Rolf Potts on cultural awareness

“Cultural awareness is often the positive product of rather negative experiences — and no amount sensitivity training can compare to what you’ll learn by accident. After all, the very concept of “cultural sensitivity” is something we understand through the liberal, democratic, egalitarian taint of our own culture — and these very assumptions might actually be offensive to some ways of thinking. The point of travel, then, is not to evaluate the rightness or wrongness of other cultures (after all, you could stay at home to do that), but to better understand them. Thus, the secret to interacting with people in foreign lands is not to fine-tune your sense of political correctness (which itself is a Western construct), but to fine-tune your sense of humor. Most comedy, after all, is simply a displacement of context — Jack Lemmon dressing up as a woman; Andy Kauffman lip-synching the Mighty Mouse theme song; Jerry Seinfeld dating a woman whose name he can