Introduction: For Six Strange Weeks They Had Acted As If They Were Friends (Svartvik, 2013)

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The page holds the opening pages of Jesper Svartvik's introduction, "For Six Strange Weeks They Had Acted As If They Were Friends," to Religious Stereotyping and Interreligious Relations, edited by J. Svartvik and others (© 2013). It says the collection addresses religious stereotyping, prejudice and discrimination, and aims to be constructive as well as critical. It opens with former British diplomat Carne Ross's account, from Independent Diplomat, of writing a letter on the "Norwegian national character" after watching Norwegians at the luggage carousel at Oslo airport. Drawing on Perry R. Hinton, it then separates the cognitive shortcuts everyone needs from harmful negative stereotyping, using the examples of a hospital emergency department and a clothes shop.

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                                                    1

          Introduction: “For Six Strange
              Weeks They Had Acted
             As If They Were Friends”
                                        Jesper Svartvik


R    eligion can heal but it can certainly hurt as well. Hence, this collection of essays
addresses some aspects of the issues of religious stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimi-
nation, and considers a range of important topics that haunt our societies today. When
stereotyping becomes the oxygen we inhale, when it is so important to us that we can-
not see how we can survive without it, what can and should we do? This book is not
only critical, but also constructive; it not only explores, it also opposes stereotyping.
   In Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite, the former
British diplomat Carne Ross critically discusses the way diplomatic telegrams are
usually formulated. He provides an example from his early career as a diplomat:

   On my first ever overseas posting, to Norway, I wrote a letter—at the encouragement of
   my boss—to the Western European Department in London analysing the “Norwegian
   national character.” This letter was superficial in the extreme, mainly because its obser-
   vations had been gathered from watching the behaviour of Norwegians at the luggage
   carousel at Oslo airport when I first arrived. I spoke no Norwegian (and never did).
   This did not however prevent me from sending the letter.1

It is important to emphasize that this way of essentializing of entire nations and
peoples that he criticizes is not an exception, but belongs to the very foundation
of our way of thinking: “. . . the habit of referring to whole countries in the singular
and to their government as the embodiment of that state is one as deep-rooted as
the state-based international system itself.”2 Furthermore, he argues that there is an
agenda at work here. The motives of other countries are not described in the same
way as those of one’s own nation:

   It is always easy to attribute to one’s opponents the base and selfish motives of eco-
   nomic interest. [ . . . ] Meanwhile, to ourselves, we routinely attribute “higher” motives
   of security, democracy, freedom, when of course the material motives are, with only a
   few exceptions, also at play. But I have often felt, looking from inside the box of policy-
   making, that it is too simplistic to assign motives in this way.3

J. Svartvik et al. (eds.), Religious Stereotyping and Interreligious Relations
© Jesper Svartvik and Jakob Wirén 2013
2                                 Jesper Svartvik

                  Shortcuts and Generalizations
Needless to say, it is not quite correct to think that we can establish and define a
national character by watching people at the luggage carousel (albeit at the largest
airport in the country), but, nevertheless, we all realize that it is necessary to make
generalizations. This is something we do all the time; we simply have to do it, since,
in the words of Perry R. Hinton in his book Stereotypes, Cognition and Culture,
“. . . human cognition is not able to apprehend the full complexity of the world.”4 In
this sense, a stereotype is a simplified picture of the world, and we all need this kind
of simplification. For example, when a man suffering from acute abdominal pain
comes to the emergency department of a hospital, the doctor does not consider,
even for a moment, the possibility that this male patient might be pregnant, and
that the cause of his pain is that he is about to give birth. In short, it is a justifiable
cognitive shortcut for hospital staff simply to take for granted that men can never
get pregnant.5
    In other words, we need generalizations; we have to categorize in order to live
our lives. For this reason, some scholars have chosen to use exceptionally wide defi-
nitions when discussing stereotyping and prejudice. Robin Fox, for example, states,
“[w]e have to come to terms with the idea that prejudice is not a form of thinking
but that thinking is a form of prejudice.”6 Whereas it is intriguing and fascinating to
reflect on human thinking in this way, it could be argued that this approach is less
than helpful in an anthology that consistently seeks to address the negative conse-
quences of our stereotyping.
    Hence, in this context we will differentiate between (beneficial and therefore not
problematic) cognitive shortcuts and (harmful and therefore problematic) negative
stereotyping. We should ask ourselves whether a heuristic categorization of other
people helps us, or, to much higher a degree, hurts them. Are we entitled, for
example, to identify, label, and categorize a person as “introvert” (and perhaps even
nothing but “introvert”)?7
    Another example, which may prove to be helpful in this line of thought, is our
behavior when we enter a clothes shop and need assistance. We probably look at
those present in the room, at what they are wearing and what they are doing, how
they are handling the clothes, whether they are scrutinizing the items, looking at
the price tags, or whether they are slowly and meticulously folding the clothes and
putting them into piles, at the same time as greeting those entering the shop with
a word of welcome. We do this in order to distinguish between other customers
and the shop assistants. Presumably, we all agree that this is acceptable behavior; it
is neither problematic nor prejudicial. In the words of Hinton, “. . . we need to cat-
egorize the social world in order to understand and interact with it.”8 Sometimes
we make mistakes. If we ask, “Do you work here?” and the other person shakes
his or her head, we feel embarrassed, but it is not the end of the world (although
it might be somewhat more problematic for the other person). Hence, we have to
return to the pertinent and underlying question: Why is it wrong to seek to establish
the “Norwegian national character” by watching the behavior of Norwegians at the
luggage carousel at Oslo airport, but not wrong to assume that men cannot become
pregnant?
    When is our everyday understanding of people stereotyping, and when is it not?
We have reason to believe that two aspects are of importance here. First, is part of


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