Lisa, a French girl living in the Netherlands, goes to the Iranian shop every morning to buy her favourite Turkish bread that she tried in Istanbul once. The shop owner is actually a Kurd from Teheran married to an Armenian woman and immigrated to Holland some time ago. The Armenian wife of the Kurdish shop owner wears a scarf which Lisa always considers as very fashionable, but she has never told the woman. Apparently, the scarf was bought in Milan where the shop owners went on vacation.

The Armenian woman likes Lisa’s dresses, although she wouldn’t wear them herself because of religious prescriptions. Lisa’s dresses are made in Turkey but the label mentions a western designer. It takes Lisa two minutes to buy bread every morning and twenty seconds to leave the shop. The interaction between the French girl and the Middle Eastern couple ends on this level and it never touches upon any deeper issue than that of buying bread.

We can only imagine how many times a day both Lisa and the shop owners interact with an ‘other’ culture. This process takes place in real life and in the media (traditional media and social media) that are nowadays available and used by everyone.

There are two processes that are very specific for the life of our story’s protagonists. First of all, they happen to live in the so called ‘global village’ (McLuhan 1962), where information is worth more than money and it is spread by millions of channels (informal and formal) flowing over people’s heads every second of their lives.

Secondly, they happen to live at a time when two powerful civilizations are perceived to clash: Muslim culture and Western culture (which in some way represents Christian values). And what is the position of an individual in this new world-set? Psychology tells us that the human brain is able to (consciously) absorb a certain amount of information that has to be somehow ordered and logically segregated.

Sociologists believe that human beings have the need for identity as well as belonging. Psychology tells us as well that human beings want, at least, to have a feeling that they understand the world (in their own way), and to safely continue their everyday activities with a drop of confidence. Obviously, the human brain simplifies things on a daily basis to handle the amount of information that surrounds it. And in all this mess and these circumstances stereotypes find their spectacular origin!

For Lisa, life is much simpler and easier if she assumes that the Armenian wife of the Kurdish guy is just a Muslim with a headscarf. It’s convenient for her to understand that this is what she is not. It is possible that both of them like to shop in Milan and maybe they share the same taste for art, but visual and communication differences are too difficult to cross to get to this point. For the Kurdish husband of the Armenian woman, it is also much easier to assume that Lisa is a Western girl that watches superficial, lowbrow movies (although he watches them too). It’s also expedient to suppose that she could not be a good wife for her son (for sure not!).

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