This time last week I was in Remagen as a guest lecturer and participant in the annual Managing Cultural Diversity weekend. My session was about how we interpret pictures differently depending on our culture.
Part of my session included two examples, one showing how the rest of the world views the Danes or Scandinavia and the second showing how the Danes view themselves through an ad for a real estate company.
The ad allegedly explodes several housing market myths as follows:
1. The suburbs are simply a ghetto for silver wedding anniversary couples.
2. You can't live in Jutland (the rural mainland part of Denmark) without a trailer.
3. It is completely irresponsible to bring up children in the city.
5. There are fights every Friday night in the countryside. (The policeman is saying 'Right, that's the end of my shift then. I'm off!'
The strange thing is that Danes often can't see the point of the 'Origins of Scandinavia' cartoon while many talk about the estate agent ad because they recognise something of themselves in the latter. This weekend was a little experiment to see how the two would go down. The multi-cultural audience could see the humour in the cartoon while the ad (even with translations) left them completely cold.
It is usually easier to spot the differences or what is 'wrong' with the other culture. It is much harder to recognise which aspects of your own beliefs are due to cultural inheritance.
Keywords: intercultural, Remagen
