When culture stops being a border

For most of my life, crossing borders has felt natural to me, perhaps because I have always been fascinated by foreign languages and by people whose lives were shaped somewhere different from mine, and over the last twenty years I have travelled, lived and worked outside Italy, moving through places where the language, habits and unwritten rules were not necessarily the ones I grew up with, learning each time that entering another country means much more than learning how people greet each other, what they eat or which language they speak.

What has always interested me most was never simply discovering how they do things somewhere else, but understanding the people I met and finding that point where nationality, language and cultural background become less important and two individuals can simply meet.

For a long time I would have called this intercultural curiosity, but after studying the subject more deeply and, especially, after experiencing it through my work as a mentor, I discovered another concept that describes it better: transculturality.

WHEN CULTURES STOP BEING BOXES

The difference may initially sound academic, but it changed the way I understand culture because interculturality tends to begin with the idea of different cultures meeting each other, with my culture on one side and yours on the other and a space between us where we try to communicate, understand our differences and find some common ground, while transculturality asks us to question whether those borders are really as clear as we imagine them to be.

In a world shaped by migration, international careers, mixed families, travel and generations growing up between different countries and cultural references, how many of us can really be explained through one culture alone?

I am Italian and being Italian certainly tells you something about me, but it does not tell you about the countries I have lived in, the languages I speak, the people who have influenced me, the environments in which I have worked, the parts of my original culture that I have questioned over the years or the values I have consciously decided to keep. Culture is part of my identity, but it cannot explain the whole person, just as knowing somebody else's nationality can never tell me the whole story of who they are.

This became much more concrete when, after completing my certification as an Intercultural Coach in 2023, I started volunteering as a mentor with the Swiss Red Cross in Zurich through the Perspektive Arbeit programme, supporting adults with refugee status who were looking for work or trying to find a professional direction in Switzerland.

I entered this experience believing that my international background, my knowledge of foreign languages and my natural curiosity about other cultures would help me, and they certainly did, although not always in the ways I expected, because working with people who had grown up in cultural, social and economic realities very different from mine also made me aware of how easily curiosity about another culture can quietly become an assumption about another person.

We may believe we are being culturally sensitive when we learn that someone comes from Afghanistan, Syria, Eritrea, Ukraine or any other country and start gathering information about their culture, religion, family structures or communication style, and some of that knowledge can certainly help us understand the context in which a person has lived, but it can also become another box if we are not careful.

The moment I believe I understand someone because I understand something about their culture, I have stopped being curious about the person sitting in front of me.

THE COURAGE NOT TO UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING

This is one of the ideas behind transcultural competence that stayed with me most strongly while researching the subject, because the goal is not to become an expert in every culture we might encounter, something that would be impossible anyway, but to develop the ability to meet what we do not know without immediately forcing it into something we already understand.

There is a thought I came across during my research that has remained with me ever since: understanding what is foreign requires interest, patience and commitment, but at some point we also have to be willing to let what is unfamiliar remain unfamiliar and admit that we cannot understand everything.

I find this particularly powerful because we like understanding, and understanding gives us a sense of control, so when someone behaves in a way we would not, communicates differently or makes a choice that seems irrational according to our own references, our mind immediately searches for an explanation and culture can very easily become that explanation.

He behaves this way because he comes from that culture. She communicates like this because women from that country are different. Family is more important to them. They don't understand how things work here.

These explanations can sound informed, reasonable and even compassionate while still preventing us from asking a much more interesting question: who is this person?

Not the representative of a country, a religion or an ethnic group, not “the refugee”, “the migrant”, “the expat” or “the foreigner”, but the individual sitting in front of us with a personality, a history, relationships, contradictions, preferences, fears and experiences that no cultural handbook could ever completely predict.

This is why transcultural competence requires, in my view, a strange combination of knowledge and humility, because we need enough knowledge to recognise that our own way of seeing the world is not universal and enough humility to understand that information about somebody else's culture does not automatically give us the right tools to interpret that person.

