Here v. There: Confusion in the Context

One thing I love about travelling is discovering things I never even knew existed. There are so many things we expect to experience when we go somewhere new, but it is the things we don’t expect that make us gasp, eyes open wide in wonder, and say, “That’s SO cool!” We think we have a pretty good idea about the world that surrounds us, but then there is that new thing that we had never even dreamt of and our ideas about the world are shattered once again into beautiful prisms of color and diversity.

For example, before coming to Indonesia and studying Bahasa Indonesia, I never knew there was such a thing as high- and low-context cultures. I suppose I assumed that we were all saying the same kinds of things, just with different words. But I am discovering in Indonesia that the number of words and the amount of information given in a conversation is very much based on whether we are communicating in a high- or low-context culture.

In a low-context culture, such as the cultures shared by most English speakers, we rely less on the context of our conversation and more on the words we actually say. Context, of course, is still a very important element in communication, but we are more explicit through our words about what we want to express.

In a high-context culture, on the other hand, context plays a HUGE role in what is being communicated. Speakers leave a lot of information out of their actual words because it is already assumed based on the context in which the conversation is taking place.

Although this kind of cultural influence on how we use language varies by individual and region, roughly speaking Indonesian culture is high-context, whereas American is low-context.

Oftentimes when I am asked questions about America, I am not asked, “What do you do in America?” Instead I am asked, “If there?” It took me many times asking, “If where?” before I realized that almost always I am being asked a question about America.

A little “here” v. “there” cultural exchange. Indonesians often eat avocados with sugar, so fellow PCV, Cait, and I introduced my Batu host family to the glory that is guacamole. It went over mostly well.

This became especially clear when I was still staying with my host family in Batu. My little four-year-old host nephew (pictured above) was babbling on in his own mix of Javanese and Indonesian (totally indecipherable to me), and suddenly, pointing far off into the distance, says, “America di sana!”or “America’s there!” It then became the game of the afternoon for me to ask, “Where’s America?” at which he would gleefully point and call out, “There!” And, in its own way, that kind of makes sense. In Indonesia we are “here,” therefore, America must be “there”.

Of course this can cause communication problems and sometimes frustration. As a low-context speaker trying to navigate a new language in a high-context setting, I am often confused. Many, many times I will be having a conversation and understanding the words quite well, but still have no idea what people are talking about. Often this is interpreted by my Indonesian conversation partners as not understanding the vocabulary, so they kindly translate things into English. But I still don’t understand. I have to ask many questions and make it clear that whoever I am talking to needs to be more specific before I can understand. And, slowly, I am learning to pick up more and more of the context clues within our conversations.

Yes, sometimes it is frustrating, but it is also wonderful and amazing. This has been such a great way to see how culture and language are inseparably intertwined. For everything that links us together as members of the human race, we are also each deeply influenced by our own culture. Culture impacts everything: history, tradition, education, language, societal norms. But even more exciting than discovering our differences is discovering that, after some confusion and with a lot of patience on all sides, we can communicate meaningfully. We can be so much ourselves with our own cultural characteristics and quirks, but still learn from one another. And that, my friends, is pretty darn cool.