Cultural Misunderstandings by Raymonde Carroll

Author:Raymonde Carroll [Carroll, Raymonde]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 1987-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

6

The Telephone

It may seem strange for the telephone to be given the same attention as friendship or the family. Yet the telephone is part of our daily lives and therefore of our relational space. Impressive technological developments transform it every day. But only the gadget itself changes, not our way of communicating, which obeys the same implicit rules, whether we use an old-fashioned phone or sophisticated “tele-cards” and computers. And we now know that whenever we say “implicit” we will find possible cultural misunderstandings.

A French woman with impeccable English who had been living in the United States for three or four years and who was about to return to France told me, “Sometimes I still get irritated because there are many things which I really don’t understand. . . . I have an American friend . . . we really get along very, very well . . . and I know she has some very big family problems. Last Christmas, she went home, and I knew that she and her mother would be going at it. I called her Christmas evening. . . . She told me that she couldn’t stay on the phone, that she would call me back to explain. Christmas came and went. Nothing. Okay, I tell myself that she must have had even more problems that she expected. I called her on New Year’s Day to wish her a happy new year, and the same thing happened; she told me to call her back, which I absolutely refused to do. I said no and hung up. She didn’t even inquire about Patrick, who, as she knew very well, had come back from India to spend the holidays with me. Patrick was quite surprised. . . . In the end she called back. I thought about the cultural differences you and I talked about, and instead of keeping my mouth shut, instead of swallowing my anger and burning up about it by myself, I decided to tell her that in my culture, it was impolite to act as she had acted. I’m glad I did, because we talked it over and cleared it up. . . . She had, in fact, had many problems.”

An American, speaking about the French friends she has in France, said, “They hate using the telephone. Here, if you’re moving around a lot and have no time to write, you use the phone. Whereas if they have no time to write, they don’t call either, nothing, just silence.”

As a French academic in the United States, for a long time I was flabbergasted by the apparent ease with which students called my house to ask what I judged to be “trivial” questions, questions which, I thought, certainly could have waited until I was in my office.

The telephone plays a very complicated role in the lives of French people. If we can afford it, we have a telephone installed as quickly as possible. But once installed, we subject it to all sorts of unspoken rules,

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