This is a continuation of my article Understanding Cultural Differences.
As you already know, the email that I received from my friend Dianna, prompted me to think about cultural differences. I wrote a story talking about the differences between cultures; but what about the differences within the same culture?
Dianna was explaining to me how she comes from California and how she just does not seem to "fit in" in her present Missouri environment. As she said to me in the email, "Not every Californian is wild and freaky or just plain clueless."
Few of us think about cultural differences within our own culture. Most people feel that America has just one culture, the American culture, and Canada has one culture, the Canadian culture. Some would go as far as to say that Canada really doesn’t have a culture at all. Canada is simply an extension of the United States.
There are differences between Canada and the United States. One obvious difference between our two great nations is the gun culture. It is embedded within the American constitution that all men have the right to bear arms. Americans have the right to own firearms and keep them in their homes for their safety. I have some friends who tell me that they carry a gun with them in their handbags for safety reasons as well.
In Canada, we do not live in a society that bears arms. The only people who have guns are licensed hunters, people who belong to registered gun clubs, the police and other law enforcement personnel–and of course, the criminals.
I am close to 54 years old and I have never held a gun in my hand, let alone owned one. My uncle, on the other hand, is a hunter and he has guns.
Licensing is available, but we do have strong gun-control laws. Gun control is a very distinct cultural difference between us (America and Canada). What one country feels comfortable with, the other country does not.
Of course, cultural differences between countries do not solely involve government legislation. It also involves the mundane everyday activities that we experience as well.
I had a professor at my university here in Montreal who taught a course on cultural differences. She is a native of New York City. When she first came to Montreal she too had to overcome the cultural differences, even though she thought she never "got" them all. She told us about her experience when her new Montreal friends came to visit her. Apparently she would greet them at the door with, "What do you want?" the typical put-on "attitude" verbiage of the suburb of New York where she lived. The usual response from the visitor in New York was "I am coming to visit," or "I want to borrow such and such," etc. Once the exchange of greetings was made, the visitor walked into the house and enjoyed a lovely visit.
However, she noticed that when she said, "What do you want?" to her Montreal friends, she got some very funny looks and the visits became almost nonexistent. She soon realized that this greeting was not culturally accepted in Montreal. It was considered rude. Now her standard greeting for her Montreal guests is, "Hi, glad you stopped by, come on in."
Not only will there be differences between Canadians and Americans, there will be differences within each country as well. Just because a native of New York City gave the aforementioned greeting, it doesn’t mean that a native of Kansas, or Texas, or Vermont would greet their visitors in quite the same way. It doesn’t mean that people even in other parts of New York City would give the same greeting either for that matter.
My Californian friend Dianna experienced the feeling of not quite fitting in when she moved to Missouri. The Midwestern culture was alien to her. She felt she was always treated like an outsider, never privy to the inner workings of the community at large.
I can certainly understand that feeling, because you can see the cultural differences as you travel from one part of Canada to another.
When you visit our eastern provinces such as New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, you will come across some of the friendliest people that you will ever meet. It is not uncommon for Maritimers to greet everyone on the street as a friend whether they know them or not.
Similarly, my ex-husband, who is from Barbados, would greet friends or strangers alike on the streets of Montreal. But much to his surprise, unlike the Maritimers, or the people from his own country, Montrealers looked towards him with suspicion, figuring that he was going to hurt them in some way, or that he wanted something from them, or that he was just plain crazy!
One year, my old friend Maxine came from Nova Scotia for a visit with her baby daughter. Maxine and I had met in elementary school here in Montreal. She moved back to Nova Scotia when she was 17. This was her first visit back to Montreal since then. We planned to go out for the evening and try as I might, I could not find anybody to babysit. Everyone I asked told me that they did not know Maxine or this child and they would not babysit. Maxine in turn replied that she had forgotten what it was like in Montreal. Back home in Nova Scotia, her friends and family did not have to know who the person was who needed babysitting services, as long as she knew that person, it was okay.
Though Quebec is not as friendly as the Maritimes, it is still friendlier than our western provinces. People liken the Quebec "friendliness" to the French-Canadian culture. It is generally believed that overall, French-Canadians are friendlier than English-Canadians, which is at least partially true. We are friendlier than people from "out west."
To give you an example, if you were invited to a house party in Montreal, it would not be considered out of place to ask the host if you could bring a friend along. Usually, if space and finances permit, the host would graciously accept your friend. In certain situations it is not unusual to "crash the party" (go to the party without an invitation)–albeit, that practice is more widespread in the Maritimes.
I have a friend who is from British Columbia, Canada’s western-most province. Alex often told me how much friendlier he finds Montreal to be. Similar to the experience of my email friend, Dianna, who had trouble "fitting in," in Missouri, Alex maintains that it would be the same in the Canadian West. He claims that if a newcomer comes to town, the residents will be polite . They would greet the newcomer if they saw him or her on the street. Yet they would not go out of their way to invite the newcomer to "join the fold" so to speak. If there were a house party or block party, rest assured the newcomer would not be invited.
According to Alex, just because the newcomer may have made friends with one of the residents attending the party, that factor alone would not secure a place for him or her in the party, and crashing parties is virtually unheard of. The question then becomes, how does one fit in? How do we break these cultural barriers and reach out to our fellow human beings? In my previous piece, I suggested cultural understanding. In this article I further elaborate on my theory to include love, patience, tolerance, and a desire to change–social flexibility.
