Intercultural Communication

A Discourse Approach

Ron Scollon, Suzanne Wong Scollon, Rodney H. Jones

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118149690
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This newly revised edition is both a lively introduction and practical guide to the main concepts and challenges of intercultural communication. Grounded in interactional sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, this work integrates theoretical principles and methodological advice, presenting students, researchers, and practitioners with a comprehensive and unified resource.

• Features new original theory, expanded treatment of generations, gender and corporate and professional discourse
• Offers improved organization and added features for student and classroom use, including advice on research projects, questions for discussion, and references at the end of each chapter
• Extensively revised with newly added material on computer mediated communication, sexuality and globalization
  

1

What Is a Discourse Approach?

Ho Man is a university student in Hong Kong majoring in English for Professional Communication. Late in the evenings after she has finished her schoolwork she likes to catch up with her friends on Facebook. Her grandmother, who has no idea what Facebook is, sometimes scolds Ho Man for staying up so late and spending so much time “playing” on her computer. One of Ho Man’s best friends is Steven, a university student in Southern California who is majoring in environmental science. They met on an online fan forum devoted to a Japanese anime called Vampire Hunter D, and when they write on each other’s Facebook walls much of what they post has to do with this anime. This is not, however, their only topic of conversation. Sometimes they use the chat function on Facebook to talk about more private things like their families, their boyfriends (Steven is gay), and even religion. Ho Man is still mystified by the fact that her friend in America is a Buddhist. Ho Man is a Christian and has been since she entered university two years ago. She goes to church every Sunday and belongs to a Bible study group on campus. As far as she is concerned, people should be able to believe in any religion they want. On the other hand, she still has trouble understanding why her friend, who is the same age that she is, believes in the same religion that her grandmother does.

The short anecdote above is an illustration of “intercultural communication,” that is, it is an example of communication between an American from California and a Chinese living in Hong Kong. The fact that Ho Man is Chinese and Steven is American, however, seems to be, if not the least significant, perhaps the least interesting aspect of this situation. In any case, it does not seem to interfere at all with their ability to communicate.

There are also other ways Ho Man and her friend Steven are different. Ho Man is female and Steven is male. Ho Man is heterosexual and Steven is homosexual. Ho Man is an English major and Steven is a science major. Similarly, none of these differences seems to result in any serious “miscommunication.” In fact, their difference in sexuality actually gives them a common topic to talk about: boys.

One difference that does cause some confusion, at least for Ho Man, is the fact that she is a Christian and her American friend is a Buddhist. What is interesting about this is that it is the opposite of what one might expect. It is, however, not particularly surprising. Over 80 percent of university students in Hong Kong identify themselves as Christians, and Buddhism has been one of the fastest growing religions in California since the late 1960s. Even though Ho Man considers this strange, it still is not the source of any serious miscommunication between the two of them.

Maybe one reason they do manage to communicate so well is that, for all their differences, they also have a lot of things in common. They are both the same age. They are both university students. They are both members of the Facebook “community” and feel comfortable with computer-mediated communication in general. And they are both fans of a particular animated story, the source of which, ironically, is a culture to which neither of them belongs. And they both speak English. In fact, Ho Man seems to have much more in common with her gay American friend than she does with her own grandmother, who is also Chinese. At the same time, Steven has something in common with Ho Man’s grandmother that she doesn’t: they are both Buddhists.

This example is meant to illustrate the fact that intercultural communication is often more complicated than we might think, especially in today’s “wired,” globalized world.

Usually when we think of intercultural communication, we think of people from two different countries such as China and the United States communicating with each other and proceed to search for problems in their communication as a result of their different nationalities.

But “North American culture” and “Chinese culture” are not the only two cultures that we are dealing with in this situation. We are also dealing with Japanese culture, gay culture, university student culture, Hong Kong Christian culture and North American Buddhist culture, gender cultures and generational cultures, the cultures of various internet websites and of the affinity groups that develop around particular products of popular culture.

