Foreign Cultures: In a Mirror Dimly

Last week, my wife gave me this intriguing article titled "McCulture" by Aviya Kushner, a writer who is equally comfortable working in English and Hebrew. Kushner acknowledges that Americans have developed a sincere thirst to know and understand foreign cultures, but she makes a subtle observation from the literary world. While America's literary landscape now features stories from all over the world ( a third of Granta's 2007 Best Young American Novelists list English as a second language ), Americans read an embarrassingly low number of translations. "It’s not that Americans aren’t interested in the world at all," Kushner writes. "It’s just that we seem to want someone else to do the ­heavy ­lifting required to make a cultural connection." We want guides and interpreters. We want our encounters with the foreign to be firmly rooted in our own experience. Kushner writes, "We prefer to read of a Bosnian immigrant in New York instead of a Bosnian man in Sarajevo, written by a Bosnian. This way, at least we can recognize New ­York." If Kushner is right, it raises vital questions. Do we know half as much about the world as we think we do? Can we really understand foreign cultures when our understanding is distilled through Western guides?

To illustrate her point, Kushner takes a jab at the thousands of American college students who flock to Europe each year. These students tote guidebooks like Let's Go!, spend two or three days in a country at a time, and stay in youth hostels where they mostly interact with other students like themselves. Kushner is exactly right. After my graduation from the Air Force Academy, I spent five weeks doing exactly what Kushner describes. Hostellers have their own distinct culture. They have a sincere desire to know and understand foreign cultures, and a self-righteous condescension for rich Westerners tourists, but they're blind to their own hypocrisies. They spend the vast majority of their time in the hostel subculture and build relationships mostly with other hostellers. That was true of me during my backpacking adventure.

Our academic efforts to cross cultures are equally biased towards the familiar and the Western. When Americans want to learn about Arabic and Islamic culture, they read books by Bernard Lewis or Raphael Patai's The Arabic Mind--books that hardly represent how Arabs view and understand themselves. Meanwhile, how many us have heard of the Iraqi scholar Ali al-Wardi? I hadn't until last year, when I read Ali Allawi's book The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace. Allawi argues that if American policymakers had put down Bernard Lewis and read more from al-Wardi, who has an intimate understanding the sectarianism in his own country, they might have embarked on a saner foreign policy trajectory.

We are also most comfortable analyzing history when led by Western guides. I have read two histories of the 2003 Iraq war: Tom Ricks' Fiasco and Ali Allawai's The Occupation of Iraq. Both are fantastic books. One is written by a leading journalist for the Washington Post and the other by an Iraqi who worked post-invasion as Iraq's Minister of Defense and Minister of Finance. I probably don't need to tell you which one was a #1 New York Times bestseller. The content of the books is markedly different, although they cover many of the same events. The cast of Fiasco is almost entirely American. Ricks is a fantastic journalist and I'm a big fan (I drove two hours to a book signing a couple weeks ago), but Allawi presents an Iraqi perspective that no American author can hope to match. The tensions between American authorities and Iraqi politicians dominate every page of Allawi's book; they scarcely register in Ricks'.

These concerns are not merely philosophical or academic. They have profound implications for our foreign policy. In an article posted on Small Wars Journal today, Judah Grunstein writes, "One of the cornerstones of the new COIN doctrine is the need to understand the culture within which the operation is unfolding. Translated into a broad policy directive, that can only have a positive effect on strategic decision-making." This recognition has fueled ambitious language and culture programs across the DoD. But what if we're not learning nearly as much as we think? If Kushner is right, our lectures on the Middle East by American PME instructors, our culture briefings by American intelligence officers, and our readings about the Middle East by Western authors are all missing something crucial: genuine cultural understanding. Western interpretations of other cultures certainly play an important role, but to really understanding foreign cultures, we must also let those cultures speak for themselves.

Cultural understanding requires contact. As long as we rely solely on Western intermediaries, that key ingredient will always be missing.

I have more to say on the subject, but will save it for another post. Next time: what does it mean for our cross-cultural competency when many deployed military personnel never speak with a native of that country, when an officer at Incirlik AB, Turkey requires O-6 permission to visit downtown, and when an Olmsted scholar requires CENTCOM theater approval to visit Jordan--and only for the purpose of official business?