AUTHOR: Hazel Rose Markus and Alana Conner
PUBLISHER: New York, NY: Hudson St Press, 2013, (320 pages).
As the world becomes more inter-connected, people will increasingly cross paths. Various people groups will intermarry and cultures will merge and adapt to each other. In many situations, they may even clash and produce conflicts never encountered before. In view of the inevitable conflicts, maybe the road ahead is not to arm ourselves with weapons but to wear the hats of understanding wherever we go. We anticipate changes. We welcome diversity. We seek first to understand than to be understood. This is where this book comes in. The key idea is, because cultural conflicts make us who we are, it is imperative to come up right through constructive interactions and engagements.In an insightful study of eight different cultural conflicts, the authors who are also cultural psychologists describe the differences, reveal the various perspectives, and how we can understand the differences so that we can not only better appreciate them, but to learn to live and let live where necessary. At the root of their quest is the desire to locate ourselves and to find our identity that is being shaped by these cultural clashes. Describing the left side culture in terms of "I" (self, mind, psyche, and soul), and right-side "culture cycle" in terms of (I's, Interactions, Institutions, and Ideas), the authors contend that culture shaping begins from the left, conditioning the right, which in turn perpetuate this cycle. What if the shaping is non-constructive but destructive? What if our cultural blindness leads to misunderstanding and wars? Differences indeed can annoy people. What is needed is to break this negative culture cycles and to replace them with positive constructive efforts to live together well in eight ways.
