Cultural Identity

In MUWCI people from very different cultures meet, or rather could meet. I have the feeling, that in most of the cases people make friends with people with whom they share a certain cultural background. At the very beginning, I can at least say for myself, when I didn’t feel comfortable at all to communicate in English, I spent a lot of time with people, who spoke my language. It took me longer to get to know people with whom I only could communicate in English. And when I look at my relationships with people from various cultures, I have the feeling the degree to which I feel understood by them or to which I have the feeling they really know me differs. Is it possible that someone, who has no clue how my life was before I came to MUWCI, really knows me or understands me? I think, I only realized here in MUWCI, in this international environment, how much ones personality and attitudes are formed by one’s culture. Even though I am not Christian, I nevertheless grew up in a Christian society, which follows Christian moral values. Such moral values may differ from someone, who grew up in a Muslim or Hindu shaped culture. The political systems we grew up influence our attitudes towards politics. But also more trivial things like taste of music or popular TV shows are things that connect me to my “country mates” here in MUWCI and somewhat disconnect me from the people, who have no idea, what I mean when I talk about the TV show “Spürnasen”, which I used to watch when I was young. It is harder to convey how my old life was to people, who are not from Germany or not even from Europe or any other “western culture”. When I tell that I am from a big German city called Hamburg, then my German country mates can imagine how my life back home looked like. European people maybe as well, but in the imagination of most of the Asian people, Hamburg is not even a big city. They cannot imagine what it means to live in a city in Germany and what the growing up in a city like Hamburg might mean for my personality and also how this old life in the city influences my views now on a city like Pune or what it means for me now to live on this hill in an Indian rural area. I think people who don’t share a certain cultural background with each other are able to get to know each other, since you exchange your attitudes and experiences with the other people here, but they might never be able to actually understand you. Last year for example I would often only go to my German 2^nd years, when I was homesick. I had the feeling they understood me, we missed the same things: the German bread, the German autumn... We had the same cultural identity. But how important is it for a friendship to know someone’s cultural identity? Is it necessary to understand someone or is it enough to know someone? In order to like someone it seems definitely to be enough to know someone without understanding why he or she has certain attitudes or behaves in such and such a way, since in the end I became really close to people here in MUWCI who are not even European. And I am very happy about that, since these relationships are unique ways to get to know different perspectives. But I still have the feeling, that there is this gap that stays. Just the fact that I don’t understand my friends’ native languages is a barrier. I will never know how they express themselves in their native language and I know from myself, that I talk quite differently in German than I do in English and this also after now talking English for a year. I will never be able to “reveal my hidden thoughts” – to come back to my last post – to my non-German speaking friends in the same way as I can to German speakers. This links now to the question, how language, thought and identity are connected and it seems that these three influence each other more than I expected it at the beginning of last year.

Hidden Thoughts

Today someone told me, that one has to be very careful with making jokes or sarcastic comments in front of me. I would always fire back and tend to judge people according to their jokes and comments. I thought about it. And I am not sure, if that person, was right about that observation about me, but actually I think the jokes and comments someone makes, tell a lot about someone’s personality. A joke or a sarcastic comment is usually a very spontaneous action. You cannot “plan” a comment; you don’t think about it, you just say what comes to your mind. All day long we can control ourselves and the things we say. We can deliberately form how other perceive us. But when you make a spontaneous joke or comment you are just you without your controlled mask. Jokes reveal the real thoughts of a person. What also means, when I am able to laugh about someone else’s jokes, we probably share a certain mind set. I know of many people, including myself, who value a lot to share the same type of humour with a person in order to have a good friendship or relationship. This seems to support my thesis. So I think in order to get to know someone you have to listen very carefully to his or her spontaneous jokes and comments.

