"To a fish, the water is invisible."

A year or two ago I took a class with Dr. Rita Geier that examined four different cultures and how they treated different life events. At the beginning of the class, we were tasked with defining ourselves as cultural beings. Interestingly, when it came time to share how we described ourselves we saw two outcomes:

1) People enlisted words such as funny, studious, etc. to describe themselves. But they were doing just that—describing themselves and their personality, not their culture.

2) A minimal, incomplete description consisting of one or two words. I fell into this group. I knew funny didn’t describe a culture…but what did?

Later in the class, a professor from Switzerland helped us to understand and describe our culture. It was interesting that an “outsider”, if you will, was much more able to identify our cultural characteristics thaN we were.

In Mary-Wynne Ashford’s essay “Toward a Culture of Peace” she discusses why it is hard to change culture. She implies that we are so immersed in our own culture that it is difficult to separate the culture and its values from other aspects of our lives. She illustrates this with an African proverb:

“To a fish, the water is invisible”

This immediately reminded me of my experience in Dr. Geier’s class. Our own culture was invisible to us. The Swiss professor helped us to grow a fuller understanding of our own culture. And truly, I recognized aspects of my cultural life that I had never pinpointed before.

When I and other colleagues go abroad we often wonder what our place in studying another culture is. This proverb, in combination with my experience in Dr. Geier’s class, clarifies our role a bit. Others, like we in our own culture, are fish in their own cultural waters. We because of our foreignness have the potential to notice aspects of other cultures that are just too obvious for the people to bother noticing, in general. An outside perspective can be beneficial once in a while.