Suggested Readings: Excepted from A Beginner’s Guide to the Deep Culture Experience:
Beneath The Surface, Shaules, Intercultural Press
Books
The foundational readings of deep culture begin with The Silent
Language, and Beyond Culture, by Edward T. Hall.(1) He focuses on
hidden systematic cultural differences, in particular those dealing
with time and use of space. Hall created some of the first formal
terminology to compare elements of deep culture, such as high vs.
low context communication, and polychromic and monochromic
time.
If you are interested in understanding patterns of cultural
difference, I recommend Riding the Waves of Culture, by Trompenaars
and Hampden-Turner.(4) Though it is written with a no-nonsense
business audience in mind, it has intellectual depth. Trompenaars
and Hampden-Turner have been influenced by dilemma theory and
look at culture as a series of solutions to the challenges of social
organization. If you are mostly interested in making sense of the
cultural difference you find when abroad, this book is a good place
to start.
If you want a detailed (and rather academic) look at the process
of adapting to cultural difference, you might pick up a copy of Deep
Culture: The Hidden Challenges of Global Living (Shaules).(5) It introduces
a series of expatriates who talk about their cultural learning
experiences. This is used as the starting point for describing a model
of deep culture learning. It looks at questions such as “How is it that
some people live abroad for years without having deep culture
experiences?” and “How can we interpret what people say about
their deep culture experiences?”
For a genetics perspective of human evolution, including
discussions of the development of language and culture, I
recommend Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors
by Nicholas Wade.(6) You will learn, among other things, how
geneticists have been able to figure out when humans started wearing
clothes, how many people were in the group of humans who left
Suggested Readings: Excepted from A Beginner’s Guide to the Deep Culture Experience:
Beneath The Surface, Shaules, Intercultural Press
Africa and who spread throughout the rest of the planet, and the
length of time it took for humans to push the Neanderthals into
extinction.
If you are interested in the brain and the cognitive unconscious, I
highly recommend Strangers to Ourselves, by Timothy D. Wilson.(7) It
discusses the many ways that Freud’s view of the unconscious is at
odds with current research among cognitive scientists. This book can
be a bit scary because as you read it you start to understand just how
much our unconscious mind shapes our experiences. Could it be that
our conscious mind is simply explaining to ourselves the decisions
that the cognitive unconscious has already made?
For a view of how unconscious cognitive processes are affected
by culture, read The Geography of Thought, by Richard Nisbett.
Nisbett(8), a psychologist, introduces a great deal of research to
support his argument that culture affects cognition in fundamental
ways. The research that I introduced with the cow, chicken and grass
comes from this book.
For a look into the question of how the brain produces
consciousness, pick up a copy of The Feeling of What Happens: Body
and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, by Antonio Damasio.(9)
Questions about consciousness are often asked by philosophers, but
neurologists are starting to understand the functioning of the brain
well enough to guess at how it is produced. Understanding this
process can help us understand how both the cognitive unconscious
and the narrative conscious work.
Another book that deals with consciousness is The Embodied Mind,
by Varela, Thompson and Rosch.(10) The authors examine what
research into cognitive science can teach us about consciousness, but
go on to examine the Buddhist understanding of perception from a
cognitive science perspective. This book is not a light read and was
published back in 1993, but it is a brilliant synthesis of Western and
Eastern ideas about cognition, and looks extensively at
Suggested Readings: Excepted from A Beginner’s Guide to the Deep Culture Experience:
Beneath The Surface, Shaules, Intercultural Press
consciousness as an emergent property. (To my mind, deep culture is
also an emergent property.)
Deep culture is not, of course, just about academic study. It’s also
an attempt to understand our own lives and take responsibility for
our decisions. My view of the human capacity to take responsibility
for our decisions has been heavily influenced by Carlos Castaneda.
His book Journey to Ixtlan discusses practices which use the mundane
events of everyday life as the fuel for transformative learning.(11) He
discusses losing self importance, assuming responsibility, using death
as an advisor, “not doing” and more. Some say that Castaneda was
an enlightened shaman while others call him a charlatan. It doesn’t
matter. There is a highly practical element to his work which I find
both inspiring and useful.
Deep culture can be seen at the macro level of society as well.
The book which ignited a firestorm of debate about the role of
culture in international conflict is The Clash of Civilizations, by Samuel
P. Huntington.(12) When reading this book, I often felt that what
Huntington was calling “civilization” could better be called deep
culture. The book revolves around the argument that unconscious
elements of culture are powerful forces that can lead to conflict and
that must be understood in a globalized world.
Economists have been looking at the question of how cultural
values shape economic development. The book Culture Matters: How
Values Shape Human Progress, edited by Lawrence El Harrison and
Samuel P. Huntington, take on this subject empirically, without being
cowed by taboos about associating economic development with
culture.(14) In the appendix there is a spirited written exchange
between an African development specialist accused of elitism by a
Western Anthropologist for considering certain cultural values as
“problems” to be overcome. Their debate is full of deep culture
lessons.
Finally, one book which does a brilliant job of deconstructing
Suggested Readings: Excepted from A Beginner’s Guide to the Deep Culture Experience:
Beneath The Surface, Shaules, Intercultural Press
deep culture patterns in Japan is The Anatomy of Dependence, by Takeo
Doi (14). It analyzes a single word in Japanese—amae (dependence),
but shows how this concept is a central organizing principal of the
Japanese world view. This book is valuable not only as a way to
understand Japan, but as a tour-de-force of deep culture awareness
on the part of the author. When I read this, I find myself thinking,
“I could never explain the inner workings of American deep culture
values with such an impressive degree of insight.”
The works listed here give a glimpse of DC from differing
perspectives. Intercultural specialists may notice that there are few
books from the field of intercultural communication, and none by
some of the giants of the field. I also haven’t included books from
the vast literature which deals with cultural identity and cultural
marginality. It’s not that I don’t see value in these other works, but
simply that the books I’ve listed have been some of the most useful
for me getting a handle on culture as a lived experience rather than as a
field of academic study or as a literary pursuit. I hope you find them
of some use in your cultural adventures.
Online resources
If you are interested in the work that I do, stop by:
www.deepculture.org. You’ll find downloadable articles, a deep
culture learning survey, a cultural learning profiler, and more. You
can compare your deep culture attitudes with those of people from
other countries. You can learn about the Certificate of Deep Culture
Learning and Practice, offered by JII Academy.