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Commitment is the biggest challenge. Why should they trust you? The normal approach is that an outsider goes into the ethnic community, becomes friendly and makes the necessary superficial cultural adjustments such as clothes, food, attending significant social functions, and avoiding giving offence. You might be interested in their history, art forms, and ethnic sports. You might live as near them as practical. This might gain acceptance in the community, but you are still a long-term friendly tourist who wants to go home after doing time. It will not necessarily gain much credibility. They want more: they want to know that you are committed to them. Living there and investing time in learning their ethnic language is usually respected as a commitment, but might be necessary for even basic acceptance. It is more than that. It's about deep-seated attitude and identity. The point is that you must change to see life from their viewpoint. You have to go through the inner personal change. Their cultural ways become your obvious, logical, natural, responses. They probably will never count you as one of their own, but they can come to you as if you were one of their own. To do these you will have to sacrifice some of your own ethnic identity. When confronted with this idea, most new intercultural workers believe they have made the commitment. New intercultural workers tend to think that if I eat the food, live in their houses, speak their language, use their etiquette, and buy in their shops, then they have made the cultural crossing. But they are just complying with the rules of surface culture, not with deep culture. They may not realize it, but they are fakes. Expect that some local people will be able to read you better than you think; some people can easily identify a fake and know the difference between an immigrant and a tourist. First, look at your motives. Are you out for their best interests, or something else, like graduating with a good research paper or achieving your organization's goals? From time to time, conflict will probably arise that tests your ethnic loyalties. In time of difficulty, do you simply run away or do you stay where you live? Can you say that the local ethnic viewpoint on a topic is right and the view of your home culture is wrong? Second, value their ethnic identity: "It's good to come from your ethnic group." It will make a lot of difference, especially if they feel that other ethnic groups look down on them. Third, value them as individuals; they are not primarily informants, targets, or statistics. When you're interested in people, you can get past your stereotypes and make friends--some may be very nice people. They aren't all the same and can be very different from each other. They have grumpy and good days, weaknesses and strengths. Some are crooks and some are model citizens. Some are open, some are not. If you have made these changes, you cannot go back to being a mono-cultural person. You have realized that the worldview of your native culture is not the only possible logical view of the world. |