The Mediator's Cultural Assumptions

In January, 1985, I conducted a series of “pilot” workshops on mediation and conflict management skills in three Central American countries. The materials and presentations were given in Spanish. However, during reflection times, the participants reported a feeling of “uneasiness” with aspects of the mediation procedure I presented. One person noted, “it seemed very North American.” Referring to his Guatemalan compatriots who had role played a conflict, he continued, “they acted more like gringos than like us.”

In the workshops I shared a model of conflict management which I had found useful, but one that brought with it the assumptions and premises that emerged from and are relevant to a North American setting. I was a “change agent,” exporting a prescriptive model of conflict management from one context to another, and I was encountering the limits of my own cultural assumptions about conflict when applied to another culture…