Clarence Thomas has said that good manners will open doors that the best education cannot. But how can we define good manners or what we understand by good manners? In broad terms, they are said to be well-established standards of proper conduct in social life and in all human interaction. Luckily manners and etiquette are not out of reach for anybody as they can be learnt, acquired and cultivated by each one of us. Good manners, however, are not uniform as at least to a certain extent they vary across generations, regions, countries and cultures; an observation and experience that most of us have definitely made already.

But is it a must always to know exactly what the etiquette, the code of behavior, that delineates expectations for social behaviour, is saying about the contemporary conventional norms and standards within a society? Is it even possible to learn all these rules and master them perfectly without ever making any mistakes when interacting with other people in our everyday life? Don’t we all sometimes violate these behavioural rules and don’t we all every now and then misbehave ourselves? Indeed we do and still we are usually forgiven by the others for our occasionally not-so-elegant or polite conduct!

Exactly this was the starting point for the Finnish National Board of Education (FNBE) when it set up an expert group a year ago to produce a publication on good manners for 13-19 year old pupils and students at educational institutions in Finland. The idea with the publication was neither to emphasise “this is correct and that is incorrect behaviour”, nor to list what are the “dos” and the “don’ts”. A slightly different approach was chosen to discuss from a teenager’s perspective the topic of good manners, proper behaviour and not grossing people out.

The booklet contains seven stories where young people face problems, challenges and difficulties that they have to deal with, such as teenage pregnancy, shoplifting, bullying, emerging homosexual identity, death of a family member, job interview, excess drinking and partying. The booklet with its Finnish and Swedish titles (FI: Pientä säätöö!!; SE: Lite koll!!) conveys a positive message that although sometimes mistakes occur to all of us, it is not the end of the world, but we can fix them and learn from them. The questions and exercises after each story help youngsters (and their teachers and parents) to reflect on behavioural aspects presented in the text. In summary, people who know how to handle themselves in social situations feel confident about themselves and can act as role models to the rest of the gang.

The booklet in Finnish is available in hardcopy since November 2014 (orders can be placed through this link), and the Swedish language version since December 2014 (orders through this link). (Publisher: Finnish National Board of Education; Author: Mika Launikari). N.B. The Finnish and Swedish titles of the publication (FI: Pientä säätöö!!; SE: Lite koll!!) translated into English would mean more or less “An eye for manners”, although the word “manners” is not explicitly highlighted in those two language versions.

“Birds of a feather flock together” is an idiom(1) that exists in several languages and can be interpreted as people with a similar socio-economic and cultural background resembling each other and therefore presumably “playing” well together. This very idiom clearly demonstrates how we construct us and our in-group and that way create the other and otherness from which we want to separate and disconnect ourselves. Another well-known proverb(2) “Birth is much, breeding is more” indicates that since the very first moment we are born, our environment and the upbringing (incl. formal education) we receive are shaping our identities and consequently influencing our attitudes, beliefs, behaviour, values, and most importantly our sense of belonging to a group of people to whom we happen to relate for one or another reason.

As part of this enculturation process – especially if we lack criticism and adult guidance as children and youngsters – we may adopt intolerant and discriminative attitudes as a norm without being able to judge the incorrectness of such conduct. Usually the acquisition of cultural categories is to a large degree an unconscious process, as Dundes Renteln (2005) describes, and therefore individuals are mostly unaware of having internalized them. Thus, the more people only stick to their own cultural home-base, where they can easily and lazily live with autopilot mode on, the more their (bad) habits and behaviours become automatic and repetitive. This indeed can have a negative impact on their readiness and willingness to deal with unexpected changes and challenges originating from their external environment.

What happens when we have to leave our comfort zone, the safety and security provided by our in-group, and encounter somebody representing the other? What if this other is an individual with a completely different background than ours as regards his/her country of origin, language, worldview, life experience, ethnicity, sexuality, etc.?  Do we in such a situation manage to cope with the fear factor that may make us feel threatened by the unknown other? Will we in such an intercultural encounter be able to think rationally and decide consciously on building the relationship upon similarities rather than focusing on any visible or invisible differences? This is probably easier said than done as, for example, Lavancy et al. (2011) point out, there are complex mechanisms of social categorization in the human mind that result in othering processes (i.e. opposition between us and them), which often may create tension, anxiety and intolerance in situations of intercultural interaction.

But don’t we too often and too hastily assume that culture is static and explains everything and in so doing gives us the perfect excuse to continue being ignorant towards what is actually taking place and eventually going totally wrong in an intercultural encounter? Isn’t it pretty convenient to think that as my own behaviour is valid conduct in my own country and in my own social network, it is therefore justified in any other context as well, and thus there is absolutely no reason for me to modify my behavioural conduct (rather the other should change and adapt to my behaviour!)? The famous Dutch researcher Geert Hofstede (2002) quite correctly claims that culture does not exist as such, but is a dynamic, ever-changing construct. As long as culture proves its utility by explaining and predicting behaviour, it serves its proper function. However, as soon as it fails to do so, it is to be dropped or traded for something better. Hofstede continues that culture is often redundant, and that other factors (such as economic, political or institutional) offer better explanations. But sometimes they do not, and then the construct of culture is needed to understand and interpret human interaction.

