The South Asianist Blog

‘Cultural’ Situations: A Three Part Series by Lauren Wilks

Like many humanities and social science students, I have been taught to question my own assumptions and maintain an objective standpoint (as far as is possible) in my analysis of societies around the world. In my new life as a volunteer at a rural development NGO in Southern Rajasthan, however, this means that I can’t help but feel slightly queasy when I am confronted with other people’s ‘cultural situations’ on a daily basis and I’m expected to respond with something suitably Eurocentric and witty.

After months of weighing up my options in terms of career paths, graduate schemes and the viability of numerous appealing (but sadly unpaid) internships, I came to Seva Mandir to further my understanding of the gendered dimensions of development work and gain practical experience in the field of social science research. Unsurprisingly, in doing this I have surrounded myself with well-meaning, blog-scribbling, travel-hungry students; the sort that are keen to ‘make a difference’ in the world. What has surprised me, however, is the degree to which I find myself flabbergasted on a daily basis in the face of endless essentialising and stereotyping. Never before have I encountered the term ‘culture’ or its sister adjective ‘cultural’ banded about so freely without any sort of clarification. At a recent volunteer PowerPoint presentation on the topic of witch accusation intended to inform all the volunteers of the prevalence of issue in the region, ‘tradition’, ‘culture’ and ‘custom’ were used interchangeably – at least one per slide. Worse still, at one point the phrase ‘tribes make their own customs’ was confidently proclaimed; needless to say, neither tribe nor custom were defined.

It was at the point of the acknowledgements slide – dedicated to ‘the people of India’- that I was reminded of a similarly uncomfortable situation last summer when I was shortlisted for a position as Team Leader on the UK Department for International Development’s International Citizenship Service programme and asked to attend an assessment day. Buoyed up at the thought of working alongside like-minded individuals on worthwhile development projects (preferably in hotter climes) I entered the host centre in York, volunteer pack in hand. After a round of awkward introductions and egotistical conversations about African road trips the twelve of us were led upstairs to an open room where we were presented with that familiar ice-breaker, the diamond ranking exercise. For all those of you who have not had the unfortunate experience of team-bonding encounters, I will spare the gory details. Suffice to say I had no choice but to show willing and take a spot on the floor, suitably close to the exit and the card marked ‘be open-minded’. The group facilitator, Mike, then presented us with the all-important task: ‘we would like you to imagine you are in a cultural situation, and decide, as a group, what the most important factors to bear in mind are.’ Snobbish hesitation soon turned to mild shock as I realised that, not only was there no further clarification from kaftan-clad Mike as to what he meant by ‘cultural’ but that nobody around me seemed to be awaiting further instruction. Before I had chance to ask as to where, who, or at which point in time he was talking about, the girl next to me swooped in (demonstrating pitch-perfect leadership skills) declaring that respect, without a doubt, was the most important factor. Quickly grasping the rule that remaining sulkily silent in the corner was unacceptable, I suggested that ‘observing’ might be a good starting point (I’d given up by this point at trying to enter into a conversation on whether a ‘cultural situation’ might simply refer to stepping outside my front door in West Yorkshire or going to my local shop). ‘Babe, you’re absolutely right but isn’t it important that respect comes first yeah?’ After an all too long and painful discussion, Mike brought the exercise to an end. Relieved that the ordeal was over, I prepared myself for Mike to explain that the activity had been intended to test how well (or badly) we had worked with each other and that there were no right answers. Wrong again. Mike proceeded to give the list of ‘correct answers’ (‘respect all cultures’, to my horror, was placed at the top of the list), still failing to mention the context that everyone but me had seemed to grasp.

Feigning polite enthusiasm (internally mortified), I returned downstairs to the crammed and awkward communal space, to await my individual interview. Taking up my familiar spot in the far corner, I turned to my right in order to better eavesdrop on two girls who were discussing their interview question – ‘you’re in Bolivia, walking down the street and you see a man beating a small boy for kicking his ball into his garden, what do you do?’. A fairly good question, I thought. The girls unanimously agreed that you shouldn’t do anything – because ‘that’s’ ‘culture, isn’t it?’. It was more than a struggle to keep from asking the girls what we were all doing there at all, competing for a voluntary position in an international development programme.

One rejection email and a few months later I reluctantly came to terms with the fact I had wasted £35 on an Edinburgh-York return (not to mention a day of my life where I could have been formatting my contents page for my final-year dissertation) and decided that DFID must have been having an off-day when it selected my fellow applicants for interview – or me come to think of it. I was keen to give volunteering in the development sector another go and started asking around about organisations in India working on women’s empowerment, something which I had long been interested in. I have now been at Seva Mandir for about one month and so far my experience has been reassuringly positive; I can honestly say the organisation is doing great work across and broad range of fields here in the Udaipur and Rajsamand districts of Southern Rajasthan. Nevertheless, as demonstrated by the excruciating PowerPoint presentation, many of the international folk the NGO seems to attract are guilty of that tendency I most deplore amongst foreigners abroad: sweeping generalisations about ‘culture’, ‘custom’ and ‘tradition’. It may be that taking what has been described by Edinburgh University’s history department as a ‘quirky’ course on the exchange of ideas in the high colonial period has caused me to question my worldview and the basis of all taken-for-granted terms describing ‘other’ peoples and societies. Alternatively, I may have just come to recognise in others those annoying traits I once imbibed myself, including an interminable thirst for all things ‘cultural’. Either way, it seems I cannot retreat back to my comfortably naïve Gap Year way of thinking; in short, I have lost my ability to effortlessly embrace ‘culture’, whatever that is.

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