least not to try to use words beyond the level of language capability of the age group we are learning in.

This reminds me of the fact that I have already also been a learner within another cultural paradigm also, that of Sufi Salafi Islam, as the grounding cultural origin of the word of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. In having had a disorienting first experience of wanting to learn about Gurdjieff’s work, (most of the literature is available through this url link: http://www.gurdjieff.org/G.2-2.htm, to a Yale university connected site, at this url link: http://mssa.library.yale.edu/findaids/eadPDF/mssa.ms.0840.pdf however the Gurdjieff tradition itself, teaches not to focus the mind on work like that of Ouspensky, until other personal recovery work has been instilled and thoroughly fortified), and then having re-oriented myself to it through reliance on indigenous culture, I have had to follow a different approach to learning the tradition, by tracing its origins back in time beyond Gurdjieff, and into the traditions which he himself learned from. That has engaged me in participating in Ramadan and Eid al Fitr festivities, with Muslim families, in attending Mosque, an Islamic women’s group, and engaging in some minor levels of formal lessons in Islam. Islamic lessons work as though a skeletal structure for any other cultural concepts to adhere to, and it is often taught in Islam, that Islam itself is not a culture, but a framework for interpreting what aspects of any cultures has worth. But it is a framework which, once revealed, can be dangerous, since it has the potential to opens many doors in any culture, but only the doors opened which can be believed in, and committed to, can qualify as sanity, (or even as having the status of a believer in Islam), and therefore, my own study of Islam, eventually, and inevitably, has re-oriented me into the framework of belonging within indigenous Australian culture, and as a practitioner of Christianity within Aboriginal culture. To take Islam in any other way, would not be true to how I have been taught either Islam, or indigenous cultural belief. Though this is difficult to express, to a non-Muslim, I could more readily assert this of myself among Muslims, even without wearing the veil etc, and this outlook is corroborated by how readily Muslim women who normally wear veil, accept my presence among them. Islam is very strict about keeping our understanding of culture discrete from our understanding of being a Muslim, yet simultaneously, there are many Muslims whom can honestly say that they are not Muslim because of fully believing in every aspect of Islam, but because it is the religion they were taught to accept by their own culture. For example, wearing the veil is a culturally biased interpretation of Islamic texts, as are many other stereotypes about Muslims; yet Muslims often are made aware of the fact that their own concepts of what Islam is, are culturally conditioned, and may not be capable of understanding any other person’s concepts of what Islam is. This area of interplay between religious belief and cultural belief, is one I am most of all interested in, and is somewhat underpinning my motivations in studying psychology. The ABC television programme “Compass” has a good series of shows showing over the past three weeks, which reveal this sort of acceptance happening at a Sufi Islamic retreat. Clearly, my own concept of Islam, is much tempered by Sufism, as well as by the Salafi tradition which is a major school within Islam, but is also able to exist aligned with those traditions, as something which is in and of itself unique. Islam is known within its own lessons, as the religion which prophesies the demise of need for mass religious commonality, yet its method of achieving that, is always by promoting our commonality. The fact is, that the combination of indigenous Australian culture, and Islamic experience, can leave any individual feeling rather raw and exposed, and in need of engaging more in the material world, and thus all Aboriginal Australian Muslims, have a strongly motivated need to constantly be working towards the recovery of indigenous culture, and its acceptance in the mainstream. I think this is very relevant in respect of how study of Islam has been enabling of many of the Aboriginal prison inmates, to consolidate their commitment not to engage in further criminal activity. However, it is a slightly tangential approach to reflecting on the lecture on cross cultural communication, but I mention my Islam here because it is a significant aspect of what enables me to approach cross cultural communication situations within any expectation of being able to engage in successful communication. I think what I am trying to communicate here, is that what Islam does, is provide a framework within which to peel away each individuals connection with their culture, just enough so that the individual can perceive of reality being discreet from cultural conditioning, but then, by necessity also thereafter, insists on us all re-conditioning ourselves into accepting a higher degree of cultural responsibility. It is like a form of asceticism which instills hunger for materiality, or a form of materiality which instills hunger for asceticism, and both are true at the same time, so it is a religion of inner tension, which is what the word “jihad” really means. That tension between inner perception of reality, and materiality, and whenever the aspects of the inner perceptions are imposing actual war into the material world, that is a sign that something is going wrong in how everybody is acquiring and maintaining some of the most basic of their cultural concepts, about safety, in particular for women and children.

