Acceptance

One common thread that runs through the sojourner experience is that acceptance of cultural difference is an essential ingredient of successful cultural learning. The way that Paul (above) puts it, is: 'When you go somewhere, the way that people do things is simply the way people do things.' This fundamentally neutral stance towards cultural difference – seeing other people's perceptual realities as valid – is the core of acceptance. As used in this model, acceptance is defined as perceiving as valid alternative interpretations of the cultural phenomena that one experiences. Stated as a definition or an ideal, acceptance of cultural difference is neither abstract nor difficult. But acceptance as an ideal and acceptance as a response to intercultural challenge are two different things. While a philosophical commitment to acceptance may be desirable it does not guarantee an accepting response to actual experiences. As we will see, while most sojourners accept many explicit elements of cultural difference, deeper acceptance is much rarer.

Acceptance implies an ability to relativize an experience – to look at the contextual reasons that influence one's experience of it. This often leads to a perceptual decentering as standards for judging a given phenomenon shifts away from oneself and moves to larger frames of reference. At the level of explicit difference one may recognize that, for example, a local dish seems unpleasant because one is not used to particular ingredients.