Of course as a proviso: mediation most often manages differences of perception stemming from complex sets of particularly conceived and contrasting symbols, moralities, histories, and internalized etiquettes. Mediation 101 could be simply this: impact doesn't often equal intent, and when perception A butts heads with perception B, the perceivers will stick to their pet perception and puzzle at anything that threatens it. I am perpetually amazed at how completely different the same old world can be seen from even closely related eyes. Human beings are natural pattern makers - we see bunnies in clouds, saints in our soup, and confirmation of our pre-formed expectations in the sludge of information heaped upon us by the world. We're primordially programmed to pick particular data points from our lives which confirm and enhance our pre-fabricated stories and edit out those points that don't. Our backgrounds, rearing, personalities, experiences, and so on shape our internal preconceptions of what our stories should be. We adopt/adapt the templates our societies provide us, putting our own individual spin and casting ourselves in our desired roles of victims, heroes, martyrs...
People tend to associate with groups and each group differentiates to have with its own set of internal rules - does the family put the cups away face up or face down, which way does the toilet paper go on the roll, who does the dishes when somebody makes dinner, how long does one wait after one person has finished speaking before speaking, how can one appropriately express desires, what script is followed in deciding what to do, do we txt talk or email about this subject, and other subtler rules... Groups reinforce themselves through their unspoken hierarchal charts, roles, group stories, in-jokes and de-contextualized references that separate "us" from "other." Clothes, turns of phrase, behaviors, intonations all become ways of demonstrating our identities within a group - and frequently it is so ingrained that we don't even understand what symbols we embrace and what signals we are sending to whom, just that those who don't embrace our "us" rules are somehow not right.
Compare that to some of the definitions of "culture."
- the totality of a person's learned, accumulated experience which is socially transmitted, or more briefly, behavior through social learning.
- symbolic communication. Some of its symbols include a group's skills, knowledge, attitudes, values, and motives.
- Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other hand, as conditioning influences upon further action.
- Culture is the sum of total of the learned behavior of a group of people that are generally considered to be the tradition of that people and are transmitted from generation to generation.
- Culture is a collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.
Still, there's cross-cultural and then there's cross-cultural. Helping somebody to stretch outside of his/her own bevy of biases and whatnot is significantly easier when there is at least some familiarity - through exposure to other families, through schooling, through religious organizations, through at least partaking of some of the more general norms of a social story. Since we often participate in a number of sub-groups, we may have a certain degree of fluency in the mores of these subcultures. Or it may be that the sub-cultures still have generalized universalities, a lingua franca of some sort. I may have certain accents and patterns of language within a sub-group (maybe I speak far more quickly, and with a sing-songier intonation with a group of close female friends than my flatter affect and slower more assertive speech with a group of male friends), but at the end of the day there's kind of a watered down default way to communicate in broader contexts.
The less experience any one person has of another set of symbols, the more likely there will be not only a disconnect, but a complete incomprehensibility - even if they truly want to see the world through the others' perspective, they don't even know how to begin, because even the generalized rules of communication can be at odds. Considering how little of speech is actually communicated by the literal words - instead being defined by meta-messages, body language, tone of voice, polite turns of phrase - two perfectly fluent speakers may still be communicating in completely different languages.
And when somebody from a very different background is present in a mediation, it is... well, extraordinarily challenging. Not only because it's harder for the parties to even settle upon a means of communicating, but because the mediator might not be all that proficient in one or both cultures. Add to that the fact that the mediator is not truly a neutral being, but also a member of a distinct sub-culture with extensive personal biases, and you have all kinds of difficulties. It may even mean that the mediation format itself, processed to embody certain essential values of the culture in which it was formed, may not be apropos - some cultures are highly uncomfortable speaking directly about an issue and will instead talk wide circles around it, some dislike the very distinct and "efficient" format that the traditional eight step model has, some find the idea of mediator neutrality offensive in a situation in which the dispute should be settled within a community and by a community, some may value power hierarchies that are neutralized in an ordinary mediation.... Add to that any history of interactions between two present cultures (animosities, power differentials, stereotypes) and it's a lot to understand let alone navigate in anything remotely resembling the nuanced and sophisticate manner that may be present as a same(ish)-culture mediation.
This is, of course, why mediators frequently 1. have extensive training in cross-cultural models and 2. may find more success when working with co-mediators in a way that ensures that both parties have somebody familiar with their cultural background. This is of course a luxury that many will not have and selecting for mediators based on race, gender, etc. can run afoul of anti-discrimination laws in certain contexts.
Of course, it always presents a risk when we generalize people into their cultures since, as I began, there are infinite variations within a culture both by sub-groups and individuals. But nonetheless, for a mediator culture-blindness is a serious barrier to a successful mediation.
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