The lecture mentions also taboos, and provided a list of different conversation taboos in different countries. It surprised me that only those most overt taboos were in the list, because I know of many examples of much more localised and specific taboos existing. For example, I read in a book called Superstitions of the Countryside, (by E. & M.A. Radford, revised by C. Hole, Arrow Books 1975), that there are taboos around eating Blackberries in many parts of the English countryside. The taboo is not to eat Blackberries after 10th October, (perhaps the berries are more likely to be growing mold by then), but in some places, they are not eaten at all, and it is certainly taboo to mention the blackberry as though it is food, in many places after 10th October. Apparently the Devil or a Serpent once got a bit friendly with a blackberry bush on October 11th. It could also be a taboo which is instilled to ensure that diabetic health outcomes are less likely, since any blackberries left after that time, are likely to be sweeter also.

However, most of the taboos mentioned in the lecture, were around much more overt subjects, like religion and politics, and when not to discuss such heavily laden topics. I think that in every place I have been, when there are such taboos, it is to prevent untoward blame being allocated. I notice also that in many social situations in Australia (eg between students and lecturers), it is taboo to ask one another how we vote in elections, whereas in other social situations, (eg, when doing Canteen duty in a primary school, the week after the State election, and perhaps often in kitchens in general, around election time), it is not taboo to seek to find out how we each had voted, but taboo still to ask a direct question of. In any specific time period, certain political outlooks are open, and others are taboo, often depending on whom is in government though, as well as on the generally accepted social ideology changing. These days it is so widely known that it is wrong to expose any person with black skin to racially motivated negative outcomes, that a black man is acceptable for the President of the USA, but not so long ago, even discussing racially oriented politics here in Australia was a taboo subject. That taboo became opened, which enabled many black voices to begin to educate white skin people about what the black experience is, because the consolidated collective voice of insistence that black people knew the white experience but white people did not know the black experience, became unavoidable for more and more individuals. Opening a taboo subject for discussion has been what has enabled individuals like Barak Obama. Our societies (of mainstream industrialised nation’s social constructs), have been in the business of opening up old taboos for quite a while now, yet we are not always attuned with what sorts of taboos have begun to replace those being opened. Is it, for example, becoming more taboo to identify religious belief? Or is that just my own religious belief? Or is it a taboo about not mentioning religious belief that wants to allocate my mentioning this, to it just being because of knowing that such an outcome is mentioned in Islamic prophesies? As though an idea might not be real if it is believed within a religious construct. The fact that anybody can allocate the concept of “less real”, to religious ideas, or call religion a “religious construct”, is itself evidence that expressions of religious belief are becoming taboo.

However, since so much of what is said in religious contexts these days, is being politicised within those contexts, and because the politicisation of belief structures, can undermine the process of consolidating sane belief in religious principals, in a way, it is a normal human response of self preservation, not to want to talk about religion and religiosity any more. I might also add, that because indigenous culture is itself originally a culture which orients every person inside the culture, into religious and sacred experience, and the traditional outlook has no place for any concept of the constructed secular world being real, it is not really surprising that there has been so much difficulty in the discourses around how traditionally oriented Aboriginal cultures actively participate in Christianity, without giving up original belief structures. Many Aboriginal families whose ancestors were displaced, have been forced to give up Aboriginal cultural concepts and habits, so as to participate in the Churches, but others, for whom first contact happened far more recently, have not needed to, and the Church men who are not inside indigenous culture, have really struggled with how to explain what has been happening in the way that Aboriginal culture is factually now assimilating Christianity into an Aboriginal paradigm. The taboo exists where that process is still in process, and not yet stabilised. Learning about the process of writing the book called Rainbow Spirit Theology, (AFT Press), is evidence that talking about internal processes in which belief patterns change, as spiritual concepts are re-engaging in new modes of interaction with political concepts, needs to be kept taboo until the process of change is stabilising well enough.

