Again, this is somewhat cheating, but I'm getting to the end of my master's and am reflecting on the year and my experience. I picked Bradford to study partly because of the international nature of the course. The Peace Studies Department attracts students from all over the world, and having experienced the relatively homogeneous academic settings of Cambridge and Oxford, I wanted to meet people who had grown up in cultures different from my own.
I was not disappointed, I am one of two (full-time) Brits on the course, and we are also vastly in the minority overall, which is great. It has been a huge addition to learn not only from my teachers but from my course-mates who have experience of conflict firsthand.
I came expecting to meet people who were different from me, and grow through the experience. What has surprised me though has been the level of cultural difference between myself and people from a culture I view as relatively similar to my own*. I have several very good friends from my course who are American, and we have spent a lot of time this year at linguistic loggerheads. Most of the time, this is simply for amusement, I insist that all desserts may be called 'pudding' while they, rather confusingly, keep referring to my tea-towel as a dishcloth. These do not betray anything more different than the use of different dialects (inevitable when your countries are 4,000 miles apart).
Yet occasionally, these linguistic clashes seem to betray actual differences. One of my favourite memories, is an evening earlier this year when we were talking about where to go for dinner and I rather casually suggested 'going out for an indian'. One of my friends leant forward in consternation and exclaimed 'You can't say that'. To her, my perfectly innocent dinner suggestion had the potential to be deeply offensive. The inference to her was that it sounded like going out with the intent to attack someone.
Similarly, at one point, she casually referred to a homeless person as a hobo, eliciting a somewhat similar response from me. Here using the slang term is derogatory and offensive, for her it was simply a shorter synonym.
I don't want to go into hypothesising why we have different associations for these terms and phrases, partly because I really don't have time to do the necessary research, and partly because I am more interested in what this has made me consider.
I want to work in the field of conflict resolution, a field where cultural distinctions and differences play a huge role in every aspect from perpetuating conflicts to attempting to resolve them. What this year has taught me (among other things) is how important it is not to assume that because I think someone is 'like me' that removes the chance for offence or miscommunication. My friends and I are able to laugh off confusions like those I illustrated above, because we are not in a conflicting situation, we trust each other and discussion is easy and free-flowing. In a situation where relationships are more fraught, assuming that we know how someone else is going to interpret what we say or do because we think they are like us is fraught with danger, and small cultural differences can be the most catastrophic.
*I should note that even within one country there are many different cultures, and thus I am being slightly over simplistic for the sake of easy reflection.
