M. Bennett’s model of foreign culture

Аннотация

The article describes the development of a person's attitude towards other cultures through six linear stages (three ethnocentric (exclusive) stages: Denial, Defence, and Minimisation—in which a person's own culture is the measure of all things, and three ethnorelative (inclusive) stages: Acceptance, Adaptation, and Integration—in which a person understands and values other cultural points of view as equal to his or her own. Key words: sensitivity, Bennet Scale, ethnocentric stages. The Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) created by Milton J. Bennett is a grounded theory based on constructivist perception and communication theory. It assumes that the experience of reality is constructed through perception, and that more complex perceptual categories yield more complex (sophisticated) experience. Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, a framework that is used internationally to guide the design and assessment of training programs in intercultural communication and competence. Bennett is an adjunct professor of intercultural studies at the University of Milano Bicocca in Italy, and he was formerly a tenured professor at Portland State University, where he created the institution’s graduate program in intercultural communication. He is the author of Basic Concepts of Intercultural Communication: Paradigms, Principles, and Practices, co-editor and contributor to The Handbook of Intercultural Training, and co-author, with Edward Stewart, of the revised edition of American Cultural Patterns: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Bennett is also a reviewer for the International Journal of Intercultural Relations and Journal of Intercultural Education, and the author of many articles on intercultural research and practical Since the 1960s, concerns about equity and diversity have mostly been associated with the encouragement and enforcement of civil rights—in other words, they’ve been political and legal issues. More recently, a lot of attention has also been given to prejudice-reduction and its extensions, such as implicit bias or microaggressions. I’ve 37 been working with a less well-known approach to equity and diversity that also began in the 60s intercultural communication. Intercultural communication is concerned with how we can understand and be respectful of differences in worldview, by which I mean the different ways we perceive and experience the world. People tend to think of this idea in terms of national cultures like French or Japanese, but it is equally applicable to cultural groups that are defined by ethnicity—which may or may not be associated with socalled “racial” differences— and gender, social status, age, ability, sexual orientation, or other group criteria. This illustration of Milton Bennett's Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (here in after referred to as DMIS), or the “Bennett Scale,” describes the standard ways in which people experience, interpret, and interact across cultural difference. Milton Bennett’s Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, sometimes called the “Bennett Scale” describes the common ways in which people experience, interpret, and interact across cultural difference. Presented as a developmental continuum that progresses from ethnocentric (denial, defensiveness, and minimization) to ethnorelative worldviews (acceptance, adaptation, and integration), the model has been widely used as an educational tool to help people progress toward a deeper understanding of cross-cultural difference. Image republished with permission from the Intercultural Development Research Institute. The DMIS is built on the observation that our perception of cultural “otherness” is also a skill that has to be learned. All of us are born into the default condition of ethnocentrism, where we see our own group as natural and complex and other groups as unnatural and simple. At the beginning of the continuum of development—the stage I call Denial—people do not discern cultural otherness at all; they may have a vague sense that something is different, but it’s not something that is worthy of their conscious notice. When interacting with people at the Denial stage, members of other groups may feel as if they are invisible—at least in terms of their distinctive cultural attributes, but possibly even as human beings. People who are socially and culturally isolated, whether it is through circumstance or choice, may not be motivated to move beyond Denial. 38 Consequently, they may seem to be willfully ignorant of equality or inclusion issues that seem obvious to people with more experience and a greater understanding of cultural differences. People at the Denial stage genuinely just do not get it. Movement along the continuum occurs when we need to interact with members of other cultural groups in more sophisticated ways. First, Denial gives way to Defense, where people start to see and discriminate cultural otherness, but only in fairly simplistic and stere