Culture clash is the friction that arises between cultures when they take differing positions on a specific issue. To move beyond it requires acceptance and comprehension of all viewpoints, and eschewing the idea that one’s own is necessarily the right view for everyone.
In the relationships between hosts and immigrants, culture clash is a frequent occurrence, particularly when refugees and local populations interact without the help of linguistic, cultural, or social mediators. Anything can cause culture clash, including choices surrounding nutrition, lifestyle, healthcare, or the education of children.
Significant examples include: taking for granted that a refugee family will know how to act as part of a condominium fails to consider that there are no condominiums in refugee camps. One refugee told me:
They called us one evening and told us that the neighbors wanted to file a complaint about us because the kids were noisy. The kids are shut up in the house, how can they help it? I can’t say that my expectations have been satisfied… They [the neighbors] call Caritas, and Caritas comes to talk to us. I have a young son – every time I have to threaten him to keep him quiet. If he walks, it’s a problem.
Medical treatments have been another major source of culture clash. The main issue was that it was difficult to explain how the Italian national health service works to refugees, who often come with high expectations of receiving immediate care for any ailment.
Food proved to be another high friction area. For one mentor family and refugee family, who shared housing, the relationship between them broke down entirely when the refugee family expressed the desire to cook their own Eritrean dishes. The Italian family interpreted this as a critique of their hospitality:
At first I would cook, and I made good dishes [for us all]. Then they started to cook too, and had the things that they had brought with them. I tried one, but […] I nearly suffocated […]. They were offended. At that point they became sort of suspicious! I could sense it – before they had been happy to have me cook and make pasta for them.
My interview with the beneficiaries in this case revealed that the friction surrounding food was just the tip of a deeper cultural divide, caused by how hard it was to adapt, given their new circumstances:
We live with an older woman […]. Ever since we got here we have been dependent on her. We don’t have any freedom to do [anything], to live how we want in our own home, with our child.
Finally, culture clash also came up in connection with the geographic locations where people were resettled. Some of these were small residential areas, far from cities and with little public transportation.
Some of these small host communities had trouble handling the beneficiaries’ intolerance of the place, concluding that they were unappreciative of the efforts being made to welcome them and provide them with a social network. One Caritas leader described the difficulties experienced by one village of 600 people, when the two families it had taken in complained that the town was not well connected with larger cities:
They can’t see everything that surrounds them – all the love that’s around them. They just reject the place […] They don’t understand how beautiful it is that there’s this entire community here for them, that puts out for them personally, in the first person.
In some instances, clashes like these led beneficiaries to abandon the program immediately. In others, they stayed, but the trust relationship with their host communities was damaged, and they left at the end of the program. In a third group, culture clash was addressed in a positive way.The factors that allowed communities to address and resolve conflicts like these were chiefly connected with mediation: the stable involvement of a mediator, who intervenes not only when there are problems, and who, in addition to translating, is able to explain the other’s viewpoint to all parties involved. Another factor was having access to professionals to handle specific issues, such as lawyers, doctors, and psychologists.
