A wish to know something in the real, to get behind the thin varnish of tourism, to reach the high degree of cultural immersion is an aspiration and a noble one at that. It is an expedition to observe the world not as set of things to be consumed, but the multifaceted weave of the human lives, histories and beliefs to be discerned. The methodology of this pursuit however cannot be as lax as visiting local restaurants and learning some greetings. The more advanced methods of deep cultural immersion do not form a checklist of actions, but a systematic process of perception, a more basic rewiring of the way one sees, hears, Rubner, and communicates. It is the art that requires tolerance, modesty, and most importantly, the ability to break down who you are before you can go to the extent of trying to comprehend who somebody is. But it does not start by gazing outward, at the bright, crowded passageways of the city street, of a place such as Lahore, but as a silent and steady movement inward, to chart the lens through which you glimpse the world itself; start by writing about that. And it is this process of self-excavation, followed by which in many cases sorely distresses, which is the source of all real knowledge.
This is the most important and most important technique in this higher-level practice-radical self-deconstruction. We are made in a culture which introduces itself to us, not as a culture, but as the given mode of the reality. Our pre-conception of time, politeness, family, logic and the community do not present a sense of regional customs, but of universal truth. To make an effort to grasp an alternate culture without having, first of all, to translate these unconscious inclinations into conscious content is to attempt to enjoy a delicate painting through distinctly colored sunglasses. You will observe something, and you will not observe it as it is; you will merely be looking at a distorted version of it, and the version is produced by your own unquestioned lens. Thus, the aspiring professional of immersion needs to start by taking the position of an anthropologist of his or her life. It entails a scrupulous activity of writing a cultural autobiography. One should force oneself to ask hard questions and brutally tell the truth in the answers. What were family rules growing up at home? What did your family hold to as central beliefs in money, success, religion and duty? How are you connected with time, as a culture, is it a scarce resource to be chronicled and maximized, or is it a fluid and cyclic river? What ways does your culture show emotion, manage the conflict and what is the connection between the person and the group? Mapping these cornerstones of your own personal worldview, you come to realise that the version of things that you thought to be normal are actually but only one of a thousand potential versions of being. This does not involve taking your own culture to task but, rather, mastering what make the culture tick to the extent in which you can temporarily shelve it. You have to be able to see the shade of your own spectacles before you have any chance of seeing the world through another man.
The linguistic dive is not only the second technique and the most immersive one, but it is also the most far-fetched, since the linguistic dive is not merely about basic vocabulary. Language does not merely label things; it is indeed the building and the organising principle that makes up a thought. To immerse ourselves through and through, those who want to immerse must get beyond the nouns and the tourist expressions and get into the spirit of the language: its first person singular and its first person plural; its idiom turns, its ineffable words. The existence of a certain culture is reflected in its verbs by indicating how they view action, agency and being. The idioms and the proverbs contain the crystallized DNA of the collective wisdom, fears, humour and values of a culture. To comprehend the complex social structure here in Lahore, one has to deal with such a word that cannot be spelled out in one word as English equivalent. Consider, as an illustration, the idea of lihaaz as a subtle, lovely attitude of showing proper respect, of altering own wishes to maintain social order, and of not hurting the feelings of another. It is a pillar of social life, and the comprehension of it makes someone know something significant about the collectivity before the personality. The social relations cannot be understood either, unless the delicate but mighty differences between the second personal pronouns are understood the informal tu, the familiar tum and the formal aap). The pronoun is not only a grammatical decision, it is the actual, real-time negotiation of status and intimacy and respect that codifies the whole relationship between two speakers. A more sophisticated practitioner will hear these subtle differences, knowing that the real cultural dictionary is neither in print nor on paper, it is spoken and lived on a daily basis. They may indulge also in a sort of silent concentrated listening, and sit, say in a tea stall, hour after hour, meaning not to translate, but to imbibe the unforced flow, the rhythm, the music of the speech, whilst yet it is music only, and the meaning is yet not clear.
