Plural Identities

Return of the Ninja

A much more welcome girl band reunion than the Spice Chickens - I saw the Frank Chickens live in 1984 and I think I had their record (or maybe I just taped them off John Peel) - here's their "We Are Ninja" from that time, now on YouTube.  Looking at it with older eyes, I realise they were making even more of a political statement about Japanese identity, especially female identity, than I had quite grasped at the time.  They are back on tour, and will be in Brighton soon, alas when I am not.

Hardwiring culture

"Our inability to understand intuitively the actions and gestures of people from other cultures is hardwired into our brains" is how the Financial Times describes the conclusions reached by researchers from the University of California into the "mirror neuron network" (FT is subscription only, so here's a free access article from Science Daily which covers the same press release), a set of nerve cells that fire not only when we perform an action but also when we watch someone else performing the same action.  Apparently the mirror neuron network responded differently when subjects watched gestures being made by someone from their own culture and someone from a foreign culture.

"Culture has a measurable influence on our brain and as a result on our behaviour", says  Istvan Molnar- Szakacs, a member of the team.

Which comes as something of a relief to those of us who make a living from explaining cultural differences and have to defend ourselves from time to time from people who hate anything that smacks of cultural determinism and say things like "I don't sense any cultural differences.  We are all human beings.  You just need to be sensitive to others and polite" etc.  Not that I disagree with these statements, and sometimes I find myself saying similar things when people get too wound up about etiquette.

In another sense it is bad news for us, because it may also mean that it is very hard to train someone to understand the gestures and feelings of a person from another culture or to use gestures which will be correctly interpreted by someone from another culture.

Absence from blogging

I have (by myself! even though I am a girl!) finally got round to setting up my own wireless access.  I never feel like blogging at my PC in my home office, because that is for work, and it is more sociable and motherly to be in the sitting room, doing a bit of surfing and blogging on my laptop, while at the same time helping my son with his K'nex.

I have not found much I wanted to comment on this past month. There was the Commission on Integration and Cohesion report (original website seems to have disappeared in the Brown changeover) which was so practical and sensible, it didn't really hit the headlines, but in its emphasis on local voluntary activities links nicely with an initiative I have just become involved in, the Time Together Refugee Mentoring scheme.

I have not been matched with a mentee yet, but it seems likely it will be someone from the Gateway Protection Programme, and therefore probably Ethiopian.  The Programme doesn't get much publicity, deliberately I suspect, but seems to me to be a very Good Thing, whereby various countries, in partnership with the UN High Commission on Refugees, have a managed programme of bringing in groups of refugees, usually from refugee camps in the developing world (where most refugees are found).  The UK is taking 400 this year, I believe, of which Brighton is taking 40, who are Ethopians in refugee camps in Kenya.  Rather than facing the random process and frequently inhumane treatment arising from trying to reach a country, illegally, and then trying to claim asylum, families and groups are given support and mentoring in resettling in the UK.