A compendium of current news and headlines with commentary providing unique cultural insight into global affairs, business and daily life around the world.

Interested in receiving the CultureWizard Digest every month? Click here to sign up.

Check out CultureWizard Digest #47 here!

IN THIS MONTH’S ISSUE:

* Umberto Eco and European Identity
* Best-Selling Cookie in China
* Telling Time Around the World
* Germans, Brits and Pygmies

CultureLinks
+ Rwanda’s Heart
+ Fluent in 11 Languages
+ Physical Appearance and Language

CultureTips
+ European Culture

RW-3.com

In The Guardian, writer and semiologist Umberto Eco talks about culture being the substance that defines European identity in the modern day. He speaks about its potential as a binding agent for a stronger European market, and a stronger Europe in general.

Eco specifically promulgates the expansion of the Erasmus student exchange system to capture not just students, but virtually everyone, in the process of developing an integrated “European culture”.

The university exchange programme Erasmus is barely mentioned in the business sections of newspapers, yet Erasmus has created the first generation of young Europeans. I call it a sexual revolution: a young Catalan man meets a Flemish girl – they fall in love, they get married and they become European, as do their children. The Erasmus idea should be compulsory – not just for students, but also for taxi drivers, plumbers and other workers. By this, I mean they need to spend time in other countries within the European Union; they should integrate.

Europe is certainly not like the United States or other federations that share a common language and constitution. Eco doesn’t think it ever will or should be. On the other hand, there may be some innately “European” values that exist in many places on the continent (and surrounding isles).

What would you vote for as the most European of values? What makes Europeans as a whole particularly unique as a large cultural unit?

If Europeans are too different to lend meaning to the concept of “European culture,” what makes them so?

We want to know what you think – please share your thoughts in the comments area.

Sean
RW3 CultureWizard

Alex Rawlings is 20. He speaks English, Greek, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Afrikaans, French, Hebrew, Catalan and Italian. Watch this BBC video to hear him speaking each language, describing how he learnt them growing up surrounded by numerous cultures around Europe. Truly remarkable!

Read more about “hyperpolyglots” in this related BBC story.

Sean
RW3 CultureWizard

As someone who writes and blogs about culture, how it affects our lives and the way we do business, I found this recent BBC news piece both funny and illuminating. It seems the Germans and Brits are at odds – again. Many Brits working with Germans find themselves offended by the abruptness of the German language, and many Germans working with Brits find themselves annoyed by the British penchant for small talk and indirectness. Germans, it turns out, don’t even have a word in their language for “small talk”! This is the point that really blew me away.

Culture runs deep – deeper than most of us know. Not only does culture influence how you will deal and be dealt with by someone from another culture, it influences your ability to understand other cultures – even when making your most open-minded efforts.

Germans don’t share concepts central to British culture and vice versa. For example, the tendency to make pleasant “small talk” by discussing the weather or “simulating concern” (this is how the BBC puts it) for the well-being of others doesn’t happen very often in Germany. Of course, “Wie geht es dir?” or “How are you?” is a common phrase in both languages, but the purpose ascribed to the statement differs within the context of German and British culture. Germans use the expression as a genuine question and only when they are truly interested in how someone is doing. Brits use is as a greeting, a substitution for “Hello” and it does not mean the person asking is necessarily concerned about the other person’s well-being.

I once read a story about a group of African Pygmies who where brought to the edge of a forest to look at the savannah for the first time. They immediately panicked at the sight of animals roaming about, albeit well off in the distance. The Pygmies perceived the animals to be right in front of them, like an odd insect just before their noses. They were startled because this particular ethnic group had no language or means for gauging perspective and spatial dynamics over such great distances. As complete forest dwellers, they were not aware that such distances existed.

The majority of what we can associate with culture exists in the invisible. It runs so deep that we often lack the vocabulary or realm of understanding to comprehend what’s going on under the surface, and how we might be perceived outside our own cultural sphere. Once we’re out of the familiar jungle of our own culture, all bets are off.

Adam
RW3 CultureWizard

As viewed from the RW3 CultureWizard headquarters in New York, the Empire State Building happens to be dressed in full purple and yellow today – the colors of our Wizard!

