Cultural Misconceptions

I was going to make another post about Swedish culture in general and how Swedes, on the whole, are different from myself and other Americans.  But after spending a decent amount of time with Swedish people, and also speaking with my friends back at home, I think I'd rather talk about our similarities.  If there's one thing that I've really learned, it's that, beyond the language barrier, we're all really the same.

As humans we inherently classify everything into groups.  We love to stereotype and generalize; it's a fun and easy way to poke fun at people and helps us to feel like we belong when we find a group we associate ourselves with.  In Europe, especially, where there are so many different languages, cultures, and nations packed tightly together, there are stereotypes and jokes for everything.  French people are snobby and their women don't shave their armpits, Germans are punctual, orderly, and drink too much beer, Spanish people are late to everything, Canadians are overly nice, and the Dutch... Well, being  responsible for Dutch Ovens, Dutch Rudders, going Dutch, and Dr. Evil, they're pretty much the worst people on Earth.

In the end, though, stereotypes can end up being false just as often as they are true.  Their main purpose isn't to give an accurate portrayal of a certain group of people, but to satisfy our brain's need to classify them into a group different from our own.  Right now, I live with a German who doesn't like beer at all and another who is rarely on time.  One of the biggest assholes I've met here has happened to be Canadian.

My point is that these cultural groups we assign people to can be fun, but are ultimately stupid and misleading, not because they aren't always true, but because it makes us think people are different from us when, at the base level, they really aren't.  Swedes and Germans are both supposed to be fairly punctual, and from my experiences, I would say that is more often true than not.  But punctuality (or beer consumption) isn't a personality defining trait.  I bet that anybody reading this, no matter their nationality, has friends who reliably late or on time to events.  But you don't think of him/her as either German or Spanish.  That's just who they are.

In the original post I was drafting, I was going to write about all of the things I've noticed in Sweden that are different from the America.  You would read them, and, if you didn't know any better, create a mental image of Swedish people based on what I wrote.  Somehow, I was going to drag the following out into a whole post:
Swedish people are...
Punctual
Liberal
Non-Religious
Distant and shy until you get them drunk
Attractive

There's your Swedish stereotype.  But seriously, if I removed "Swedish" from the description, these traits could easily describe millions of people all over the world.  Hell, I would say most of these adjectives can be used to describe myself (other than attractive, of course).



These are not cultural traits, they are human traits.  The average Swede is probably no different from the average American any more than an introvert is different from an extrovert or a Texan from a New Yorker.  If you can look past the stereotypes, you see that we share all of the important things: we all want to live, laugh, love, travel, make friends, drink, party, have fun, and prepare ourselves for the future.  Personally, I can identify with Swedes better than with the average South Carolinian, but that doesn't make me any less American.

So the next time you meet somebody from a foreign culture, don't identify them by their nationality; you're depriving yourself and them of a more natural and fulfilling conversation.  More importantly, you're making yourself look bad.  If there's anything that is worse than judging somebody else by their nationality's stereotypes, it's confirming your own country's stereotypes.  The Europeans like to stereotype Americans as loud, obnoxious attention whores and ignorant, so when you confirm this bias by calling a German a Nazi or asking if Paris is a country, you're making all of us look bad because they'll just think "damn, Americans really are stupid."

Instead, just buy them a beer and speak to them like you would any other person and you'll have a new friend in no time.

Skål!