SIETAR USA & personal reflections of a visit to the homeland

On April 1 to 4 the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research USA held it's annual conference in Cary, NC. I went. It was my first visit to the USA since the day we invaded Iraq, over six years ago. This absence was not politically motivated, though I did tell my friends often enough, tongue in cheek, that I was "waiting for regime change." Now I had no excuse other than the fact that my travels took me via Manila, Dubai, Nice, London to get to RDU, leaving my body clock with a 12 hour time jolt. The greatest culture shock I experienced in the trip was transferring from business class on Emirates Airlines to steerage on American Airlines.

The high point of the SIETAR event for me was the all day pre-conference held on April 1 (my feast day = All Fools). Doug Stuart conducted an excellent presentation and discussion entitled, "Shaking the Interculturalists Paradigm: Considering Consciousness and Cultural Evolution." Our group was labeled HEAL by one of its members, an acronym for "highly engaged and loquacious," as indeed we were. Much of our discussion served to identify deceased and diseased paradigms in the intercultural field and the profession, raising the question,"Whither now?" Here is the police line-up of the suspects in this criminal or at least iconoclastic discussion.

By the way, if you click on the title of this post it will take you to the SIETAR USA home page where you can download the conference program, and where, shortly I hope, the proceedings and reports of the conference will be published, at least for participants. So this post will simply recount a few of my observations, quite partial of course, as it is impossible to attend everything in such a meeting. Others of you who were there might want to add to or comment on the post.

For reasons of either timing or the recession, conference attendance was, as I heard, in the 180's, so, relatively small for such an event. To me the crowd also seemed younger than usual (or am I just getting older?). At my best guess, about a dozen or more of the presenters were from the catalog of the Intercultural Communications Institute in Portland. 

Quite a few folks, including myself were somewhat disappointed in their expections of the first keynoter. Harry Triandis focused on the dynamics of self-deception in the key issues of the day, the financial meltdown, the population explosion, and terrorism. The big takeaway here was that we need to develop an alarm which should sound when we are Fooling Ourselves (the title of Harry's new book). Certainly a useful psychological perspective--and the field needs more presence of cross-cultural psychologists--but seemed a bit trite, biased and US-centric according to a number of the comments I heard. 

On my list of outstanding presentations were two that were done on somewhat related themes, an "Intercultural Perspective on Arabs, Muslims and Arab Americans" (Labna Ismail and Basma DeVries) and the role of "Muslim Women as Professional Interculturalists" (Pari Namazie and Munya Alyusuf).

Several significant sessions addressed theater and its uses for and impact on intercultural work. Saumya Pant and Nagesh Rao explored the use of participative theater for social change and engaged those present in the spontaneous participation process. In a TED talk, Emily Levine recently articulated one of the basic tenets of improvisational theater: "You cannot deny the other person's reality, you can only build on it." What a sterling principle for intercultural work!

Drew Kahn received a standing ovation for his keynote about the transformative effect of casting and perfoming  a play involving the story of Anne Frank, set side-by-side with the dynamics of the genocide in Rwanda. Though Kahn presented well, my sense was that the applause was even more for the courage, relevance and results of the project.

Patti Digh's plenary on "Hip-Hop, Manga, Facebook and Twitter, etc." was challenging, interesting, diverse, and just plain fun. Patti has a way of making asides to herself  that I rarely find other than Americans doing or doing well. She helped us look at at several less commonly explored arenas in which culture and the intercultural contest for people's attention today. These can be both learning challenges and useful tools for the work we do in the field.

We should be grateful to Cecilia Utne and Peter Fordos, for appraising us on "Icebergs and Polar Bears, viewing sustainability through a cross cultural lens." We should not be "fooling ourselves" about the gravity of our environmental situation and how cultures both affect and are affected by this issue. I am reminded of Paul Schafer's book Revolution or Renaissance.  Paul recently commented to me, "I am aware of a few individuals and institutions who seem to be committed to this issue, rather than the 'do culture because it's good for the economy,' which I think is rampant in the intercultural community today."

