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245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 98 98 How Culture Affects Mission ture is the best way to cultivate the sense of belonging and identification that is so crucial to effective communication. 12 If missionaries have bonded with a culture, they will do better at sorting through thorny issues that a shallow sense of cultural relativity would cause them to ignore. To aid the bonding process, the Brewsters urged new missionaries to consider living for a time in the home of a family of their host culture. What do new missionaries need to learn about a culture? There is no detailed universal checklist although the ability to communicate is at the top. After that, individual items vary from culture to culture. For example, knowing how to ride subways would be important in Caracas, Venezuela, where there is a subway system; it would not be important in Dakar, Senegal, where there are no subways. The list of what one needs to learn will also vary depending on how closely the missionary’s mother culture is related to the target culture. A Korean working in an Asian creative access area would not need to learn to eat with chopsticks; a European going to the same area would likely not have that skill and would need to acquire it. A good place into which to pour boundless curiosity is a list of cultural universals (see sidebar “Cultural Universals”). While such lists often have a handful of comprehensive categories, functionalist George Murdock listed 70 things he thought were cultural universals, including age grading, division of labor, property rights, status differences, body adornment, courtship, incest taboos, cleanliness training, personal names, gestures, hospitality, greetings, and jokes. Because learning a culture is a lifelong process, there is no master checklist that will ever be marked as completed. 3. Usefulness of Short-term Workers Cultural anthropology will enable global mission strategists to make the best use of short-term mission teams and workers and to maximize the long-term impact of the experience upon team members themselves. Leaders on the receiving end as well as the participants themselves should be cognizant of cultural issues relating to the effective use of the short-term workers. Anthropological insights will help short-term mission teams with issues of communication, expectations, control, finances, gift-giving, and gender interaction as well as construction techniques and medical practices unique to their host culture. Both goers and receivers need to be aware of and at least somewhat sensitive to each other’s cultures. Form and Function One anthropological concept helpful in the work of Christian mission is the distinction made between form and function. Form refers to the distinguishable characteristics of an object, sound, or custom. Function is the meaning or significance that those physical characteristics communicate in a given
245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 99 context. For example, to the Christian, the Cross is a form whose function is to evoke reflection about Christ’s death. Jehovah’s Witnesses argue that Christ died on an upright pole or stake rather than on a cross. In this case, the function is the same (both the cross and the stake were instruments of execution), but the form is different. Sometimes form and function are closely related, sometimes not. For example, the relation between the form and function of a Styrofoam drinking cup is very obvious. Other relationships between form and function are not always so obvious, with many having been subjectively chosen, as is the case with the trademarked swoosh logo of the Nike company. Although that form or design is widely recognized, its relationship to the function it performs has been arbitrarily assigned. There is nothing inherent about the swoosh drawing that says “Nike” or even “footwear.” The different functions or meanings assigned to the same form can evoke different reactions in people of different cultures. For example, the hand gesture that signals “OK” or “superb” in the U.S.A. and Great Britain has vulgar and offensive meanings in Brazil and Russia. In southern Europe and Japan, that very same circle made with the thumb and forefinger means “zero.” The form of the gesture is the same in all three cases, but the meaning or function varies greatly, producing very different reactions in different contexts. In many cultures, nodding one’s head up and down is a nonverbal way of saying “yes.” In Slavic countries like Bulgaria, a similar up and down head movement means “no.” In some cultures, “picking up the check” (i.e., paying for someone’s meal at a restaurant) is a magnanimous signal that says “I’m taking care of you.” In some southern European cultures, the most important person at a table must never be the one to pay the tab. How does a guest signal to the host that food at a meal has been good? In some cultures, the form of the signal is a completely empty plate. In Armenian culture, an empty plate signals that the quantity was insufficient. People in that culture must leave some food on their plates to signal that there was enough for them to be completely satisfied. Do Missionaries Destroy Culture? How Culture Affects Mission 99 Some early cultural anthropologists such as Paul Erhard Eylmann claimed that missionaries were destructive to culture. They could point to things like the tragic burning of the Maya libraries in 1562 by Spanish priest Diego de Landa. They could point to the treatment a century ago of Native Americans in some mission boarding schools where American Indian children were forbidden to use their mother tongue. They could point to the imposition of
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