Phillip McArthur, dean of the Faculty of Humanities, said increasing personal capacity to be culturally competent is needed to work effectively with others. BYUH professors shared doing so requires having an open mind, not relying on social media to learn and always seeking opportunities to be immersed in other cultures.
Amanda Ford of the Faculty of Intercultural Peacebuilding said the root of cultural acceptance is first understanding who one is individually. As a mother, Ford said she is helping her children understand they decide what their background will be. “My kids are half Asian since their father is Japanese, but they also grew up in Laie,” she explained.
Growing up, Ford said she understood she was half Dutch. Even though her father introduced her to the Dutch culture while she was young, it wasn’t until later she said she understood what it meant to her.
“Growing up in predominantly white areas, I was just identified as white, but I also had deep connection to my European roots,” Ford recalled. “That was when I realized it’s more important to learn about what makes [me, me].”
The gospel lineage
McArthur said, “Every time I encounter another human being, it is from a position of respect, but I always ask myself, what do they have to teach?”
He explained the effect culture shock sometimes has on people, who may “retreat into [their] own cultural baggage because [they] don’t know how to act.” He said if people allow themselves to adjust, they can gain an appreciation for that culture and also participate in it.
McArthur recalled his arrival in the Marshall Islands as a missionary. What shocked him the most, he said, was no one spoke unless a certain woman was around. He understood later the Marshallese are matrilineal, or rather, everything passes through the bloodline of women.
“For example, the land doesn’t belong to the man living on it, it was given to them through their mother or one of her relatives,” he explained. McArthur said some missionaries objected, saying their system needed to change for them to follow the gospel, but he soon realized gospel principles can fit into that lineage as well.
The illusion of social media
Brent Yergensen of the Faculty of Arts & Letters said social media is where people think they participate in public discourse because it creates a sense of self-righteousness. He added social media acts as a simulation since variables in a story are carefully chosen. The result, he explained, can be borderline propaganda. “It’s a scary way to interpret the world because [people] are so reliant on it psychologically.”
Yergensen stated people are often willing to go to the worst places to get information since anyone can publish anything for the sake of likes. He added an educated mind is one that puts aside such materialism for truth.
Ford explained learning about culture and accepting those from other cultures has always been important, but social media is not the best place to learn. “Social media allows [people] to think [they] know other cultures since [they] have multiple outlets to access that information,” she said.
Ford shared how her children have gotten into Korean pop music on TikTok. “In their mind, they believe they understand Korean culture because of that music.”
In contrast, she reminded students how they have access to cultures themselves at BYUH, where they “can really understand who they are and be open to as many cultures as possible. … It’s a miracle there are this many cultures in Laie.”
Even though she only spent one semester as a student at BYUH, Ford said she brought a love for mindfulness to her classes as a professor. She added understanding who people are comes from “seeing other people and being present with them.”
Stepping out
McArthur said the only way to understand one’s own culture better is to step out of it and learn to embrace other cultures because when one is living in their own culture, they’re “meshed and immersed in it and … not seeing things clearly.”
McArthur added learning about other cultures can give students tools and resources to make sense of their own culture. He compared stepping out of one’s own culture to learning a different language because appreciating one’s own sense of language comes when studying another one.
McArthur said he continues to be intrigued by different cultures, no matter where he goes, but added there is nothing like BYUH anywhere else in the world. “To me, this was a rich, fertile ground to explore not only culture, but how to gather them under the tent of the gospel without neglecting our diversity,” he said.
He was invited to give a formal oration for someone that recently passed away in a clan McArthur was adopted into, he said. “I’m sitting there on that Zoom meeting and listening to them talk and I’m still picking up things 40 years later,” he said.
McArthur said once someone has learned about another culture, they never finish. “I’m always still finding little-known things I didn’t understand previously, even in my own culture,” he said.
Ford added students don’t need to be peacebuilding majors to learn the value of cultural acceptance. “There’s opportunities every day to do so,” she said.