WHAT HAPPENS IN THE SPACE BETWEEN US

Communication makes this even more interesting. Some cultural environments tend towards direct communication, where much of the meaning is contained in the words themselves, while others rely more heavily on relationships, context, hierarchy, tone, silence and non-verbal signals, so if you have spent your life in an environment where saying exactly what you mean is considered honest and efficient, someone who communicates indirectly may appear evasive, while to someone who comes from a context where maintaining harmony and respecting social roles are particularly important, the same directness may feel aggressive rather than honest.

Neither person necessarily intends what the other perceives, because the misunderstanding is often created somewhere in the space between them.

In mentoring, this meant learning to pay more attention to pauses, body language, hesitation and the words someone repeatedly chose, especially when we were communicating in a language that was not their first language, but it also meant paraphrasing more often, checking whether what I had understood was actually what the other person intended and, most importantly, observing my own reactions before treating them as facts about the person in front of me.

Because transcultural competence is not only about understanding someone else; a large part of it is understanding ourselves.

THE CULTURE WE DON’T REALISE WE CARRY

We tend to notice culture very clearly when it belongs to somebody else, while our own culture often feels simply like reality, which means that our ideas about professionalism, punctuality, independence, ambition, family, authority, success, privacy and even what constitutes a good conversation can feel so obvious that we forget they were shaped somewhere too.

This is where self-reflection became one of the most important parts of my mentoring experience, because when I find myself thinking that somebody is being too passive, too indirect, too emotional, not ambitious enough or insufficiently independent, I have a choice between interpreting that reaction as information about the other person or becoming curious about what it says about me.

What am I measuring this person against, where did I learn that this is the correct way to behave, and would I interpret exactly the same behaviour in the same way if it came from someone whose background looked more like mine?

The uncomfortable part of cultural awareness is discovering that prejudice does not always announce itself as prejudice; sometimes it sounds perfectly reasonable inside our own heads.

There is another lesson that became important to me through mentoring people who had experienced migration, instability and very different levels of access to opportunities, and that is the thin line between supporting someone and trying to rescue them.

When we see the barriers in front of another person, especially when those barriers include financial insecurity, difficulty finding work, language limitations or the frustration of navigating an unfamiliar system, the instinct can be to remove as many of those barriers as possible, but helping someone is not the same as taking over their process.

A mentor can provide information, ask questions, clarify possibilities and help someone recognise resources that may have become invisible to them, while the person on the other side of the conversation must remain the author of their own decisions, because meeting another person as an equal sometimes requires doing less rather than more, listening before interpreting, asking before assuming and accepting that another person's solution does not need to look like ours in order to be valid.

BEYOND CULTURE

The more I explored transculturality, the less it became a subject only about migration and the more it became a way of looking at human relationships in general, because every person we meet comes with a history we cannot immediately see and culture is only one part of that history, alongside personality, family, education, relationships, losses, opportunities, choices and experiences.

We will never know all of it, and we do not need to.

What we can do is become more aware of the lenses through which we are looking, learn about differences without turning those differences into definitions, acknowledge culture without making it a cage and become more comfortable with the fact that another person's world may never completely make sense from inside our own.

For me, this is where transculturality becomes truly transformative, because it is not primarily about knowing more facts about other cultures but about becoming less certain that our own way of seeing things is the obvious one, and when that certainty becomes a little softer, there is finally more space for curiosity.

The foreigner becomes a person, the difference becomes a conversation, and the border between us becomes much less important than the encounter itself.

References and further reading

Domenig, Dagmar (2007). Transkulturelle Kompetenz. Lehrbuch für die Pflege-, Gesundheits- und Sozialberufe, 2nd edition. Bern: Verlag Hans Huber, Hogrefe AG.

Hofstede, Geert & Hofstede, Gert Jan (2009). Lokales Denken, globales Handeln, 4th edition. Munich: dtv Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag.

Rosinski, Philippe (2003). Coaching Across Cultures: New Tools for Leveraging National, Corporate and Professional Differences. London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing.

Australian Multicultural Foundation / Robert Bean Consulting (2010). Managing Cultural Diversity: Training Program Resource Manual. Carlton South, Victoria.