I like taboos, because it is as often as not, that we learn how to engage in cross cultural communication, by observing what is taboo, as by observing how we are supposed to behave. And the taboos are actually much easier to be obedient to, once we get the idea that we have to be regarded as the incapable, until we are culturally competent. If I am incapable, since I do not have any cultural competency yet, then I have to avoid trying to do anything and everything, and I have to consider that many things are potentially taboo, and so all we can do, is wait to be instructed. So taboos are a strong part of how culture is taught also, through our fear of breaking taboos. Here is a big taboo I might be breaking now, but have chosen to ignore my fear of: going over normally accepted word limits for first year university work. We have not been given a word limit for these reflections, and I am taking advantage of that, by writing as many words as I feel like, but as I do this, I am also conscious that I am choosing to be obedient to my inner felt experience of what I am allowed to write about as a learner of indigenous culture, but I am in that, choosing also to ignore that fact that I know that there is probably a taboo not being spelt out, about how long these reflections ought to be.

Here is another taboo. In many families, it is normal to warm the body up get to sleep at night, and taboo to let a guest sleep while cold, however, in many Aboriginal families it is taboo to warm the body up for sleeping. We all are more likely to dream more vividly if cold, so long as there is no other health consideration prohibiting strong dreaming.

The lecture mentions Montesquieu’s hypothesis, that people who live in warmer climates engage in more emotional expression, and that there has never been an Australian study of the hypothesis. My own immediate interpretation of the hypothesis, is that there is one form of emotional expression which is very commonly withheld among racial and cultural groups which came originally from close to the arctic circle, and which can be traced by the geneticists who study the seven genetic markers of heredity. Fewer of the original racial groups and ethnicities, from close to the equator, have the specific genetic marker that causes people to be more actively conscious of the consequences of very flowing body language. However, here, in the previous sentence, I have put together the idea of the genetic markers which are known of by science, with ideas from within Aboriginal culture, about the mythology of the Seven Sisters, who are important ancestor spirits, and who can be equated to the culture of science having discovered seven markers of matrilineal descent. One of the Seven Sisters has the law for how to prevent leading others astray by using very flowing body language. All Aboriginal Australians, and every Australian with any Aboriginal ancestry, even without knowing it, have all seven genetic markers, and so it is safe to assume that if Montesquieu’s hypothesis were to be applied to Australia, the results would not prove his hypothesis. Yet the fact is, that the culture of science is today well enough understood within Aboriginal cultural concepts, so that this idea can be adequately expressed as provable, but the culture of science is not yet accepting that it could potentially prove that many Aboriginal cultural concepts are real (e.g. who ought to marry who in Kinship, is already discovered to be real, by research into Major Histo-compatibility Complex [MHC], but has not been adequately applied to the cultural traditions which have always been aligned with the science: which is ridiculous really, since just that one application of science could achieve major positive health outcomes in all cultures, once the scientific world adopts it). The point being, that science as a culture, has enabled blokes like Montesquieu, to spend lots of money on research in erroneous directions, but when, if we let the world’s traditional cultures lead us in what direction scientific research needs to take, the scientists could achieve faster results for less money. Perhaps all that prevented that outcome to date, was the extent to which scientific research was being funded by seeking money hungry outcomes, rather than by seeking outcomes which can be good for both human beings and the Earth’s environment. But more likely it was that certain taboos existed, but which are in the process of changing, and soon, when a new balance of stability in what aspects of culture are open and what are closed, can be attained, the scientists may well begin to have more access to Aboriginal cultural concepts of what areas of study may be most fruitful. Already now, with Peter Garret as the Minister for the environment, Australia is beginning to experience such possibilities in land-care becoming realised.

The other idea in this lecture which engaged my more general worldly concerns, is in respect of how we are often uncertain in cross cultural communication, as to whether or not any situation is going to be very formal. Remembering that formality lends itself to more collectivistic approaches, and informality, lends itself to individuality, I have something to reflect here about my own experiences. My experience of indigenous culture, is of formal social processes often giving the semblance of being informal.