Dervin (2014) highlights the evolutionary nature of cultures and that every single culture is constantly co-constructed by people participating in it through their actions and discourses. This leads to regarding people as actors actively involved in negotiating representations on themselves, their life experiences and their daily environment, and moves away from seeing them purely as cultural objects. In this setting, the term “intercultural” becomes even more essential as it is strongly suggesting that everything is negotiated between (“inter”) people and that their identities are constantly transforming through the ongoing process of human interaction. In this respect, interculturality should be observed as a vivid and dynamic relationship for negotiating images of the self and the other (incl. cultures, languages, worldviews, religions, …) instead of relying on them as explanatory static elements. This allows us to conclude that any culture or any identity is a result of co-creation between individuals representing a wide variety of different backgrounds, and thus we all are doers giving our input to “designing” our joint culture in a highly globalized world (Dervin & Gao, 2012).

(1) For example, in Swedish: « Lika barn leka bäst. »; German: « Die Vögel gesellen sich zu ihres gleichen. »; Latin: « Pares cum paribus facillime congregantur. »; French: « Les oiseuax de même couleur se cherchent volontiers. »; Spanish: «  Yo como tú, tú como yo, diablo nos juntó. »

(2) In French : « La naissance ne fait pas la noblesse. » ; German : « Nicht Geburt macht den Adel. »

Bibliography:

Dervin, F. (2014). Exploring “new” interculturality online. In Language and Intercultural Communication, 14:2, 191-206.

Dervin, F. & Gao, M. (2012). Constructing a fairy tale around intercultural couplehood on Chinese television. In Language and Intercultural Communication, 12:1, 6-23.

Dundes Renteln, A. (2005). The Use and Abuse of the Cultural Defense. In Canadian Journal of Law and Soceity. Volume 20, Number 1, pp. 47-67.

Hofstede, G. (2002). Dimensions do not exist: A reply to Brendan McSweeney.

Lavancy, A., Gajardo, A. & Dervin, F. (Eds., 2011). Interculturality at stake. Politics of Interculturality. Newcastle: CSP

Now in September I have been following a course on Multiculturalism in the light of research at the University of Helsinki. The course has not only been informative, interesting and enjoyable, but above all thought provoking thanks to the knowledgeable lecturers, the numerous exercises as well as the lively debate in the class. Simply an excellent course with a good combination of theory and practice.

One of the lecturers called for a more critical awareness of what racism is and how it expresses itself. He addressed the issue of individual and systemic forms of racism. Individual racism is related to an individual’s racist assumptions, attitudes, beliefs and behaviours that are based on that person’s conscious and/or unconscious prejudices, whereas systemic racism manifests itself in the organizational policies and practices that either include or exclude certain groups, but does not necessarily involve an individual act of explicit discrimination.

Further, systemic racism can be regarded as racial discrimination stemming from an individual conducting the orders of others who hold prejudices (institutional racism) or there are inequalities in the systemic functioning of the society that excludes, for example, members of a particular minority group from social or civic participation (structural racism).

Individual-level racism is not developing itself in a vacuum, but instead emerges from the established values of the society and how they are visible and repeated over and over again in institutions and systems (e.g. education and training, labour market). In this context, we cannot overlook the impact of culture on us and how it shapes our way of seeing the world and the people, who live in it.

Since the very first moment we are born, we start learning and internalizing the values and behavioural patterns of the culture, in which we happen to be (enculturation). As part of this process, the influences that restrict, guide, or form us as individuals include in the first place our parents, other adults (such as teachers), and also our peers. As children we tend to follow the example of adults (especially our parents), and if they happen to demonstrate discriminative/racist attitudes or acts, we easily might take and absorb that as a norm without being able to judge whether that actually is correct behaviour.   

Needless to say, it is much easier to recognise individual or interpersonal acts of racism (than systemic forms of discrimation/racism), such as to pass carelessly over another person, intentionally leaving him/her out in a social or work context or committing a psychological or physical act of violence against him/her. Moreover, due to the prevailing culture of individualism especially in the western parts of the world, some people (try to) justify their judgemental statements as not racist, because that just happens to represent their “personal opinion” and should thus be allowed in terms of freedom of speech.

Finally, I think that multicultural education provided in schools and educational institutions can help learners to gain an understanding of the concept of racism as well as help them to adopt tools to combat discrimination, xenophobia and intolerance in their daily environment. To this end, the conceptual framework for the Dimensions of Multicultural Education*) developed by Banks (2011) can be a useful model to be applied by teachers to address the complexity of racism.

*) The five dimensions of the framework (i.e. content integration, knowledge construction, prejudice reduction, empowering school culture, equity pedagogy) have been described, for example, in Banks, J.A., (2011, Ed.). The Routledge International Companion to Multicultural Education.