Intercultural Negotiations

When I entered England I thought I knew about what being a part of a culture different to my own meant, and I thought of myself as a person who would be open and relatively adaptable to other cultures. However, upon actually entering another culture I was forced to reevaluate my preconceived notions about what actually makes a culture functional. Hybels defines a culture as “the ever-changing values, traditions, social and political relationships, and worldview created and shared by a group of people bound together by a combination of factors” (Hybels 57), the definition seems broad but in actuality it encompasses all the little aspects that mark a country as different as our own.

I don’t think I was aware of quite how much I had been stereotyping the British until I arrived in England. It wasn’t even something I was doing consciously, rather all the little jokes and stories I had heard about people in England simply accumulated at the back of my mind until I thought had a clear picture of what I thought the British were like. Perhaps the thing that stuck out to me the most was the idea of people being polite. It’s something that is mentioned in all the travel books, all the blog posts, all the stories I’ve heard, people in England are polite. I thought I had a good understanding of what that meant but it wasn’t until I arrived that I truly saw the difference in how Americans classify politeness.

In America you make eye contact, you casually compliment people; you make small talk about your day, little things like that. All my life I had been taught asking a stranger how their day has been when standing together was polite. So imagine my surprise when I got to England and I made eye-contact with people and received confusion and discomfort in return. It was a bit of a shock. I was expecting a culture where my American notions of politeness were the norm; instead it became clear that England’s view of politeness was vastly different of our own. When I expressed my frustration to my flatmate one morning over breakfast he put the situation into perspective for me. In America we think of politeness and friendliness as the same thing, in England they think of being overly friendly as an invasion of space. That was the moment I realized that not only was I frustrated but that I was making the people around me frustrated as well. Ever since it’s been something that I’ve tried to be hyper-vigilant of.

I’ll be honest, when I make eye contact with someone on the street my first instinct is still to wave and be friendly. It’s hard to abandon manners that have been stressed my entire life. However, I’m trying to adjust. I’m trying to understand that I make people uncomfortable when I approach them out of the blue and I need to adjust to a new way of being polite. It’s a small change, a small part of entire culture, but it’s something that is important in daily interactions here that I need to adjust to.