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Chapter Two: American Culture
And American Diversity
The essence of cross-cultural understanding is knowing how your own culture is both similar to and different from the local or "target" culture. For this reason, those who pursue cross-cultural knowledge must sooner or later turn their gaze on themselves. People from other cultures, after all, aren't different by nature, but only different in relation to a particular standard they're being measured against. To even see those differences, therefore, you have to examine that standard. In the case of the Peace Corps, that standard is the American culture that Volunteers come from. This chapter contains a series of activities designed to reveal that American culture.
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You might wonder why people from the United States would need to have their culture revealed to them-isn't it pretty obvious?-but the fact is that people from a culture, as you learned in chapter 1, are in many ways the least able to see it. They embody the culture, of course, but they would in fact have to get out of that body if they wanted to see what it looked like. In that sense, you might want to think of this chapter as an out-of-body experience, courtesy of Peace Corps training.
As was noted earlier, no one American is quite like any other American, but a handful of core values and beliefs do underlie and permeate the national culture. These values and beliefs don't apply across the board in every situation, and we may, on occasion, even act in ways that directly contradict or flaunt them, but they are still at the heart of our cultural ethos. It is some of these beliefs, with the characteristic behaviors that come from them, that are the focus of this chapter.
Remember as you do these exercises that whether or not you personally can identify with or believe in the typical American being constructed here, this is the image that many host country people have of Americans.
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