As the practitioner gains a better knowledge of the language of thought he may then start mapping the social ecosystem, the invisible web of relations which binds the society together. The individual or the fundamental social family is the nuclear family in several forms of western culture. To go to a place such as Pakistan with this assumption is to be blind to reality as it is. The more sophisticated method is to know and sight the real underlying unit that often lies in the extended family, the clan or the biradri the gigantic system of kinship that acts as a regulator of social security, economic opportunity and identity. You need to learn to observe how these invisible webs of connection affect business transactions, marital deals, political affiliations and every other thing in between. This is another stage of perceptual intensity: charting the channels of esteem and authority. You pay attention to who walks in a room and who rises up. You note that the one who talks first during a meeting is able to break in. You witness the small but barely noticeable signs of respect to an elder. The witnessing gives away the unwritten order, the linguistics of the social order. One potent way of doing this is to learn and co-practice the complex rituals of hospitality. Being a visitor in a Lahori household is a rich social ritual that involves many unwritten codes of being generous, expecting the same, and being honourable. The one who learned this dance gets a key to the internal system of the heart of the culture.
Culture does not just occur in majestic ceremony, or elaborate social system, culture is most heavily present, most compressed in the trivial, in the everyday, daily repetitive rituals of day-to-day living. The advanced practitioner realizes that and becomes the student of the banal. One very effective method is the so-called micro-ethnography, selecting one specific and apparently irrelevant site and examining it over time. This might be a particular corner street seller, a local shop of barbers or a certain bench on a park. By attending the same place every day, you start to notice the underlying trends and the case of regulars. You observe the slight variations of mood and work during the day. This microscopic, microcosmic lens affords a rather surprising view into the bigger culture. The other aspect is to break down one of the daily rituals. The art of making and sipping the evening chai in a family atmosphere can be taken as an example. The ritual is a meaning-rich text. Who qualifies to order tea to be prepared? Who prepares it and to whom this job is traditionally assigned due to gender and age? Whose needs have to be met first, which reinforces the structure of the family? What kind of chatter is appropriate at this point of mass winding-down? To examine this apparently plain ritual, is to learn a lot about family relationships, sexual characteristics, and the beat of daily life. In addition, a profound immersion involves synchronizing personal clock with the spiritual clock of the site. In Lahore, it implies the awareness of the five prayers summoned each day, the knowledge of how the city loses and gains power with each new moment surrounding them. It implies experiencing the social change in the holy month of Ramadan and the collective happiness in the festival of Eid. Living by this calendar will mean being made in touch with the spiritual pulse-beat of the city and with the holy rhythms beneath the secular life of the city.
The economic undercurrents of any culture, dates and methods of valuing and exchanging not only goods but social and symbolic capital must also be understood in order to have a proper understanding of that culture. This involves going deeper than skin deep of commercial transactions. One of these is the so-called artisan s trail. You as a customer will not just make a purchase of a handcrafted item but will follow the artisan. You also visit them in their shop and inquire about their materials, their process, the symbolism of certain designs, and of the economics of their craft. You get to understand how they relate to their suppliers as well as customers. It turns a mere purchase to a plunge into a mini-economy of a place, a world of craft, custom and trade. The technique of bargaining should be broken down as another advanced practice. Haggling is not zero-sum bargaining to get the best deal common in many societies such as the bazaars of Lahore. It is an elegant social contact, a dialogue, a mind game, and development of a transitory alliance between the buyer and the seller. This is one of the commercial games that can only be played with retrospective and good humour; and to enter into it with aggressive low-balling, is quite to fail to understand the native commercial culture. It is also essential not to see only a formal economy of shops and businesses but also the admire vast, complex and usually not observed informal economy. This is the street vendor, this is the home caterer, this is the neighbourhood committee pooling funds, this is the multilateral networks of trust and informal credit, which enable the city to exist. One has to look and realize this strata to really comprehend the real economical endurance and resourcefulness of the citizens.