There is nothing at all unusual about this situation. In fact, all situations involve communication between people who, rather than belonging to only one culture, belong to a whole lot of different cultures at the same time. Some of these cultures they share with the people they are talking to, and some of them they do not. And some of these cultural differences and similarities will affect the way they communicate, and some of them will be totally irrelevant.

The real question, then, is not whether any given moment of communication is an instance of “intercultural communication.” All communication is to some degree intercultural, whether it occurs between Ho Man and her Facebook friend, Ho Man and her boyfriend, or Ho Man and her grandmother. The real question is, what good does it do to see a given moment of communication as a moment of intercultural communication? What kinds of things can we accomplish by looking at it this way? What kinds of problems can we avoid or solve?

The Problem with Culture

But wait a minute, you may say. While it seems normal to talk about “North American culture” and “Chinese culture” and even “gay culture” and “Christian culture,” can we also talk about the “culture” of university students (even when they go to university in different countries), the “culture” of English majors or environmental science majors, the “culture” of fans of a particular Japanese anime, or Facebook “culture”? One problem is that the term “culture” may not be particularly well suited to talk about all of the different groups that we belong to which may affect the way we think, behave, and interact with others. In other words, “culture” may not be a particularly useful word to use when talking about “intercultural communication.”

The biggest problem with the word culture is that nobody seems to know exactly what it means, or rather, that it means very different things to different people. Some people speak of culture as if it is a thing that you have, like courage or intelligence, and that some people have more of it and some people less. Others talk about culture as something that people live inside of like a country or a region or a building – they speak, for example, of people leaving their cultures and going to live in other people’s cultures. Some consider culture something people think, a set of beliefs or values or mental patterns that people in a particular group share. Still others regard culture more like a set of rules that people follow, rather like the rules of a game, which they can either conform to or break, and others think of it as a set of largely unconscious habits that govern people’s behavior without them fully realizing it. There are those who think that culture is something that is rather grand, something one finds in the halls of museums and between the covers of old books, while there are others who believe that true culture is to be found in the everyday lives of everyday people. There are those who cherish culture as the thing that holds us together, and others who deride it as the thing that drives us apart.

All of these views of culture are useful in some way, in that they help to illuminate a different aspect of human behavior by leading us to ask certain very productive questions. Seeing culture as a set of rules, for example, leads us to ask how people learn these rules and how they display competence in them to other members of their culture. Seeing culture as a set of traditions leads us to ask why some aspects of behavior survive to be passed on to later generations and some do not. Seeing culture as a particular way of thinking forces us to consider how the human mind is shaped and the relationship between individual cognition and collective cognition. Each definition of culture can lead us down a different pathway, and all of these pathways are potentially fruitful.

It is best, then, to think of culture not as one thing or another, not as a thing at all, but rather as a heuristic. A heuristic is a “tool for thinking.” The word comes from the Greek word meaning “to find” or “to discover.” It is rumored that when the Greek mathematician Archimedes realized, after getting into a bath and watching the water overflow, that he could use this method to measure the volume of objects, he ran naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting, “Heureka!” (rather than, as is commonly recalled, “Eureka”), meaning “I have found it!” Each of these different views of culture has the potential to lead us to a different kind of “Heureka.” At the same time, none of them alone can be considered definitive or complete. The way we will be approaching the problem of culture and the phenomenon of intercultural communication in this book will draw insights from many of these different views of culture, as well as from the ideas of people who never used the word culture at all. At the same time, we will, we hope, come up with ways of helping you to use these various ideas about culture without being “taken in” by them, without falling into the trap of thinking that any particular construction of “culture” is actually something “real.”

