When working on an international project or multidisciplinary teams, it is very important to understand the ideologies and beliefs of those you are working for and with. In the eyes of others you do not know what can be construed as ignorance or apathy towards an entire culture’s belief system. This can be a big sign of disrespect and will cause you many problems on the job. Not only does it complicate working conditions, it can also affect the solution. As Dr. Nolan exemplified, if the team had proposed the USAID project without knowing about the practices and values of the FulBe herders. Since Grayzel noted why certain aspects of their society did not rationally makes sense economically. Upon further investigation, Grayzel saw that these discrepancies were due to their independent exercise of beauty, intelligence, and wealth. Another practice of the FulBe herders is emotional satisfaction.
Even outside of the professional work environment, I see actually studying and knowing something about a culture before visiting it (or at least being especially sensitive) is incredibly important for positive, constructive interactions. One example that had nothing to do with a project was the first small story - the young man's response did not include him thinking about how he maybe was asking the wrong thing, and trying to be sensitive in asking other questions to get the information he was looking for, but was based on an assumption that the person in front of him was bieng rude, sarcastic, or was just plain ignorant. These kinds of interactions are all too common among tourists visiting other cultures.
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I agree that it can be disrespectful not knowing about the other cultures of the people you are working with. If you don't know anything abouth their culture or how they work, something little could be said, but it could mean something completely different in another culture. When working with inter cultural teams, we should try to find out as much about the cultures we will be working with as we can to prevent these type of issues. More work can be done if these issues don't arise and have to be resolved
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When you say that we need to understand the ideologies of other cultures, I hope you mean that we need to know them so that we can set them aside and make sure we don’t insult the other culture. There is definitely a need, though, to know as much about the culture we are working with in order to advance and to not create tensions between cultures. ENGR 103
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