Developing Cultural Attentiveness: Becoming Curious, Humble, Engaged Learners
Photo by Mae Mu on Unsplash
In a previous post, I described some of the ways that developing cultural attentiveness–a focused and active engagement with people, is different from developing cultural awareness—a broad, general consciousness of our surroundings. Over the past several years, I have been struck by the difference it makes to be attentive rather than simply aware.
Developing Cultural Attentiveness, I’ve discovered, involves what I describe as posture shifts—these shifts, I believe, prepare us for a “missionary encounter” in the places where we live, work, and play. The first and foundational shift involves…
A shift from being simply “culturally aware” to becoming curious, humble, and engaged learners—the changes we’re experiencing in our American and global culture require us to stay attentive and alert. We cannot afford to think we know or understand what’s going on, but in fact, we need to explore and discover the reality in our corner of the world.
Over the years, my husband and I have had the opportunity on numerous occasions to live in different countries. For example, we moved from Austin, Texas to Moscow, Russia in the fall 1991, a move that forced us to develop cultural attentiveness—a lesson we learned time and again the hard way. I remember our first night in Moscow as we sat with our team in a hostel eating borsch for dinner. One of our teammates exclaimed, “Y’all, this is nothing like Dallas!”
Indeed.
Due to crazy things happening in the Soviet government that summer and fall, US news agencies regularly reported on the lack of food in the city. So to be prepared, we stuffed our giant duffle bags with packages of pasta, granola bars, peanut butter, and coffee. Once we arrived, a food delivery service was set up for our team due to the unrest in the country, which only compounded our scarcity mentality.
Let me be crystal clear here…this was in 1991 in Russia, long before Uber Eats and Door Dash was a thing.
Every week or so, a guy would deliver food to our door—several bags filled with tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, and potatoes fresh out of a garden. Sometimes there was red meat, and one time, two dozen quail eggs. These bags of food were meant to sustain eight people. So, to supplement our supply, we stood in long lines to buy bread, entered produce stores only to find empty shelves, and purchased tomatoes, potatoes, and even toilet paper from various vendors on the street.
Then, just after the first of the year, someone very familiar with Moscow, took us on an excursion to show us the huge farmer’s market situated just blocks from our flat. Words cannot explain the experience of walking into that market and seeing tall towers of oranges, stacks of apples, fresh chicken eggs, bottled honey, bouquets of beautiful flowers, all kinds of cheese, and various kinds of meat.
We felt at once immense joy and humiliation. Why had we never asked our Russian friends about where to buy food? We simply assumed that we knew based on what we could see and what we had heard from home. Then, we shared our discovery and divulged our ignorance with our Russian friends, they graciously added another layer to our learning curve. While we, as Americans, could afford to shop at the market, many of the Russian locals, including most of our friends, could not. This realization, even more than the discovery of the market, woke us up to the economic hardships our friends were experiencing and humbled us again.
Developing cultural attentiveness requires us to assume the posture of curious, humble, engaged learners. Wherever we go, our understanding of reality needs to be challenged and our assumptions tested.
Bob and I live in North Carolina now, which is culturally very different from the other places we have lived. Most people, like we did before we moved here, assume that North Carolina is the “buckle of the Bible-belt.” Contrary to popular belief, the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area of North Carolina has a rapidly growing South Asian population. Our neighbors are from Senegal and our Uber drivers are often from various countries in Africa and the Middle East.
Our area is changed and changing right before our very eyes. What about yours?
Take a minute to learn by doing a quick search—simply ask Siri, Alexa, Google to show you the demographics represented in your zip-code. Or, ask, “how many languages does the public school system in my area represent?” What do you discover and what difference does this make as you develop cultural attentiveness? For more information on demographics check out my resource page.
In my next post I discuss a second posture shift—a shift from the comfort of our perceived reality to the unfamiliar complexity all around us.