Looking back to a post we made in 2009 on Kraft’s mission to sell Oreos in China, we’ve seen some major progress, according to this recent NPR story. In fact, The Oreo has become the best-selling cookie in China.

Kraft initially responded to Chinese taste buds by reducing sugar content in the cookies. For the masses, it was too sweet. They took further steps by looking at other flavors the market craved, resulting in Oreos with green-tea and mango flavored filling. They also changed the shape to resemble a rolled wafer, much easier to eat in the traditional Oreo fashion for a country that isn’t accustomed to “dunking” their cookies in (soy) milk. The imprint Americans have for eating Oreos (“Twist, Lick, Dunk”) doesn’t exist in China. To address this, “Oreo launched a series of TV ads where cute children demonstrate to their parents and other adults how to eat an Oreo cookie in the American style,” says the NPR story, effectively teaching children and adults at the same time.

Lorna Davis, head of the global biscuit division at Kraft, told NPR what she learned:

Any foreign company that comes to China and says, ‘There’s 1 1/2 billion people here, goody goody, and I only need 1 percent of that’ … [is] going to get into trouble. You have to understand how the consumer operates at a really detailed level.

Culture encompasses all the detail to which Davis refers. Culture informs the preferences we develop at a young age, which influences our behaviors for life.

What other foods have you seen undergo this kind of cultural transformation as it migrates from country to country?

Grayson
RW3 CultureWizard

RW3′s Sean Dubberke traveled to Rwanda last year and wrote an article on the experience for Eastern Air Connections, China Eastern’s in-flight magazine. Connecting with Rwandan culture was an important aspect of the experience, which Sean details through the friends he made and what he learned from them. Read Rwanda’s Heart here (the link will load a PDF, opening in Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox will optimize image quality).

My first experience with time was the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. I couldn’t wait to be able to tell time and get my own watch (sadly, it wasn’t a pocket watch). Since then, I’ve learned to see time through so many different lenses.

The 12-hour clock divides the day into two 12-hour segments (midnight to noon and noon to midnight). Thus, 2 o’clock in the afternoon is 14:00 on the 24-hour clock.

I come from a country that uses the 12-hour clock, but I much prefer transportation schedules that use the 24-hour clock. It means there’s less chance of being mistakenly booked on a flight that departs before my connecting flight arrives. In fact, many countries use the 12-hour clock when conversing, but use the 24-hour clock in timetables.

Sounds simple? Not so fast.

Many African cultures use the 12-hour clock, but start the cycle at 6 a.m. (sunrise) rather than 12 a.m. (midnight). In East Africa, this is known as Swahili time (click here to see what time it is on a Swahili clock). In other words, 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. becomes the first hour of the day. You can think of this first hour as 00:00 to 1:00 on the 24-hour clock. Imagine the confusion if you schedule a meeting by asking for “2 o’clock”? Unless the exact time is clarified, your African colleague might think you meant 8 in the evening (2 o’clock = the start of the third hour of the cycle, which is at 8 in the morning or evening, according to certain African cultures). Confused yet? When scheduling appointments, it’s important to specify morning, afternoon, or evening if using the 12-hour clock. Alternatively, you could use the 24-hour clock considering it starts at midnight.

In Thailand, there’s a different twist on time. Thais divide the clock into four 6-hour segments: 07:00-12:59, 13:00-18:59, 19:00-00:59, and 01:00-06:59. When speaking among themselves, Thais divide the day into four 6-hour segments. Therefore, “1 in the evening” is the first hour of the 19:00-00:59 segment, or 7 p.m. on the 12-hour clock, 19:00 on the 24-hour clock. Click here for more information from Wikipedia on the six-hour clock.

And, check out AFAR’s beautiful mix of clocks from around the world.

From AFAR Magazine

Carrie
RW3 CultureWizard

A compendium of current news and headlines with commentary providing unique cultural insight into global affairs, business and daily life around the world.

Interested in receiving the CultureWizard Digest every month? Click here to sign up.

Check out CultureWizard Digest #46 here!

IN THIS MONTH’S ISSUE:

* Interpreting Overtime in Brazil
* Improper Child-rearing?
* Who works more in Europe?
* Translating British Talk

CultureLinks
+ International Assignments: Then & Now
+ A Long and Prosperous Life

CultureTips
+ Brazil

RW-3.com