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The concept of privacy, like many other concepts, changes across cultures.

It is interesting to understand how the difference in the perception of privacy affects interactions between individuals of different cultures.

I practice Linguistic Empathy and I expect you to do the same. Please bear with me if my English is not perfect.

Here in Jakarta, where I am still living until tomorrow :-), my pembantu (maid) Ani shares my daily routine.

She knows there are three reasons that push me to leave home: I hang around with friends, I go and give an intercultural training, or I go to my beloved Roberto. She can always understand where I am about to go. Sometimes it’s me who tells her, to better organise the day.

A couple of days ago I did something that did not fit into the above schema. I went out in the morning, on foot, and told her I would be back very soon.

I did not ask her if there was anything I needed to buy, like I always do whenever I know I’ll pass by a supermarket, and I did not tell her were I was going.

I was going to a travel agency close to my place, and I knew I would have been back in no time.

The agency did not solve my problem, though, so in the afternoon I had to go to another one.

When my taxi arrived, Ani could not control herself any more. She asked me “WHERE DO YOU GO?”.

She made me smile. If I did not know Indonesian culture and were not used to bend in front of what in my mind are complete oddities, I would have gotten angry. What does she care about where I go? This is my business!

The point, however, is that here “one’s business” is different from “one’s business” in my Italian-Western culture, which is very strict on what can be asked and what not.

For example, the saying “you don’t ask a lady’s age” does not exist at all in Indonesia. Once I was joking with a taxi driver, and told him I don’t speak good Bahasa because I am too old to learn a new language. He laughed out loud and asked me how old I am! I obviously told him.

This free inquiring among Indonesians also reflects in the kind of sharing they choose to have. When someone tells you about his health problems, maybe to let you know that he can’t go to the office or to a party, he does not spare details. Sentences like “I cannot come because my period this month is absolutely abundant” or “I’ll be late today, I have a terrible attack of diarrhea” are daily routine.

 

 

Considering the deep intimacy, one would tend to think that Indonesians also favour a certain physical contact, but it is not so.

It is generally considered very inappropriate to invade people’s personal space or to touch them.

It was not like this in Palestine. I remember well that whenever I withdrew money from an ATM in the streets of Jerusalem, I could feel on my neck the breath of the person behind me in line. My Western mind immediately thought their intention was to steal my personal code, but it was not like that. Palestinians are among the most honest persons I have ever met, and I could personally check (when I was third or fourth in line) that it was not the code that was necessarily spied upon. It simply is like that.

I recently read an absolutely interesting article about privacy. I was fascinated by the fact that the concept of privacy is relatively new and was born and developed in the Western world.

As with many other aspects, I think it is important to reflect on how we need to manage a different concept of privacy when we change culture.

I had no problems in hugging my maid Ani the first time I left to Italy after living in Jakarta for a while. The shock I saw in her eyes made me understand that I had done something highly inappropriate.

Now that I am about to leave Jakarta, I realize how much I’ll miss the challenges of the daily contact with such a different culture. For as demanding and puzzling interacting with another culture can sometime be, it is one of the most fascinating situations I have ever faced in my life.