Many Cultural Traditions Are Metaphors for National Character : Behavior: Why do Americans cheer football and Spaniards hail matadors? Because they are powerful metaphors, a researcher says.
Soon after his wedding 25 years ago, Martin Gannon knew something wasn’t quite right.
Every night he would watch patiently as his bride ate in virtual silence until she was finished. But he didn’t know why. Not until 14 years later when the young business professor moved his family to Kassel, Germany, to conduct research under a Fulbright Fellowship. Doris Gannon, then and still thoroughly American, looked forward to spending a year in the country where she was born and raised before immigrating to the United States at 9.
“I found that my wife was more similar to the Germans than she was to the Americans,” says Gannon, who quickly recognized that his own dinner behavior was at odds in a nation of people who consider eating to be serious business.
“I happen to be Irish-American,” he says, “and the Irish really don’t eat that way. Food is secondary to conversation for them.”
If quiet meals proved to be a minor cultural clash in an otherwise harmonious marriage, they also started Martin Gannon thinking about cultural mind-sets, about how people in a society think, feel and act purely because they are members of that society.
Three years ago, returning from an extended stay in Bangkok, Gannon had found a way to characterize behavior in terms to promote understanding: Metaphors.
Gannon fashioned an upper-level seminar at the University of Maryland’s College of Business and Management, College Park, to pursue such culturally potent metaphors. With the assistance of doctoral and advanced MBA students, many of them foreigners, he began exploring and reviewing possible characterizations of diverse societies. The three-year effort has produced a 500-page manuscript whose table of contents is a collection of such image-inducing entries as the Mexican Fiesta and Belgian Lace.
“Using metaphors to describe societies” is relatively new, says Gannon, who credits anthropologists with experimenting with the device sparingly and organizational theorists with applying it in their field (the organization as “machine,” for instance). “But,” Gannon notes, “it is the best way to cut into the culture.”
According to several studies, between 25% and 50% of behavior is attributable to cultural influences, much more than to sexual influences.
To understand what “the Fatherland” is all about has little to do with the aggressiveness and rigidity often attributed to Germans. “What they really are is reflective of a symphony.”
Not only is music a cherished part of the German character and history, but Gannon contends that symphonic music symbolizes the dynamics of German society.
As in a symphony orchestra, conformity is valued, order is important and rules are many, he says. And each person is expected to contribute fully his or her talents for the good of the whole. And the education system further supports full-blown participation by emphasizing efficiency and preparation for a place in society for everyone.
Calling this “a sense of combined effort,” Gannon says, “the German sees himself as an integral part of society. . . . And if you approach German society that way, it is a lot easier to get integrated in it and understand it.”
Similarly, the French would prove far less frustrating to other cultures if approached with the metaphor of “the French vineyard” in mind, says Gannon. “France is a heavily agricultural country, much more so than Germany or the United States.” That rural element, combined with a Cartesian educational system that emphasizes rational thought and mathematics, in effect plants a perfectionist in the vineyard--a relationship that is reflected everywhere in France.
“You touch an apple in a shop in Paris and they get annoyed because you are violating the perfect picture they have developed there,” says Gannon. Ask a Frenchman for directions in English? Try to close a deal with a French business executive you’ve only recently met? Same reaction. “The French want to know you,” he says, “and they really won’t deal with you until they get that. In the vineyard you nurture relationships.”
For Spanish society, the metaphor is the bullfight, “which really reflects Spanish culture and is not a sport whatsoever,” says Gannon. It is the proud individualism of the matador and the gang-like relationship of those in the bullring that reflect the personal relationship in Spain.
The Italian opera metaphor, he says, mirrors a society where “the drama is much more important than the individual and where emotions are so great that an individual can’t hold them inside themselves.”
The American metaphor? “American football,” says Gannon. “Aggressiveness and individuality. In the United States, the society is individualistic, and we focus on specialization. We try to learn something really well so we as an individual can do better than anyone we are competing with. Then there’s huddling: What we’re really good at here is getting together on a problem, working intensely and then scattering.”