Foreign to Familiar (book recommendation)

I’ve just read this book, which I would highly recommend, on the ways people of different cultures think and behave:

Sarah A. Lanier, Foreign to Familiar: A Guide to Understanding Hot- and Cold-Climate Cultures (McDougal Publishing Company, 2000).



In some cultures, it is rude to have a conversation without including everyone present; in others, people are assumed to want privacy and so one needs to ask permission to engage them in conversation. In some cultures people are expected to conform to the group and defer to collective wisdom (“The nail that sticks up is hammered down”), in others people are expected to take initiative for themselves and have their own opinion on everything.

In Chile, a 2 o’clock meeting time means that at 2 o’clock you will finish doing the last thing you were doing and start to get ready to leave to get to the meeting; in Germany it is somewhat different. In some cultures, visitors will drop in at any time unannounced but will fit in around whatever you happen to be doing; in others, visits are mutually agreed in advance and will involve the host cleaning the house and cooking a special meal.

As I said before, if you enter a hardware store in Georgia, another hot-climate culture, and say bluntly, “Five pounds of nails, please,” you will be considered rude. You are expected to say something pleasant and superficial before stating your business, like “How’s it going? You doing all right today?”

If you were to go into a Dutch hardware store talking that same way, the owner would become irritated because you were taking up his time. There, you can just politely say, “Hello, I’d like five kilos of nails, please.” There is no reason to ask how the person is feeling that day. That’s none of your business. It’s personal information and is reserved for relatives and close friends. (pp. 36-7)

Foreign to Familiar is a quick read but has a lot of valuable insights. Some of these are things I’ve discovered from hanging around with people from around the world (especially living in Link House), but this book helped me to make more sense of things that had previously irritated or perplexed me.