Pride and Prejudice

"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?" - Jane Austin 1802

"I dunno why French are hated.
Apart from the fact they lack balls, courage and spine,
I see nothing wrong with them." - Jim Kirkwood 2003

When a baby is born she is capable of making every sound in every language on the face of the earth.

Instead then, of looking at human speech as being learned from scratch out of a void of silence, we can view the child's acquisition of her native tongue, as being as a gradual reduction in the full and comprehensive range of sounds she can utter.

And so it is difficult for those of us who know only one language to learn another, once childhood is past. In fact, some sounds are so 'foreign' to us that we are seemingly physically unable to utter them. And English speakers can more easily learn a romantic language than an Asian one, as the phonemes are similar.

It seems to me that the same sort of thing is going on with the assimilation of people into their "culture", and with their aquisition of an understanding (read stereotyping) of others.

There is nothing we inherit to make us Australian, Greek or Malaysian. Perhaps there is some remnant of racial memory but I am sure most of our ways (speaking culturally only) are learned. So given no narrowing of our ways, we could all gesticulate wildly à la Italiano, have stiff upper lips like the English, and a strong sense of irony like many Australians. Surely we are all capable of all of these.

I was taught not to stereotype, but I do. It seems natural to all humans. But dangerous. Just look at the stereotypes displayed in war propaganda going back centuries.

And especially in multi-cultural societies such as the United States and Australian, what sense does it make to define a "national culture"? How can it be, when such a large proportion of Australians were not brought up in a Western English speaking country, let alone Australia, that there is one definable Australian "culture".

When we are far away from the "sunburnt country", we often think of Australia in terms of the bush and "rolling plains". Yet most Australians live in cities.

How correct is our image of ourselves?

Certainly there is an "Australianess" that many of us recognise. But is it qualitatively better than "Americaness" or "Chineseness"? It cannot be. Yet I hear "mateship" and other supposedly typical Aussie traits glorified by many of us.

Simpson and his Donkey are probably unknown to many young Australians, and yet the image the photo evokes epitomises Aussieness to many Australians who would personally not be prepared to lift a finger for a neighbour.

Are New Yorkers rude, the French arrogant, the Germans orderly, the Italians great lovers? All I can say is everything that has four legs isn't a dog, as my parents used to say should I dare to make a joke relating to another culture... they were politically correct before PC was invented! No wonder I was such a serious child...

I once read somewhere that the essence of humour was familiarity and the recognition that someone else has the same understanding as oneself. Thus we can all laugh at the Moonee Ponds housewife and the Spanish waiter in the English restaurant. It would be a sad world if we didn't.

But let's only go so far. And when we come in contact with people from a culture that is as foreign to us as Swahili is as a language; when we experience cultural traits that we have been taught to disdain - think - there but for a wink in my father's eye, go I.

Kate Juliff
New York
May 2003