the world around it? Disappointingly, the two topics are dealt with in less than ten pages, before the narrative moves on to the larger historical and geographical scene, where Wexler’ s main interest appears to lie.
Surely, though, he is mistaken to think that the main cultural clashes that matter result from the interaction of societies that have developed separately. In fact, it is far from clear that even the societies Wexler mentions have developed as separately from each other as he thinks: interaction, rather than isolation, appears to have been the norm throughout history, admittedly not on the massive scale that jet travel and Facebook now allow. Moreover, the cross-cultural interactions that are experienced by an individual brain are not the tectonic interactions of civilizations but the daily encounter with difference; the landscape-changing experiences of bereavement and migration, yes; but also the student who finds she has a foreign teacher, encounters a classmate from Taiwan, or takes a trip to Thailand.
For this student, Wexler’ s thesis would still apply: her inner neurobiological structures formed by one kind of environment will resist and try to re-shape the“ other” environment in which she finds herself. The struggle between internal and external worldview will be fierce and fairly unpleasant. But here there are important questions that Wexler does not address directly: On which side of the watershed between being moulded by the environment and attempting to mould it does our hypothetical university student stand? Why, if the adult brain’ s instincts are essentially conservative and rejecting of difference, have whole industries been built on the human desire to travel to and experience exotic environments?
On the first question, the information Wexler provides is a little vague. The watershed is referred to as“ adolescence” but at one point he mentions 25 as the age by which all brain structures are fully mature. He would probably say it is a gradual change rather than a single moment in a child’ s development. This raises the possibility that, through Study Abroad programmes and the internationalisation of education, young, plastic brains can be moulded to see cultural variety as the norm to which they later try to make the outside world conform.
The second question, the human instinct to explore, to“ seek out new life and new civilizations,” is not addressed at all in this book, though surely it provides the natural counterweight to the processes Wexler is exploring. It is why, despite a tendency to cling to the comforts of home, students do take part in Study Abroad programmes and retired people take cruises to exotic locales. It is why we travel.
There is a danger here, as with all book reviews, that I am reviewing the book I would have liked Wexler to have written instead of the one he did write. My point, though, is that his book is interesting and useful for the thinking it stimulates, not just for the thesis it promotes. There is clearly a great deal of merit, and food for thought, in his thesis,
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