And place has a present which is a dialogue between that present and a past. The immersion advanced practitioner is going to be called upon to be a historical archaeologist, a person who will be able to look beneath the surface of a place and see the temporal strata underneath the ground. It is more than reading what a guide book presents of dates and events. The trick is to go and listen to the stories the culture tells about itself. That involves reading the novels, the poetry and the histories written by local writers. To really know Lahore one has to read the gut wrenching stories Saadat Hasan Manto writes about 1947 Partition not necessarily in order to know the facts of the event but to know its human trauma because that trauma is still audible in the psyche of the city. The romantic resistance of the city has to be read in the poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz. One other effective method is to organize the ghost walks. You read an antique map of the city, say of the British colonial times or before, and you are trying to walk along its streets nowadays. What you will observe is a huge movie theatre come mall, a historic park come estate, an abandoned canals come free-flowing streets. History is something you can touch in this exercise that is a physical presence that you can sense in the very structure of the city. The most significant method of historical approach however is the listening to oral histories. You visit the elders of the city, its living history books and you ask, reverently, that they tell you stories. Their remembrance of street that has shifted, of a festival that is no longer observed, of days before the congestion and the noise have a historical evidence that cannot be found.
It is this eventually most personal and also deepest transformation of the inner landscape of the practitioner that is represented by this last gesture, this last aspect of humble contribution, of giving back. It is where the very project of immersion goes beyond an individual search of knowledge and turns into a two-sided, life-giving relationship opportunity. When you get out of observing a community and get into serving it, no matter how humbly, that final delicate veil which still separates you and the other disappears. It is not out of pity or out of charity, but due to a feeling of deep, deserved respect and true sense of connectedness that prompts this act. It is the logical end result of all the earlier methods. Self-deconstruction in the intro makes you not approach the service with arrogance. The language and the social insight of the foreign language will enable you to contribute positively and in a culturally correct manner. Your contribution has a historical context, and this is why it is not a naive act of imposing but an action of solidarity. That shift between a taker and a giver is the last point of integration the point at which your internal map perfectly matches the outside territory, since you are now more than simply mapping it; you are assisting to nourish it.
As soon as such state is achieved and maintained, the very notion of an existence of a “traveler,” or rather, an “observer,” starts being out of date. The methods which have been considered deliberately acquired develop to be a matter of course, an automatic, emotional manner of existing in the world. It follows the realization of a new type of consciousness, a condition that could be termed as a sort of positive placelessness. Not the negative, dis-embodied sense of a home-lessness, this, but the extended, freeing sense of a home-versality. It started with the process of Self-discovery regarding cultural programming to be able to perceive a new place distinctly. The trip brings to a conclusion that what unites such diverse human experience, love and loss, fear and hope, and community, and lies at the root of all human grammar is universal. having been taught how to decode this grammar in one novice condition, you find out you can read it anywhere. You can traipse through the kinetic bustle of the Ichhra Bazaar in Lahore or the antiseptic silence of a Zurich railway station and still have the same feeling of belonging, since your own idea of being at home now no longer rests on the familiarity of the external environment. It is a condition one carries around and is a moveable castle constructed with acceptance of the self and a profound comprehension of interpersonal belonging. The planet stops being made up of various foreignaties to visit but becomes one, big, united neighbourhood where you can freely travel and feel well-known with just very few challenges.
The existence of such unified consciousness leads to a unique and potent cognitive ability an ability that amounts to some kind of poly-empathy. A typical empathy is to have what a person is going through in his/her frame of reference and to feel it. Poly-empathy is a sophisticated skill to appreciate, to carry, to believe in more than one and often it is conflicting set of cultural and moral systems at a time. By living the experience, you have not only seen it but have come to make sense out of how the world works in a different style of life. You will learn to appreciate, say, the profound social reason and even collective security inherent in the tradition in the south Asian family of the arranged marriage, and not think about it as an oppressive practice (as it would do any vestigial remodeling of western vision), but as a sophisticated construct that is meant to maintain family alliances, to bring and maintain personel comparability, and to offer stability to a union. Meanwhile, you have your own personal, possibly radically different, conviction in romantic love and individual choice as equally viable as regarded by its own culture. You can observe, both systems have an identical basic question of human beings how to build a long-lasting companionship and just apply different sets of tools and values. This skill to accommodate two truths without having the need to disprove one of them is the final remedy to dogmatism. It will give you a sense of having a finer mind, a kinder leader and a better person to interconnect with various worlds.
