CROSS-CULTURAL COMPLEXITIES
LSU art historian examining cultural
differences from ages and places East to West

LSU School of Art Associate Professor Fredrikke Scollard has spent much of her life in Asia. She spent 20 years following her grandparents and parents through Hong Kong, Thailand, and China. It was not until her 15th year in Hong Kong, though, that her experiences made her understand cultural differences in a new, deeper way.

While working on her doctoral degree at the University of Hong Kong, Scollard received an invitation to have Christmas dinner with a professor’s family. However, she declined because she had already accepted another invitation—which would seem like a common practice to most of us in America. By declining, she had inadvertently insulted her professor because, by Chinese custom, the teacher should be considered more important and should take priority over other invitations, regardless of the order received. After that experience, Scollard had a renewed commitment to cross-cultural studies and the importance they have in our world.

“To collaborate with other countries, cross-cultural studies are of the essence. Like genes on a chromosome, cultures involve human behaviors, which may be combined in an infinite number of ways,” says Scollard. “People often assume that their behaviors are natural and look for the same patterns in other cultures becoming confused when they fail to find the familiar. Finding additional, often unexpected, factors to explain the difference between cultures is the major part of cross-cultural studies.”

Scollard says most Americans, including our diplomatic corps, assume China is deficient in human rights. This assumption involves a lack of understanding of Confucian ideas traditionally institutionalized in China. A portion of these ideas include the idea of rites, which are rules for relationships and duties to others. These rites are the foil to what Americans know as rights. In each relationship, by observing rites properly, people impart to each other their human rights. Americans may overlook Chinese morality, even though it is thoroughly discussed in Chinese literature, because it is not seated in the Church as is often expected in the West. Instead, morality finds its home in government ideally. Political meetings in America are usually for promoting a certain candidate or party policy. In China, however, the political meetings everyone has to attend are all prefaced by the statement, “This political meeting is for the purpose of raising and maintaining a high standard of morality.”

Scollard focuses on examining art and literature cross-culturally from many time periods in China and the West, which allows her to see how objects and ideas are transported through cultures and history. Her research also includes Shiwan provincial pottery; exchanges on the Silk Road, an ancient trade route across Asia; political expression in Chinese landscape painting; and new methods of teaching interdisciplinary, multicultural, and collective research.

Scollard’s work can also be applied to understanding the different education and business customs of different societies. Understanding the education aims of other cultures could make it easier to appreciate an international student’s strengths and to help ease the transition from one education structure to another.

Cross-cultural studies can take time, and the results can be slow to show themselves outwardly. But, every opportunity for study brings us closer to a better understanding of countries abroad.

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from Winter 2006 Issue