3/12 Athenaeum at 1pm - Culture Shock and Political Correctness by Juan Fernandez Iglesias

On Wednesday, March 12, 2008 at 1:00pm Juan Fernandez Iglesias, WSU Professor of Foreign Languages, will present Culture Shock and Political Correctness: The Challenge of Teaching Foreign Cultures in America.

Culture is often perceived as something that, well, other cultures have. Think, for example, of the French, with their “peculiar” culinary and social eccentricities. We, on the other hand, (whomever that “we” may be in any particular instance) tend to behave and interact with each other and interpret the world around us following the sometimes vague but generally accepted rules of what could be described as “common sense.” This stance makes us look at other cultures as literally eccentric, that is, out of center, not normal. Since they behave differently than us, and our behavior is determined by common sense, then their behavior has to be motivated by something else, something strange. When two cultures interact, this clashing of two different systems of “common sense” results in what has come to be known as “culture shock,” the seed of stereotypes and ultimately of ethnic and cultural chauvinism.