Book Review:
BRIDGING CULTURAL CONFLICTS: A New Approach For A Changing World

 By Michelle LeBaron

Jossey Bass, 2003
[Reviewed by Peter S. Adler]

          I need to make two disclaimers. First, I know and like Michelle LeBaron so I am probably not the right person to offer an objective review of her new book, Bridging Cultural Conflicts. For that reason, I’m also going to refer to her as “Michelle” rather than Dr. or Ms. LeBaron or just LeBaron. Second, I have to admit that I frequently find myself annoyed and heading for the exit when mediator discussions turn in earnest to “culture.” I’m not alone in this.

          I often see other people yawning, shuffling papers, reading newspapers, inspecting fingernails, or scrolling through their Palm Pilots when culture becomes the topic of the moment at ACR meetings. For the record, I stand (or more properly, sit) with them. Culture is one of those rarified and reified concepts that certain people use as an explanatory political club or as a self-evident and self-defining philosophical truth. If, by chance, you don’t understand what they are talking about and ask a question, or worse, if you happen to disagree with them, you will be viewed as a moral shrimp. As I know it, the word “reify” means to regard something abstract as if it were a material or concrete thing. The culture-vultures among us mediators do this all the time. They thrive on keeping the idea of culture abstract, mysterious, and bloodless.

          Should you want to dig deeper into the opaque relationship of culture and mediation, you need to boot up your computer and start doing some searches. Google says there are 63,800,000 web references to the word “culture.” Factoring out those that probably deal with yogurt making, pearl cultivation, and staphylococcus samples, it is still a very big number. Now, if you plug in the word “mediator,” you will have instant access to another 1,390,000 references (a ratio of 45:1). (Both searches, by the way, take exactly 0.14 seconds.) Finally, if you query on the words “mediation and culture” you will come up with a paltry 554,000 references. One of those -- the very best of them I suspect -- will be Michelle’s book.

          Bridging Cultural Conflicts is not, strictly speaking, a mediation book. It is something bigger and better. What Michelle has created is an intellectual field manual for cross-cultural encounters regardless of whether those moments happen at the negotiating table, on a tour in the Peace Corps or Marine Corps, or on a working trip to Japan or Costa Rica. Culture has a myriad of meanings, many of which are written in academic gobbledygook and some of which are downright goofy. But culture has a core meaning that is really quite simple: it’s the specific way we do things around here regardless of whether the here is an ethnic group, an organization, or a political economy. Michelle understands this and that is the joy and beauty of her new book.

          The mechanisms she uses to explicate all this are simple. First, there are the concepts she points us to, many but not all of which derive from mediation theory. She talks about the formation of cultural identity; the power of multiple perspectives; and the many ways people seem to bridge smaller and larger cultural divides. At core, though, is her notion of “cultural fluency.” Effectively dealing with culture (or conflict) requires an internalized familiarity that can only be acquired by direct experience. Fluency, I suspect, actually means being reasonably “comfortable” in your own skin and with other people’s skins even when you are in the middle of a big social, psychological, or cross-cultural mess. What I like so very much about Michelle’s book is that culture is de-reified and brought down to its basics: it’s the differences in the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the time we keep, the things we prize and make choices about, and the way we like interacting with others. And these emerge in her stories and the personal experiences she uses throughout the book. 

          As mediators, most of us work hard to demystify stubborn conflicts. It is not simply the deconstruction of conflict into component parts (emotions, interests, bargaining zones, agreements in principle, etc.) but the creation, when it all comes together, of something new and different. What Michelle shows us is that the cross-cultural learning moment is the same. Quite suddenly we are up against the reality of real differences that cannot be arbitrarily separated, smoothed over, meshed together, or overcome with well-crafted ambiguities. And yet, in our best moments, whether the traction point is cultural or conflictual, we see third possibilities created. The Latin phrase for this is “tertium quid” – that unknown and indefinite thing that is related in some way to two known or definite things, but distinct from both.

          Michelle LeBaron’s book is a huge and open portal into the mysterious world of culture and conflict. Buy it and read it. Better yet, keep it with you so it is close at hand the next time you are trapped in a complex, over-bearing culture discussion and the exit is just a few too many rows away.

Peter S. Adler is Director of The Keystone Center for Science and Public Policy,
a past president of SPIDR,  and a member in more or less good standing of ACR.