Locating the McDonald's is Not Enough Posted on January 7, 2008 Learning about a community's culture before stepping off the plane will facilitate international research, counsels Kenneth H. Rubin (bio)

There are very different methods that are used when you do cross-cultural work. It extends beyond lab work; much of it is ethnographic. You really have to know what’s going on, and you really have to be comfortable within the culture, and it certainly helps to have more than a single language.

You have to do some serious reading about the communities within which you’re studying, so if you’re going to go off to Korea, you have to have a sense of history of that culture. Where did it come from? One of my big mistakes when I first visited — well, I made several mistakes when I first visited Korea, but I might as well get them out — so one of my big mistakes was I noticed that people were wearing little crucifixes around their necks. And here’s an Asian culture, prototypically Asian, and as you walked down the street no one looks like you, no one speaks the same language as you. There’s something to being lost in translation.

But there were people wearing crucifixes, so my first question was could someone, as I play tourist, when I’m done with my work and I play tourist, would someone be willing to take me to a Buddhist temple?

And the group that I was with happened to look at me and say, “Why would you want to do that?” And it turns out that most of Korea is Christian, and I should have known that before I went there and it wouldn’t have been a faux pas.

And then I went to lunch with people who eventually became very close friends of mine. And so I wanted them to feel comfortable with me at lunch, and so I said, “Just forget the Dr. Rubin business; just call me Ken.” And they looked at each other, and they smiled. And then they looked back at me, and then we started having lunch. And they spoke English throughout the whole thing to make me feel more comfortable, and they called me Ken. But when they spoke to each other, they called each other “Dr. So-and-so.”

And then I learned that the American version of friendship is one of intimacy and comfort and disclosure, and the Korean, really the prime bits of friendship in Korea is to demonstrate respect, and that’s what they were doing.

And you just don’t say, “Okay, I’m going to do work internationally,” without really becoming a scholar of that country, and it’s not like picking up a tour guide and learning where the cities are and if they have a local McDonald’s or something like that.

It really is learning the history of the country and the culture and its people so that you can seem half intelligent, and you certainly look interested to your colleagues, interested in their community. And they’ll take you a whole lot more seriously.

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