However, not all is always as it seems, and while, to an outsider, it may seem on the surface, through contact with many informal feeling contexts, that Aboriginal cultures are very individualistic, within the Aboriginal experience, it is rather than formality is the norm, but within a level of informal cover that is unusual by comparison to other cultures. My experience is that when any participant in any Aboriginal cultural context, is experiencing the context as informal, what it means is that everybody else, and especially whoever the local land owners and managers are, is just waiting for the person whom is experiencing society as informal, to independently find it within their own unique capacity, to recognise and acknowledge the more formal processes which are happening always and concurrently often with seeming informal. Each participant must make their own formal gestures of recognition of how their own behaviour is impacting upon everybody else and how each individuals internal experiences are impacting upon the whole collective spiritual experience, which can only be communicated formally, and until a participant makes their own independent gestures towards their hosts, of having recognised the consequences of their own behaviour, that person will be experiencing being shut out perceiving the more formal patterns of communication. For example, in the last reflection about the lecture about communication, I mentioned that information such as how high or low a person’s body is, communicates specific information, and the point I am making here, is that what such behaviour communicates is part of the formal patterns of cultural interaction that are going on all the time. For example, if an old man lay down in Queen street mall, most people might assume he was just a drunk and want him to be carted away out of public, and others might be embarrassed about his level of informality. But in fact, he would be communicating something very serious within the formal understanding, which everybody within indigenous culture who knew of such an event, could not fail to pick up on, even if also knowing that such a fellow might well have had to be drunk to be able to get himself through all the mainstream social taboos against doing such a thing. Within Aboriginal cultural contexts he might be considered to be very brave in fact.

What is going on often in Aboriginal social contexts, is that anybody and everybody participating, is constantly being re-engaged in the processes of negotiating the terms and grounds and reasons for social participation. Re-negotiation of such things happens after even the slightest break in participation in any distinct and discreet social context. The process of such negotiations if seldom actively spelt out, but always current. It is that process within which formal communications are at times disguised as informal. The informality is in itself a protection for young people often, and for strangers whom do not share enough local cultural competence to participate within their normal degree of social participation. So the informality being exhibited, is protecting those whom do not need to know certain aspects of the total set of relevant knowledge, from being able to interpret that knowledge out of whatever else is happening.

There are many examples of the sorts of interactions I am describing, that are on display in films at the National Museum down in Canberra. For example, in one film I remember seeing, it is about a formal dance being performed, but it is so very important and serious, that the dancer is not talking about when he might begin his performance, and so when he starts dancing, it is while a group of women and children are nearby, and they keep on doing what they were already doing, acting as though they are ignoring him, but more probably they are acutely conscious of his every movement, and their formality is being exhibited by not reacting to him in the slightest. His dance passes by them, and continues on into another part of his camp. Eventually other men join in, and some of the women respond also, and it turned out that everybody had prepared for their own part of the performance well ahead of time. Such performances might be going on for days, and the lead performer like in this example, awaits everybody being ready to receive his performance, no matter how long he need wait for. The fact that it is a social responsibility for some of us, depending on our social status, to simply ignore behaviour which we cannot understand, often makes many examples of formal communication in Aboriginal contexts, seem very informal. There are other situations of cross cultural contexts, within which the formality of the indigenous cultural context, is so severe, that it is going to be allowed to manifest in the mainstream cultural context as though no more than insanity, but that is enabled within an understanding that having the cover of insanity will simultaneously communicate to the mainstream cultural participation, a need to ignore the contribution, and be communicating to the indigenous cultural participation, that the matter is so very serious as to mitigate against it being able to be witnessed as worth being held to be credible in the mainstream society. Anybody in such situations whom can related to a communication which might not be compliant with the mainstream culture, is expected to do so, but without being expected to respond, since there is no point in more people than necessary having to manifest themselves without a credible voice in the mainstream. The point is, that every individuals participation is being constantly evaluated, and the extend of scrutiny anybody is under, will depend on a whole range of variables, but mainly on being first of all inside the cultural context, (or inside the cross cultural communication context), and second of all, it will depend on the extent to which, and accuracy within which, a person is sustaining their own internal set of memory reflections about their social participation, and is responding to actual memory with social responsibility.

