Before I am going deep into this concept, I would like to mention why I bother writing and sharing this one. Four days ago, my housemate visited my room and brought some snacks from her hometown, variants of seafood paste and seafood crackers; absolutely my favorite. Shortly, we found ourselves talking about things we miss from our hometown and things we find different from where we at right now. We both have been here for about five years yet there are many things that we still find peculiar especially about the food and the custom. After that conversation, I realized we were talking beyond the "conscious culture" and into the " unconscious culture". Hence why, I wanted to share this concept through the topic my housemate and I were talking about : Food and Marriage. I am hoping we can have some discussion about these two in the comment section.

The concept of Cultural Iceberg was first developed by Edward T Hall in 1976. He argued that culture is like an iceberg. Hall meant to say that there are more than just visible aspect of culture that we know of but there are larger portion under the surface. When we examine a culture commonly we talk about the food, the language, dress, literature and arts. These are which according to Hall is categorized in the "conscious culture" and makes up only 10% of the culture whilst 90% remains on the unconscious realm.

10 % conscious vs 90% unconscious

The 10% conscious culture according to Hall is objective knowledge(something tangible), easily changed, conscious and explicitly learned e.g. (food, arts, dress, language, music, greetings).

Meanwhile.............

The 90% which is something called the " unconscious culture" is subjective knowledge (values and thoughts), difficult to change, implicitly learned e.g. (dating, child-rearing, concepts of time, justice, religion, authority, friendship, social status, communication, body language, work ethic, etc).

These two are the cultural component proposed by Hall which can help us navigate ourselves through the global market today. This leads us to another question, Why should you know this?

Why should you bother to care?

These days, higher chance is we are not only communicating with people from our hometown. We are now part of a global ecosystem which consist of people from different culture and society. Understanding some of the 90% aspects of the culture may help minimize misunderstanding during our interaction.

A good example is ways of communication. For instance, coming from East Java, I am accustomed to people talking directly and expresses themselves freely meanwhile living in Central Java there are much more indirect communication and I have to tone down my directness and refrain myself to express my emotions spontaneously.

Despite that I have been living in this place for 5 years, I am still doing some cultural slip ups; as in talking too loud (though it's normal for my standard and how I grew up). However, whenever I interact with people from here, I try my best to adjust to their ways of communicating.

Hence why, I think it's important for many of us to look into the cultural iceberg especially when we have diverse team, living globally and interacting at a global scale.

While we munched our crackers, our conversation got to be more personal. We started talking about dating and marriage. For this aspect, Elia contributed a lot in telling me the differences.

She is currently dating a local which made her aware of the differences in marriage ideals and views. Previously, she had no issue as she was dating someone from the same island. Now, she found some potential future problems.

Elia mentioned that where she lives, a marriage has to be grand. It is one of those " big fat wedding" type ceremony. Whilst according to Elia's colleagues and her current boyfriend, it should be humble and simple. Furthermore, in terms of gender roles there is quite a distinction. Where she lives, woman is supposed to stay home while the husband work. Meanwhile in Central Java, majority of the woman works, following more modern gender roles. This as per Elia's colleagues who are locals. I can see why this is the case as Central Java is the hub of education where majority of its people are university graduates which led to being career oriented male or female. However culturally, I don't really know if that is the actual case given the province is still following a monarchy system. So, this could be only within the younger generation.

Now, When it comes to the idea of nurturing and building the marriage, housing is very important in Elia's culture. A man needs to have a house before he even gets to marry a girl. Growing up in that kind of culture, Elia also sets the same standard for those who date her, a house before marriage. In contrast to her colleagues, this was considered as outrageous demands. Most of her colleague rent a place and didn't even bother to have a mortgage. So this caused a slight concern for her as she wished to have a boyfriend who own a house before marriage.

Why do they need to have a house?

There could be some reasons but from our collective observations, first it is because after married, the bride and groom has to live on their own not with their inlaws. Second,Houses in East-java represent its owner and the family; it is also part of the family's pride to have a great house. The house are normally big, with a small garden, high fenced, a modern architecture with plenty marble rocks as the decoration or variants of rocks. Meanwhile in Central Java houses are dominated by woods instead of stones. We also concluded that in East-Java culture, house is #1 priority and we have never met anyone without a house. People that we know of either have it through a mortgage or some sort of inheritance. Hence why, a house is a necessity especially after marriage.

Personally, this was all something interesting to learn. I understand that this was too short to unpack a culture, let alone discussing about food and marriage. I would say, I don't even touch a 10% of cultural ideas of both. However, I have tried in my best ability to summarize my conversation with my housemate in hope someone might share the idea of marriage or even food differences especially when you live in different culture than yours. If you have made it this far, thank you so much. I leave some resources where you can read more on this topic and reflect as to why is it really important to know the cultural iceberg.