General India musings

[mdrnprometheus]

I'm finally getting around to posting the final thoughts about the India trip -- the moving has just been a whirlwind of packing, and graduation's also kept me hopping. They feel a little stale now that I've been back for two weeks, but the insight's still there. There's also some more professionally-oriented reflections up at the main blogAs you

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Have you read anything about high-context vs. low-context cultures? I came across it through John Hooker from Tepper.

Some cultures, like ours, like things to be navigable without people needing to know a lot of extra context, so they post lots of signs and schedules and rules and so on so that anybody, dropped into a setting, can figure out what they're supposed to do. Other cultures are high-context; people are expected to learn how to behave and how to navigate particular situations, so there's no need for signposting. Ethnically homogeneous cultures tend to be high-context; diverse and/or immigrant-heavy cultures tend to be low-context.

You can see this in Doha by visiting the American and Indian embassies. At the American embassy you go to the window marked 1 and then the window marked 2. At the Indian embassy you also have to go to two windows, but they aren't marked... you just look to see what other people are doing and figure it out.

When we were trying to catch a train from Gaya to Delhi, there seemed to be no way to find out which track the train would come to. I found the stationmaster and asked, "Where is the signboard?"; he replied with "Which train are you taking?" I told him, and he said, "Oh, that's always track four or five." Presumably most people catching that train already know it's always track four or five. It's only when you're planning for outsiders that there's need for a sign, and in Gaya, they're not. :-)

[mdrnprometheus]

I had not read that, but it's an interesting framework for explaining what I noticed.