observe, analyze, generalize

This past weekend I attended the Power of Place festival at the Harbourfront centre (Toronto, Canada). A quick glance at the program reveals the wild variety of performers from all corners of the world. It is this culturally rich because it looks to attract the culturally diverse audience of the Toronto scene, the majority of which are immigrants which have no other place to go to express their pride for their heritage.

Walking among such a crowd can be overwhelming, but a couple of hours of this dose was sufficient to come up with a method for assimilating foreign culture:

• Observe: look around. There are always other people that seem to know what they are doing. Whether they know exactly how to eat a particular dish, how to dance at the sound of some rhythm or behave in a particular social setting, it is obvious they belong. They are likely the agents of culture, those who have brought a snippet of global culture to this place.
• Analyze: say you’re listening to a live concert, but much of what you hear is new. As most cultural manifestations, a performance such as this is a very complex aggregate of many simpler cultural expressions. An effort to decompose the performance into its fundamental parts will help you discover those that you can relate to. You may, for example, realize that the beats of percussion are powerful and inviting, with a very familiar sound. This discovery will give you an opportunity to study those agents that you have been observing in relation to this isolated sound and realize that to them it is the core driver for their dancing movements.
• Generalize: you have a different background and a very rich cultural heritage too. Imitation would be too easy. Better yet, your newly discovered relationship between beats and movement can be applied not only to the particular performance, but will likely help you do it again in new settings, whenever the same patterns reoccur. It may not be the same music or even the same genre, but the discovery of that special relationship will give you a new tool for enjoying culture in the first person.

Throughout the night, thousands of bodies of all colors, races and ages ended up dancing in a very uniform movement which I would be tempted to describe as trance if it wasn’t for the fact that every person was well aware of their surroundings and realized that for those couple of hours they had discovered home, among strangers. This place was amazingly familiar and yet completely new to most of them. This is the place where global culture is born.