Another part of the lecture was the comment that “culture is constructed and learned”. I myself have reasons to want to insist that while we can conceive of culture being a construct, because we experience different cultures, and so we know that what feels very real for one person, need not be experienced as real for another person, so we can extrapolate that how our minds relate to definitions of what comprises reality, can be made to be different, that it is not always the right way to teach about culture. For example, people whom have used heavy drugs like opiates in particular, or whom have psychotic disturbances from extreme alcoholism, are able to suppose that solid matter might not be real, when their capacity to think like that, has no cultural conditioning, but can only manifest by having considered their own cultural conditioning to be a social construct which they might individually escape from. The result is an increased desire to escape from their own body and its experiences, and in particular, the displeasure of needing to detoxify from drug dependence.

There are a large number of examples of how one culture might perceive solid matter to be less real than in another culture, and in fact, when we have two very different cultures which we comply with in our mind, we may also become less able to perceive solid matter as changeable and/or permeable, or simply experience our worldly life as more concrete, and our inner world as less significant. In the mainstream society, in which there is a large quantity of cross cultural communication necessary for many of us most days in fact, it is normal to consider it dangerous to suppose that solid matter might not actually be so solid as it is. It is for good reason that we need to consider solid matter as stable. Yet even within the mainstream society, the phenomenon of “spoon bending” exists, has been studied by the CIA for example, (there are lots of trashy type internet links that spread that as a rumour I first heard from a well read American), and was, as recently as November 2008, on public display at the Institute of Modern Art Christmas Party here in Brisbane. It was an astonishing thing to witness, but even more astonishing perhaps to realise that there is a real life professional spoon bender who calls Brisbane home. Many of the audience could be perceived to be experiencing some kind of culture shock in what was being witnessed. Yet, from within an Aboriginal cultural paradigm spoon bending is more like a joke being made in bad taste.

Here is another similar example. I had heard of very many stories about how older Aboriginal healers can reach inside a person’s body and pull out a bone, or pull out an organ which is diseased. Sort of like a surgeon can. (Drug users often refer to similar phenomenon, but in language which defines it as the drug dealers being able to remove healthy organs to sell, for example, some drug dealers get names like “the vet”, who removed human organs and replaces with animal organs, apparently, if a person is so badly drug effected to believe that, or if the person already had a cultural basis to believe that such could be real. The fact that it is often only among drug users in the mainstream society, that specific notions, which are commonplace in Aboriginal cultural contexts, can be believed in, is perhaps a part of the picture of why too many young indigenous people begin to use drugs; because it is a way to relate to the non-indigenous community and be considered to be believable.) However, I myself was not sure about what I thought about the stories of healers reaching inside a human body, until one night, I was sitting in Boundary Street in West End with the drunks, and a man reached inside my lower back somehow, and removed a bad pain, (aka a bone), and threw it across the road. He did it real quick like, but the sensation, akin to what is normally called a “somatic hallucination” in the mainstream culture, was as though he had reached inside my lower back, grabbed hold of my spine and removed something which was painful. I had been experiencing a lot of lower back pain at the time, and have not had any ever since. So I have every reason to expect that he really did reach inside my lower back and remove the part of my bone which I did not need, and am very grateful for it. The “bone” itself equated with a fear I had been harbouring without having yet identified it as an unnecessary fear, and gradually, over the next few weeks, I reconciled my mind to the fact that a whole set of life changes were happening around what he did, both before and after the event, because of an accompanying change in my psychology.

The pain could not perhaps even have been described by a medical doctor as psycho-somatic, but was a real consequence of myself having behaved inappropriately at one time, but having sustained an injury, because of how another person reacted to me. So the change in my psychology, needed me to accept a greater degree of responsibility for my own inappropriate behaviour, which then relieved me considerably of the consequences of the inappropriate behaviour of somebody else. It is a psychological response known about in psycho-therapy. There are also examples of, healers whom exist in the American mainstream, one who I have studied the work and methods of, whom is used by the police force, and whose students practising here in Australia are used by professional Footballers, and whom use a similar process to that I experienced as having a bone removed by a man reaching inside my body. That specific American healer is called Vianna Stibal, and information about her is at the url: http://www.thetahealing.com/about-vianna-stibal-founder.html, however I do not recommend that healing technique, since its longer term effects are not quantified or qualified. It is also worth noting that her Australian student named Simon Rose, whom was making a living out of teaching and delivering the technique, had recently redefined himself as having been previously wrong in his methods, and made the sort of change in his outlook which is often actually associated with people whom are not emotionally or culturally stable. My point however is, that within Aboriginal Australian culture, such practises have a stable platform for belief, and the same can be said of Vianna Stibal’s practise, perhaps, since her ancestors include native Americans.

