When we learn to drive in a particular place we acquire the habits involved with driving on a particular side of the road as we discussed earlier. Driving becomes part of our embodied culture, our habitus. When I went to New Zealand, where they drive on the left side of the street, I didn't just acquire the culture by interacting with it. I knew that there were rules, laws about which side of the road to drive on. Those rules or laws are part of metaculture. The native New Zealander doesn't need that metaculture to perform the act of driving there. It's just part of the local habitus. But I needed the metaculture since I was trying to control my driving through an idea about how to drive. So the metaculture was literally a force affecting my driving. It was compelling me to drive on a particular side of the road. I had to struggle with my habitual inertia that I had learned about driving. But I was able to do so pretty effectively as long as I set my mind to it. That's an effect of reflective culture. And I have to say that when I returned to the United States it felt strange at first, to be driving on the right side of the road. I'm not sure I quite always did it, though I was able to re-acclimate pretty effectively. Let's try to diagram this. Here you see on the bottom the culture of right side of the road driving, flowing into me from my social learning in the United States. However, once I get to driving in New Zealand, I try to inhibit that habit I've indicated that by the two slash lines across the output arrow. But what is behind that inhibition? I've represented here that the cause is another form of cultural flow. A metacultural flow coming to me as the idea or law about driving on the left side of the road. To indicate that it is an idea, I've put a source above the box with my name on it, and I've used a block arrow to indicate the force. According to this diagram therefore, what I was trying to do was to overcome my habit by vigilant attention and thought processes. But those thought processes, the ideas that are driving on the left side of the road are themselves a part of culture. They got socially learned and socially transmitted. I've indicated that by the arrows flowing through at the metacultural plane. In fact, I've been reading about driving in New Zealand long before I actually arrived there. The ideas came to me not only from books, but also from friends, who gave me pointers about adapting to driving on the other side of the road. How to calculate the position of the car relative to the lane dividers, and so forth. What's interesting is that no one, and I mean no one, said anything about the position of the turn signal. So I was driving without meta cultural guidance so to speak. And in that area the habit kept reasserting itself. After getting teased about it enough times by my daughter I finally formed a mental representation, an idea about the position of the turn signal and how I needed to remember to control my behavior in accord with the idea. One might say that my daughter, through her teasing, was passing on metacultural commentary to me. In any case the mental representation seemed to work quite well except in stressful situations where I tended to revert to habit to my embodied culture that I'd acquired previously. We can diagram my initial experience this way. The practical learning from driving in New Zealand clashed with my embodied learning from the US or you might say that the cultural learning embodied in the New Zealand car clashed with my habitual learning from driving in the US cars. You can see that the two arrows coming out from Greg Urban and forming a kind of mini-boundary clashed. So ultimately I was able to overcome the habitual culture in part through the metacultural teasing by my daughter as depicted in this version of the same diagram. Okay with that I think it's time to head back to ancient Egypt and we'll do that in the very next lecture.