It is also a life altering trip during which you change your perception of what it is to know something. The Western ideology of knowledge tends to build up on existing measurable objective facts. The knowledge of a city in this model is the population of this city, the historical dates of this city, the key landmarks of this city, the economical output of this city. Deep immersion practitioner is engulfed by the realization that this is most superficial type of knowledge. Instead they have also developed another deeper form of knowing, a phenomenological and embodied one. Knowing Lahore to them does not mean having the list of names of the Mughal emperors at his/ her tongue. It is experiencing the particular sensation of the cold night air as it settles the courtyard of the Wazir Khan Mosque. It is the taught experience of how to day-job the moving mile of The Mall road, something you just can feel in the muscles and the reflexes and that you do not pick up out of the book. It is a familiarity of the taste of the water of the city, some special smell of the dust after a long drouth, some impactal sound of a certain verse of Punjabi poetry as it is read by a friend. This common sense, Known knowledge of the senses is more profound and more than a set of facts. The practitioner learns to become confident with this felt sense, to read a place with all of his or her being and that the best truths are the ones that are sensed, not memorized.
And this deep, embodied knowledge is accompanied by a moral duty throughout the lifelong. You cannot spend days in such a close contact with a culture, get invited into the houses, into the heart of the people and just walk away without becoming a bit changed and weighting down with guilt feelings. You are a custodian of the stories and the trust vested on you. This forms what may be termed as the burden of representation. You are an unwilling ambassador now as you go back to your own culture and you will also be an unwilling ambassador when you travel to another one where you have gotten to know the place so intimately. When you see it written off as mere stereotype or a news headline on the negative side, you must speak out, must present a more complex view, must present a more human and more sympathetic one. It is your duty to describe its stories with the complexity and respect, which were given to you, to confront the biases of your fellow people and to press vociferously the need to have a more equal and factual comprehension of the world you have known.
It is in this sense that this responsibility is more than that of storytelling. The beneficence that has started due to the action of humble offering turns out to be a part and parcel of your life forever. You preserve relationships you have built. You are still maintaining the artisan who does the work you now know about, maybe by introducing him/her to a broader market. You may also choose to keep donating to the local residents fund or the school that you were working in. You apply to your own professional and social network to provide opportunities of the people, who showed you such a great kindness. Your relationship is not a journey experience that you will forget in life. The immersion has left a debt of gratitude, which you will be gloriously paying until the rest of your days. The destiny of a land and a people which were not native to you is henceforth silently and irrevocably bound up with your own.
In ultimate analysis, the creation of unity of consciousness through the long, patient, disciplined practice of all these sophisticated techniques eventuates. The first project as the attempt to learn more about the other turns out to be the road to a complete and, hence, more cohesive self. The polar oppositions on which your version of the world has previously been organized crumble and lose their rigidity: self versus other, inside versus outside, home versus away, inner versus outer. The way you identify yourself is not stuck on some points where a culture, nationality is just enough to define you, but it is moving, it is changing as it connects, observes, participates, and reflects. You find that the symphony that you learned to listen to in Lahore and Tokyo, in Cairo, or in your home town are not entirely distinct. and they are all, locally, movements in the great world music of the whole human experience, and you are now learning to know how to listen to the music. The trip culminates, as all of the great trips do, where everything started. The place is not the same as it was called. The world has not been transformed, but you have, and thus transforming your world. The greatest journey of all has been accomplished by thee: by thy efforts hath the tremendous, complicated, and beautiful map of a full-grown human life been drawn.