Here, just to consolidate my response to this lecture about cross cultural communication, I want to provide a story which is enabling in respect of cross cultural communication experiences. First I will establish that it is my belief, though it need not be the belief of anybody reading this, that it is through story telling that we impart a good part of what culture is. It is through our acceptance of the narratives of other people, which we learn to share their culture. When we accept another person’s narrative, which normally only happens because we can corroborate it within our existing experiences, we are accepting that there is a possibility of a similar narrative becoming a part of our own experience of real life, because if it is real for one person, then it could also be real for another. So in itself, being prepared to listen to a person telling their life experiences, and believe what they say so long as they are not lying, is the best way of proving oneself to be willing to comply with if appropriate, and respect, their culture. Therefore, we all need to have very clear cut ways in our own belief structure, of figuring out whether a person is telling the truth or lying. Mainstream industrialised nations use science, and the academic referencing systems, while indigenous Australian culture uses the process of individuals revealing their own narrative, and providing links along the way, (eg of people known in common or places travelled to in common), which are points of reference by which a story has the potential to become corroborated. We listen to the narrative, and if we are suspicious of it, we seek then to corroborate it, or we wait until it becomes manifestly corroborated, before accepting it as a real or valuable story, but even in having listened in the first place, a part of that process of accepting it has already begun. The process is similar in every culture. We corroborate personal narratives about travel, food, and love, perhaps by believing in the story to test out whether it works to believe in it, or we look up references to work by other academics, to make sure that what we are reading is worthily meeting academic standards. The process is fundamentally the same, even when inhabiting very different modes of communication. So then, this story I am going to tell, might be difficult to believe in, but I find it worth telling, and relevant to my reflections on the topic of cross cultural communication, and so I am going to tell it.

I once or twice read a book, with a story in it, about Mr George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. It is a well known book, called Meetings With Remarkable Men, and a film has been made of it. It tells of Mr Gurdjieff’s life story. Before reading it, I had done a little research about Mr Gurdjieff, and found out that while he is often well thought of by those whom followed his teaching and their descendents, and has been widely written about, that little is known about him, and that he has also been almost just as widely condemned as a charlatan, which, in fact, he is known to have encouraged.

While I will not here repeat Mr Gurdjieff’s life story as he reveals it in Meetings with Remarkable Men, I want to tell one small part of it, and also comment on a thread which runs through it, which he himself focussed on in his narrative. When he was young, still a child but at an age when children are already thinking more independently of family, and he was in fact studying theology as his father was paying for him to become a Christian priest, he witnessed an event that disturbed him. It was that other children were teasing a child of the Yetzedi tribe, but what was so distressing was that the Yetzedi child was unable to prevent what was being done to him, and Mr Gurdjieff intervened on the other child’s behalf. The Yetzedi tribe believe that if a circle is made around a person that the person cannot get out of it until the circle is broken, and the other children had made a circle with a stick in the sand around the Yetzedi child, and taunted the child about being unable to leave the circle, even trying to push the child out when unable to leave. Apparently this is a strong psychological phenomenon among all Yetzedi, and the child, like all members of the same tribe, would become unconscious rather than leave the circle. The other children could not even physically force the child to leave the circle without the child becoming unconscious, and so intervention was necessary. Mr Gurdjieff writes that after witnessing that event, his own psychology was so profoundly effected, that he committed the rest of his life to finding reasonable explanations for such phenomenon, which meant seeking out such phenomenon. So his life became full of stories of both wild goose chases after the evidence he sought, (one even resulting in the death of a friend), and actual witness of random phenomenon, normally categorised in mainstream society, as “supernatural”. Well I read all of Mr Gurdjieff’s books eventually, and very cautiously, and thereafter, it seems to be, normally as though by accident, that I too have begun to witness the sort of events which enable a person to “see outside the box they live in”, or question their normal cultural paradigm, or even at times worry about their own sanity, such as has happened to me whenever the sorts of experiences I have described in this reflection, (and others), have happened before I could qualify myself by corroborating what other people’s experience is of the same event. I used to think that nothing unusual ever happened to me, and then after reading the Gurdjieff literature, I started to notice first that more unusually things were happening in my life, and then, eventually, I started relating to the fact that the whole of my life experience is somewhat out of the ordinary, first in respect of having had a wide variety of experiences exposing me to cross cultural contexts from an early age, and second in having been enabled by traditionally oriented Aborigines, to learn inside their traditions beginning when still a teenager, which are the two things that have always provided me with an adequate social context for experiencing such unusual events as I have. But it was not until I read about such experiences happening to somebody else, that my conscious mind became able to relate to myself having had a qualitatively very different set of life experiences from those of my peers. Eventually, I even discovered at the Tent Embassy in Canberra, that Aboriginal men use the same belief as is the foundation of the Yetzedi response to being inside a circle, to maintain the Tent Embassy site, as has always been used to sustain every Bora ring.