Online education and virtual collaboration were high interests of mine, and several presentations provided good insight into these developing facets of our work. At the very end of the conference Jen Stouse and I, along with the virtual imput of Joao Paoulo Brito of BluePill did a presentation of the curriculum design for a mixed media course on "Doing Business in the USA," which has been delivered now in its sixth year at the ESPEME-EDEC Business School in Nice. The BluePill Group were the sponsors of the highly attended online SIETAR Pavilion for the Granada Congress, which some of you may have visited. They also constructed the online learning center in SecondLife for this course. Joao Paulo spoke via Skype and interacted with Jen in SecondLife from his nightime in Barcelona, Spain. The technology for the presentation was last-minute touch and go, but thanks to the Palestinian technician of the hotel, we got the equipment we needed for satisfying connectivity. A big shukran to him! If you are interested in seeing or developing this kind of curriculum, we invite you to visit our course mindmap and resources. You can also view one of the online student projects, a video which we presented in the session. More info on request.  

In another session, Karen Dickman presented an interesting comparison of the Volstead Act (Prohibition, 1919 through 1933) failure with the contemporary struggle of gays for legitimate marital union in the USA. It was quite instructive as to how culture and law engage each other, and usually unrewarding challenge of trying to legislate morality on these and other issues in the USA. 

In my visit to the US I was also eager to explore the relationship of the pious and the prudish in US culture. There was  not really enough time to do that beyond a few conversations, and the fact that quite a few of the participants identified themselves as religious. This may be indicative of a recent national cultural trend. Or, maybe there is a sense of greater freedom to claim religious adherence and proclaim religious views in professional and academic contexts where anything but holy agnosticism tended to be seen as suspect and "unscientific." Or, maybe just my aimless speculation from a too small sample. Few people discussing religion and culture, on the other hand, seemed to be aware that many of the pioneers in the intercultural field had religious or missionary backgrounds. Phil Harris and Bob Moran, were religious brothers who later authored Managing Cultural Differences, now in its sixth edition. Mormon scholars originated the Culturegram series--early tipsheets on living and working abroad, still going strong at http://www.culturegrams.com. 

There was a noteworthy groundswell of interest as well as a conviction that we should do more to create a certification process for interculturalist practitioners as exists in other professions and professional organizations. Much complaint that SIETAR has failed to achieve this despite several attempts in various parts of the world. A working group has formed around this and created a process for taking it forward.  

A musical group called One Drum provided entertainment with an amazingly worldwide reperotoire, both at the opening reception and at the gala closing dinner. I captured this small segment as they were doing one of my favorite Leonard Cohen pieces at the gala. 

The Embassy Suites hotel which hosted the conference had a large and pleasant spa which I visited each morning, since my jet lag had made an early riser out of me. US "law and order" values were apparent in the spa area. I had to ask myself whether I should exercise my intercultural curiousity by taking half an hour to read and ponder all the posted rules for the hammam, jacuzzi and swiming pool, or just plunge in and get wet. I chose the hot water.

The last of my objectives on this visit was to go shopping à la américaine. Prices are good and they tend to have my sizes. Unfortunately the conference venue was a bit out in the sticks and by the freeway--not much shopping within walking distance. Moreover, out of respect for churchgoers, Sunday shopping in the area does not start until noon, so I managed only a couple of hours window shopping and a hot pretzel at the nearest mall before needing to fly off. Just about everything but the pretzel seemed to be made in China, but that is another story.

Finally, there was also the issue of having to spend two hours on arrival at the RDU airport in the immigration "holding pen" waiting to be interviewed. Did I look wierd, smell bad or have too many visas with Arabic text on them, or all of these? Also, on my departure, the immigration officer was reluctant to let me fly away with out showing him a return ticket to the USA. Both great opportunities to shoot off my mouth, which I fortuntely resisted.