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.