Perhaps I have achieved my goal of not entering into academic style discourse about cross cultural communication, and not entering into the kind of discourse topics which are current at the moment around communication between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. But I am not able to avoid feeling a need to assert what my individual experience based narrative about specific ideas, is. I do believe that there are still today, here in Australia, a whole range of changing ways and varieties of cross cultural communication patterns which we can access. However, it is quite rare for me to find other people whom have been acculturated in a way that is similar enough to how my own life has been socially transacted, that it is readily possible for me to feel able to relax into assumptions of having shared cultural understanding. However, those with whom I am able to interact well, and sustain shared understanding, include: a significant number of other white skin indigenous Australians, whom may or may not be identified as indigenous, but all of whom have had spiritual experiences which corroborate indigenous culture, yet are socially assumed to be more likely to oriented into a non-indigenous cultural paradigm; also a set of individuals whom belong within very traditional cultural contexts where the men are all initiates, but whom have also become well educated and socialised in mainstream Australian contexts; and another group of people whom are originally from other cultures, and are strongly holding onto the interior belief system of their original culture and are able to communicate their difference, but whom are also very often, in more or less degrees of success, engaging with the social mainstream of white Australia. I think that it requires a large quantity of personal and interpersonal resources to sustain existing in cross cultural paradigms for any great length of time, and I notice frequently how rare it is to find anybody whom is succeeding at it most of the time to the extent of being socially acceptable within a credible social status in both cultures, and in the majority of their social contexts, and that those whom can, tend to come across as either normally eccentric, or extra-ordinarily religious in outlook, or are otherwise only succeeding at interacting within a limited quantity of the mainstream social contexts. One of my long term goals is to produce a periodical publication to use for exposing the writing and other storytelling of indigenous Australians whom have found a way of engaging in story telling which is fully acceptable in both cultures, because I think it is important to appropriately value the narratives in which real cross cultural communication is being achieved. Interestingly, just the same day as the cross cultural communication lecture, a friend posted a webpage in facebook (the url is: http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13643981 ), identifying some minimal research into living in cross cultural settings being enabling of the mind to be more creative. The eccentric personality styles are potentially often a way of covering up for having learned to distrust how society accommodates individuals. But there is something to be gained for us often, and often as individuals, by our work towards making the social mainstream become more enabling of cultural difference, without also disrespecting any specific set of internal constructs which prohibit individuals from engaging in cross cultural communication frequently.

What I am relating to most of all in reflecting upon this lecture, is that this week, I have been already putting my mind towards the problems of cross cultural communication, and had earlier in the week expressed some of my own difficulties in cross cultural communication to a friend who has a similar way of managing being in two cultures as myself. What came to mind out of that communication, is that we need to work to change ourselves for the better often, but that there is no reason to disrupt any distinct set of cultural habit patterns, only so as to enabled that the people involved can perceive inside another person’s culture more effectively, unless the disruption, or intervention, is actually enabling of the people it effects, to sustain a higher degree of positive self discipline afterwards.