Perhaps the best definition of culture we can settle on for now, though we will be revisiting and revising the concept throughout this book, is that culture is “a way of dividing people up into groups according to some feature of these people which helps us to understand something about them and how they are different from or similar to other people.” While this definition seems rather innocuous, it really points to what is probably the trickiest aspect of this notion of “culture,” and that is, when you are dividing people up, where do you draw the line? You might, for example, want to use geographical boundaries to divide people up, to speak, for example, of French, Brazilians, British, Chinese, or Americans. Putting all the people in China, however, into one category might mask the fact that people in the northern part of China eat different food, celebrate different festivals, and speak a different language than people in the southern part, or that older people living in China, who may have been alive during the time of Mao Zedong, tend to have very different ideas about life than their grandchildren who are growing up in a rapidly expanding consumer economy. It might also mask the many similarities people living in China might have with people living in France, Brazil, the United Kingdom or the United States. This problem gets even worse when we make our categories bigger, when we start talking, for example, of Easterners and Westerners, Latinos and Northerners, Middle Easterners, and Europeans. Even when we try to narrow our categories, however, to speak perhaps of New Yorkers or Parisians, the same kinds of problems arise. Do the Wall Street banker and the taxi driver who drives him to his office really belong to the same culture? In some ways they do, and in some ways they don’t.

This is the fundamental problem with all heuristics, that while they illuminate or help us to focus on some things, they can distort other things or hide them from our view altogether. Later in this book we will discuss how this aspect of dividing people into groups can lead to two particular kinds of problems: one we call “lumping,” thinking that all of the people who belong to one “culture” are the same, and the other we call “binarism,” thinking people are different just because they belong to different “cultures.”

There are other problems as well with studying intercultural communication, one of which many of us who specialize in this field have experienced: You pick a situation to study as an intercultural situation and then you find that nothing at all seems to have gone wrong. The social interaction proceeds smoothly and you come to feel that there is, after all, nothing to the idea that intercultural communication causes problems of communication. Alternatively, you pick a situation to study and things do go wrong, but it is very hard to argue that the problems arise out of cultural differences rather than other more basic differences such as that the participants have different goals. For example, even when a Japanese businessperson fails to sell his product to an Indonesian customer, the reasons are likely to have to do with product quality or suitability, with the pricing or delivery structure, or perhaps with the even more basic problem that the customer did not really seek to buy the product in the first place, and the differences between “being Japanese and “being Indonesian” have nothing to do with it.

Even more fundamental than this problem is the problem of bias in the research. How does a researcher isolate a situation to study as “intercultural communication” in the first place? If you start by picking a conversation between an “American” and a “Chinese,” you have started by presupposing that “Americans” and “Chinese” will be different from each other, that this difference will be significant, and that this difference is the most important and defining aspect of that social situation. In most cases, none of these can be assumed to be true and yet if the researcher begins by making this assumption and goes through the long, painstaking work of careful analysis, human nature is likely to lead this researcher to find significant differences and to attribute those differences to his or her a priori categories “American” and “Chinese” whether they really fit or not.

Culture Is a Verb

While throughout this book we will be trying to avoid committing ourselves to one definition of culture or another, mostly by trying to steer clear of the term culture as much as possible, if you were to force us to admit what we really think culture is, chances are we would say something like “culture is a verb.” This rather provocative statement is actually the title of an article by an anthropologist named Brian Street who is particularly interested in the idea of literacy. What he means by literacy, however, is a bit different from what most people mean by it. Rather than just the ability to read and write, Street would define literacy as something like the communicative practices that people engage in to show that they are particular kinds of people or belong to particular groups. Thus the ability to sing or shop or dress in certain ways or operate certain kinds of machines, along with the ability to read and write certain kinds of texts, would all be seen as kinds of literacy. The most important thing, though, is that these “abilities” are not just a matter of individual learning or intelligence, but a matter of living together with other people and interacting with them in certain ways.

What we mean when we say “culture is a verb” is that culture is not something that you think or possess or live inside of. It is something that you do. And the way that you do it might be different at different times and in different circumstances. The way Ho Man “does” “Chinese culture,” for example, is likely to be very different when she is talking to her grandmother and when she is posting comments on her friend’s Facebook wall, which brings us back to Street’s i...