Beginning and Ending of Tolerance

To live in such a diverse community as we do demands from us to be very tolerant. But at the beginning of the year my tolerance got challenged, when students declared to be extremely homophobic. Can we tolerate people, who are homophobic? Should we tolerate them? Should we tolerate intolerance?And what is needed to be tolerant? I don’t think in order to be tolerant I have to like everyone. There are many people on campus I tolerate but still prefer not to spend my time with. Indeed there are people I avoid. Am I intolerant towards them? I think I am not. Since I still let them be how they are and let them do what they do. I don’t try to change them. This was completely different, when I was confronted with the homophobic people. I couldn’t accept their viewpoints and their behaviour. And I started wondering, how such people could be admitted by UWC. Even though I wished I could change them, I was not able to and throughout the conversation I started getting the feeling that I am not in the position to say that my stand was the better one and I had the right to judge them. Our backgrounds are so different and compared to their traditions these people are already extremely open. Is this something we should consider at a UWC? Should we judge people’s openness according to their backgrounds or according to western standards, since the UWC movement was initially a western one? When we look at our community agreement, one has to admit, that we are clearly a community that is shaped by western values and we just try to respect for example Indian traditions as far as it does not infringe too much on our western liberty. I think we keep forgetting that we actually life in India and we choose do to so. We are guests in this country and demand to live according to our own rules. Back home, I would consider people who behave like that as extremely impolite and our image in the valley is indeed quite questionable. It is quite possible that on this campus the culture shock is bigger for an Indian in his own country than for me from Germany. This seems rather odd. But of cause, after all I am not willing to give up the freedoms I have either. But maybe I should try to show more understanding for the other members of the community who struggle with these western freedoms and maybe these include the homophobic students I met. But after all should we be satisfied with tolerating each other? I think in order to have not only a functioning community but a good one, it is necessary that we all accept each other. But this is even harder to achieve. And you cannot force people to accept each other but you may be able to force people to tolerate each other. So should we force homophobic members of the community to tolerate homosexuals? To a certain extent we are already doing this but I am also forced to tolerate the homophobic students to a certain extent. I guess this is the secret of this diverse community, that we all demand from each other to tolerate us to a certain extent and hopefully we then meet somewhere in the middle and manage to live together.

MUWCI's community structure

MUWCI is a very special community. Every year half of the students exchange and 1^st years become 2^nd years. I felt a change in my “social role” in the community, when I came back to this campus in August. Especially when the 1^st years came, I realized that I am a 2^nd year now. And I developed the feeling that some students from my batch took over certain roles of my 3^rd years. And when I started thinking about this feeling I came to the conclusion that community structures do not change - at least their overall organisation.

When we were 1^st years our 2^nd years had certain roles for us. For example there was the group of people who would party every weekend. Others were the ones who would always talk in college meeting, student meetings or Global Affairs. There was “the artist” or “the joke-teller ” and many more such “roles”. How you name these roles does not matter and no role is better or more important than the other. But I think there are such roles and they are taken over by the 2^nd years of the next generation. Who will take them over depends on who meets who through out the year and this might only be decided by the fact, that you live in the same Wada or not. I think my 2^nd years probably influenced me more through out the year than I like to admit. How they treated me and what they told me about their opinions and experiences of the place had - I guess especially at the beginning when I was new and did not understand anything that was happening to me – a great impact on the opinions I have now and the experiences I made and how I will pass these on to the next 1^st years. When I talked about this with some MUWCI people and gave them examples of “who became who” according to my feeling, people often disagreed with me and said that these two persons were still very different and anyway our 2^nd years were too unique to be possible replaced by someone from our batch. But I think this might feel so for us, since our 2^nd years were the one, we “admired”, who would give us advice, but I think the 1^st years perceive again the same roles in certain persons as we did, since they cannot compare them with our “unique 2^nd years” and for them they are just by themselves now the “party-person” or the “joke-teller”. Some roles necessarily have to be taken over such as the roles of the CI-coordinators, but I think this “role-passing-on” is also happening in our social life.

This would mean, that the community structure of MUWCI does not change. There will always be “the trouble maker” and “the nerd” and “the caring person” and “the bitch” and “the gossip informer” to use very stereotype-like-names.

I think this is not only true for MUWCI. When I went two years ago to a summer camp such roles developed within two weeks! I hesitate to argue that all communities will always have the same set of rules, since different communities clearly develop under different conditions and hence different social rules might be needed and I hesitate even more to say that human beings will always take the same social role in a community. Since the latter would clearly link to Hosper and his determinisms and it seems rather unfair to build an argument on a dogma, but nonetheless, this idea is linked to questions of identity. When our identity is made up of the roles we play in life, the different masks we wear when we are a sister or a student or friend, then our identity is decided by the community we live in; the people we meet, who influence us to take over a certain role or not.

I actually hope someone can prove me wrong, because I personally do not like the idea that the fact that I lived in Wada 3 last year might have decided what defines my identity now at least in the MUWCI context.