The Butter Lesson

Learning that the world is not fixed in stone.

Anyone who as ever lived in a foreign country has learned something new. I don’t mean learning a new word in Chinese, or how to cook a new native Uruguayan dish, or that you should never eat or offer food with your left hand in Muslim cultures. Those are all important things to learn, and any intercultural encounter is valuable because one does learn such new things. But I mean learning something even bigger than that.

Actually living in a foreign culture, among the other, teaches that your fundamental view of the world and how it should work is not cut in stone. That is a very powerful thing to learn: Your framework of reality is not, in fact, based on some objective truth that reflects how the world works, but is based on the cultural values of the place where you were born and raised.

Let me give you an example. (And anyone wanting to learn more about this should plumb the depths of research done by Geert Hofstede and Fons Trompenaars.)

When I was 17, I spent one year as an AFS exchange student outside of Zurich, Switzerland. Except for short trips to Mexico and Canada, I had never been outside of my country, the United States. There I was, embedded in a Swiss family, struggling to learn Swiss German, going to school, and just get on with life, and the first thing I remember “learning” seems a bit trivial: In Switzerland butter doesn’t come in sticks; in Switzerland it comes in slabs.

Butter from the supermarket just looked different, flatter and wider in its packaging. It was curious but no biggie, until my mother sent me a recipe for brownies so I could bake some for my Swiss family. The recipe called for a “stick of butter” and I realized “stick of butter” does not mean anything in a brownie recipe in Zurich.

I learned then that I had been using a frame of reference so ubiquitous in my own culture that I had not even been aware of it as a frame: it was just a truth to me that, in this new place, was revealed as merely one particular way to deal with butter. At that moment, my truth went out the window.

I did not even know what amount of butter was in “a stick,” and had to do some research there (before we had powerful computers in our pockets; I had to consult books). Once I learned that a stick of butter in America is ½ cup, I then used conversion charts to show me how many grams were equivalent to a half-cup of butter, and then I learned to use a scale, common in European countries where ingredients are measured by weight, not by volume. That was the practical stuff one learns by living in a new culture; that is learning that is helpful and enlarges one’s world. That kind of learning is one immediate benefit to living abroad.

But the more profound lesson was learning that the way I understood the world was based on a frame of reference and not on an objective reality. Now, that was profound. The Butter Lesson wasn’t about the butter.

I learned that objects, as in “a stick of butter,” are created and bound by culture. A frame of reference provides a convenient way to get people who live together to understand phenomena in the same way so that there is some regularity in how to deal with it, so that when we talk together about it we mean the same thing. “A stick of butter” is a really useful way to communicate with people you live with.

But out of context, it is useless.

Had I not been plucked from the warm oozy plot of my own culture, I never would have learned that my frame of reference was merely a cultural construct—useful, pleasing, convenient. But Truth, with a capital T, it was not.

This new understanding of the world, that it exists as a cultural construct rather than existing independently as hard-as-rock truth, prepared me for every international encounter since. Since my year in Zurich, I have spent forty years living and working abroad in Germany, France, China, India, and Guinea; I have negotiated contracts in a foreign language, volunteered in a German Sport Club, haggled over the price of vegetables in China, and organized professional development opportunities in Mumbai. I know that the way I grew up to expect the world to look and be can be very different from the world I am living and working in, and I can adjust. The return on investment in the Butter Lesson has been huge.

But learning, as any teacher knows, happens on an ascending helix…we revisit a problem again and again, on an ever-increasing scale of complexity, learning a little more about it each time. I have had to re-learn the Butter Lesson many times, and with each reiteration the learning goes just a bit deeper.

The first time there in Switzerland, though the lesson learned was big, coping with the difference—how to measure the butter—was easy. The situation was transactional and needed only mechanical tools, charts and scales, to succeed.

The last time I relearned the Butter Lesson, however, success wasn’t so easy. The situation was not transactional, did not deal with something as simple as translating ways to measure quantity. The situation where I needed to learn something new about the culture I was in dealt with deeply held human values. And that lesson knocked me on my derrière, where I stayed for a while before I got up again, ready to engage with the other.

And that story, how I recovered and brushed myself off, ready and willing to learn again, will be in another posting.

© Sarah Knightwriter

#context #culture #learning #frameofreference