Do you see what someone else sees?

Do you see what someone else sees?

A JAPANESE, when looking at a photograph of the Eiffel Tower, registers the same Eiffel Tower as, say, a Swiss does. How they interpret what they see, however, might be different. Our interpretations of pictures depend not least on our cultural upbringing.
Hans Durrer

Tue, Jun 24, 2008
The Straits Times
A JAPANESE, when looking at a photograph of the Eiffel Tower, registers the same Eiffel Tower as, say, a Swiss does. How they interpret what they see, however, might be different. Our interpretations of pictures depend not least on our cultural upbringing.

Take, for instance, that famous picture of the lone Chinese man facing a tank at Tiananmen Square in 1989. The Western media read it as a symbol of exceptional bravery in the face of massive threat. The official Chinese reading saw it as an expression of extraordinary restraint by the tank commander.

'How do you know how someone is feeling?' the International Herald Tribune asked recently, referring to the findings of a recent study: 'For people in Western societies, it is usually easy: look at the person's face. But for people from Japan and other Eastern societies...it may be more complex - having to do not only with evaluating the other person's face but also with gauging the mood of others who might be around.'

Researchers had shown two groups of students - one Western, one Japanese - a series of drawings of five children. Respondents were asked to rate the face of the child at the centre of the picture on a 10-point scale for happiness, sadness and anger.

The Japanese students were heavily influenced by the mood displayed by the other faces in the picture: When all faces looked happy, they gave the figure in the centre a higher score than when the faces in the background looked sad. The Western students remained largely unaffected by what was going on in the background.

'The differences may speak to deeply ingrained cultural traits, the authors (of the study) write, suggesting that Westerners may 'see emotions as individual feelings, while Japanese see them as inseparable from the feelings of the group',' the Tribune reported.

It goes without saying that one can too easily fall into the trap of cliches - Westerners and Asians, us and them, etc. This seems to be almost unavoidable, although we might know better. Nevertheless, cliches and stereotypes can serve - if not taken deadly serious and if we are conscious of them - as helpful signposts for mutual understanding.

Disagreements on values are more often than not caused by politics rather than fundamental differences. After all, the Universal Declaration On Human Rights has been signed by both Eastern and Western states.

One nevertheless needs to ask whether there isn't some truth in Rudyard Kipling's famous line: 'East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.'

Janwillem van de Wetering in his book Afterzen: Experiences Of A Zen Student Out On His Ear thought the quotation 'gently dated'.

He wrote: 'East keeps meeting West and the dalliance, however hostile at times, gave rise to...Toyota, Japanese jazz, a movie harmonising the talents of Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune, much better TV sets. My neighbour in Maine thanks Honda's competition for the fact that his five-year-old Ford...does not rattle. ('They used to, you know, them Fords, but no more, no more. Thanks to them Japs. I fought them in the Pacific. Clever fellers, don't you think?').'

The Swiss philosopher Elmar Holenstein once read to an international gathering of his fellow philosophers an unnamed classical text that was said to characterise Asian thinking. He then asked the audience who they thought the author of the text was. Confucius, said some; Lao Tzu, said others; a Shintoist, said yet another group. Well, the text was by the Swiss Peter Bichsel, on the peculiarities of the Swiss national character.

Cultural differences do exist. The question we should ponder when we see studies claiming that West and East see the world differently is this: Are we condemned to see the world in culturally conditioned ways? Will I, because I was culturally conditioned in Switzerland, always see the world through my Swiss value system? In part, sure. But a value system is not fixed; it is in a constant state of flux.

We can choose to see the picture that somebody from another culture sees. When we become aware of our cultural conditioning - that Westerners focus on the individual and Easterners on the group, for instance - we can change our focus.

So why not, occasionally, try to look at pictures through the eyes of another culture?

The writer is the author of Ways Of Perception: On Visual And Intercultural Communication