{"id":17522,"date":"2018-05-10T14:55:19","date_gmt":"2018-05-10T21:55:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=17522"},"modified":"2018-05-10T14:59:48","modified_gmt":"2018-05-10T21:59:48","slug":"learning-how-to-wai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/learning-how-to-wai\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning how to wai"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>During our year of living in Asia, I boarded a Thai Airways flight from Manila to Bangkok. Prior to this trip, I had received a quick cultural lesson on peculiarities to Thai culture \u2013 don\u2019t touch someone\u2019s head, keep the soles of your feet facing the floor, never disrespect the king, and in lesson 101, how to greet one another. In that culture, one greets another with a wai<\/em>: palms facing each other below the chin, higher if more respect is deserved, and bowing slightly. I walked down the passageway to the plane, and ahead I saw the Thai flight attendant waiting for me, her immaculate purple and gold silk outfit gloriously contrasting with my grubby and sweaty Western wear. She graciously wai\u2019ed<\/em>, palms together and bowing, welcoming me onboard. Self-conscious, I returned the sign of respect. Then, curiously she held out her right hand. I was flustered! What does this mean? What do I do? In that instant, my mind jumped to a quick conclusion: She had greeted me, and I responded in Thai fashion. Now she must be reciprocating by offering a greeting with a Western handshake. I reached out and vigorously clasped her limp palm. But she wasn\u2019t squeezing back. I awkwardly released, catching a whiff of exotic frangipani, as she whispered, \u201cYour boarding pass, sir.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cultural faux pas<\/em> like this one are only the tip of the iceberg. David Livermore\u2019s book, Leading with Cultural Intelligence<\/em>, helpfully breaks down the intricacies of cultural interaction and assists those seeking to lead within our globalized context. He does this primarily through offering a tool he calls CQ: Cultural Intelligence. One\u2019s cross-cultural drive, knowledge, strategy, and action combine to offer a numerical score which defines the level of cross-cultural sensitivity and adaptability in environments that require cultural awareness.<\/p>\n

Livermore\u2019s thesis is that in our global village, we must become aware and culturally adapt our own behavior to meaningfully communicate with individuals and organizations from other cultural contexts. Refusing to do so, or being blind to the opportunity, will severely reduce one\u2019s capability in achieving one\u2019s goals. And with globalization, growing one\u2019s CQ quotient is necessary for any leader. He states, \u201c\u2026[A]lmost everyone can become more culturally intelligent by working with the four-step cycle. Cultural intelligence is uniquely situated for the barrage of cultural situations facing today\u2019s leaders. It includes a set of competencies needed by leaders in every field\u2026 [L]eaders who commit to improving the ways they think, plan, and act through cross-cultural situations have an unusual edge for navigating the fascinating terrain of our curvy, multidimensional world.\u201d[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

One\u2019s culture is a shared imagination that helps us to be knit together as a community. It informs us on ways we perceive beauty, our response to authority, the raising of one\u2019s children, and the ways we worship our Creator. Shared culture leads to the idea of nationhood and allows us to form communities that adhere to a collective imagination. Thus, as Benedict Anderson proposes in his book, Imagined Communities<\/em>, we come together only as we meaningfully link \u201cfraternity, power, and time\u201d in shared consciousness.[2]<\/a> Livermore assists us in crossing those boundaries to relate to the other.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Livermore\u2019s work also synthesizes nicely with the anthropological research of Sarah Pink. She offers that ethnography is \u201can approach to experiencing, interpreting and representing culture and society that informs and is informed by sets of different disciplinary agendas and theoretical principles\u2026 a process of creating and representing knowledge (about society, culture and individuals) that is based on ethnographers\u2019 own experiences.\u201d[3]<\/a> Livermore takes these cultural cues, images, and experiences and encourages us to understand them not with our own cultural biases and interpretive grids, but through those of the other culture being considered. Therefore, this smiling man (see photo) could be communicating joy or embarrassment, depending on the cultural framework one uses to interpret his grin.<\/p>\n

Skills learned in growing one\u2019s CQ quotient can also be applied on one\u2019s home turf, which must be acknowledged, is no longer a monoculture. Learning cultural interpretive skills is essential. New generations are reshaping Western culture, marginalizing a meaningful role for religion. Legal rulings are slowly eroding the ability of faith to have meaningful presence within the public square. In Canada, Christian charities and churches are being threatened with the loss of charitable status as the collective wisdom believes religiously-motivated entities do not offer a net benefit to society.<\/p>\n

This week, as a representative of my clients, I attended the launch of the Cardus Religious Freedom Institute in Ottawa, our nation\u2019s capital.[4]<\/a> At the event, Dr. Ellen Roderick, Co-director of the Diocesan Centre for Marriage, Life and the Family at the Archdiocese of Montreal, spoke during a panel session, sharing a story that illustrates the cultural disconnect between generations and between those with traditional faith and current spiritualities.[5]<\/a> She, with a small group of advocates from her city, arrived on Parliament Hill as a faithful presence against abortion.\u00a0\"\"But the space for religiously-motivated activism is becoming increasingly narrow in Canada, as it is in other Western nations.\u00a0Unbeknownst to them, they were crowded out, for every Wednesday during the summer space is granted to Yoga on the Hill, and over a thousand would gather to practice their downward dogs and shavasanas<\/em>. While Roderick\u2019s group were there to articulate, convince and reason with their minds, a thousand others arrived to embody faith, inner healing, and world peace.<\/p>\n

As this new think tank launched \u2013 even the name \u201cthink tank\u201d is cerebral! \u2013 I wondered if CQ skills were being appropriately applied here. This shift from mind to body means that in order to live out the faith passed on from previous generations, we must learn to enflesh the ways of Jesus in new ways. Culturally intelligent ways of embodying this are necessary. Interestingly, we must now look to the master of the incarnation for help in knowing how to best embody the beauty of Christian community for our reshaped cultures.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

_____________________________________________<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> David A. Livermore, Leading with Cultural Intelligence: The New Secret to Success<\/em> (New York: American Management Association, 2010), 110.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism<\/em> (New York: Verso, 2016), 36.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Sarah, Pink, Doing Visual Ethnography: Images, Media and Representation in Research<\/em> (London: SAGE Publications, 2003), 22.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> For more information, see https:\/\/www.cardus.ca\/research\/law\/crfi\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Ellen Roderick, \u201cLaunch of Cardus Religious Freedom Institute\u201d (panel discussion, Cardus Office, Ottawa, May 9, 2018).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During our year of living in Asia, I boarded a Thai Airways flight from Manila to Bangkok. Prior to this trip, I had received a quick cultural lesson on peculiarities to Thai culture \u2013 don\u2019t touch someone\u2019s head, keep the soles of your feet facing the floor, never disrespect the king, and in lesson 101, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":100,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[977],"class_list":["post-17522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-livermore","cohort-lgp8"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/100"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17522"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17522\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17534,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17522\/revisions\/17534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}