Today’s post is by Dr. Milton Bennett and has been reposted from the IDRInstitute blog with his permission. Visit www.idrinstitute.org for more information on Dr. Milton Bennett’s current projects.
Following Dr. Bennett’s post are some ideas from the AFS perspective.
With all due respect to theoreticians who continue to use the iceberg metaphor to describe culture, I think it’s time to retire the image altogether. Here’s why.
Most people with any background in intercultural communication theory agree that culture is not a “thing”; it is the process whereby groups of people coordinate meaning and action, yielding both institutional artifacts and patterns of behavior. We feel it is unfair when anthropologists and critical theorists accuse us of essentializing culture. But many interculturalists actually do essentialize culture by using the objective metaphor of an iceberg.
Comparing culture to an iceberg floating in the sea implies that culture is an actual thing. The 10% above the water is really visible to everyone who looks in that direction, and the 90% below the water is both real and dangerous, since it can sink the unwary sojourner.
The metaphor does not in any way imply that culture is a process of coordinating meaning and action – rather, it implies that culture is an entity with mysterious unknown qualities. So, while we ourselves may not romanticize or exotify foreign cultures, we inadvertently support those who do by teaching this metaphor.
This situation is a great example of paradigmatic confusion. We want our students or clients to engage culture in a dynamic way, enabling them to understand complex cultural identity formation and generate mindful intercultural communication.
These are laudable goals drawn from a constructivist paradigm. But then we introduce the topic with a distinctly positivist metaphor – the iceberg. The client is left with a simplistic understanding of culture that cannot support the complex operations vis a vis culture that we subsequently advocate.
In other words, we are shooting ourselves in the foot with this metaphor. Let’s find a more appropriate one.
For many years I described culture metaphorically as a river that both carved and was constrained by its banks. While this gets at the “co-ontological” construction of boundary conditions, it doesn’t really capture the coordination of meaning idea.
The seemingly related idea of a river (e.g. the Amazon) with tributaries flowing into it strikes me as being another paradigmatically confused metaphor, since it implies that cultural diversity (relativism) disappears into a transcendent unity (positivism). Other ideas?
An AFS perspective on the subject:
In agreement with the post, a iceberg is not a perfect representation of culture. However, while it has its negatives, for the AFS context the iceberg is not entirely bad, either
The iceberg does not demonstrate how culture is actually a fluid process of learning and adapting. Nor does it demonstrate which aspects of culture are acquired during one’s childhood and which later in life, which tend to be more malleable and which more stable.
The double iceberg demonstrates that, often, the roots of cultural-based conflicts are invisible (AFS 2012).
Yet, what it does do is present an initial, easy to understand metaphor for AFS audiences (many of whom are teenagers) who have never learned about cultural theories and need to be able to recognize that there is more to a new culture than the food, music, clothing, and language. It also allows us to explain (via the double iceberg image to the right) why some of the largest cultural conflicts (those leading to host family changes, early returns, etc) often have unidentifiable causes.
Nevertheless, as Dr. Bennett says, it is important to realize that the iceberg is a starting point and that once our audiences have grasped the concept of culture, we must emphasize the fact that the iceberg is just one of the possible metaphors (including the onion, tree, atom) and that most likely, there is no perfect model that encompasses all aspects of culture.
Psychologist Daniel Goleman, author of the keystone book Emotional Intelligence, recently wrote an article after new Chinese President Xi recently stated that emotional intelligence (EI) is “more important than IQ [Intelligent Quotient, or traditional intelligence measures]” in front of a class of graduating university students. The article can be read here. What is most striking about this reference is that the rise of emotional intelligence in social psychology, business management and education in the past years has started to shift the traditional understanding of intelligence and how it can be channeled in different settings to make individuals excel. Goleman suggests that EI continue to be regarded as a significant contributor to work, education and life and that countries “[t]each these life skills in school, beginning in early childhood and continuing to university.” Countries like Singapore are already doing it!
