The Handbook of Communication in Cross-cultural Perspective

Donal Carbaugh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317485599
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This handbook brings together 26 ethnographic research reports from around the world about communication. The studies explore 13 languages from 17 countries across 6 continents. Together, the studies examine, through cultural analyses, communication practices in cross-cultural perspective. In doing so, and as a global community of scholars, the studies explore the diversity in ways communication is understood around the world, examine specific cultural traditions in the study of communication, and thus inform readers about the range of ways communication is understood around the world. Some of the communication practices explored include complaining, hate speech, irreverence, respect, and uses of the mobile phone. The focus of the handbook, however, is dual in that it brings into view both communication as an academic discipline and its use to unveil culturally situated practices. By attending to communication in these ways, as a discipline and a specific practice, the handbook is focused on, and will be an authoritative resource for understanding communication in cross-cultural perspective. Designed at the nexus of various intellectual traditions such as the ethnography of communication, linguistic ethnography, and cultural approaches to discourse, the handbook employs, then, a general approach which, when used, understands communication in its particular cultural scenes and communities.

Part I: Introducing the Handbook

1
Communication in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Donal Carbaugh, Editor

Background

This handbook brings together research reports from around the world all of which examine communication as a culturally shaped practice; resulting is a view of communication in cross-cultural perspective. Readers will find here a global community of scholars who have produced studies that explore the diversity in ways communication is understood around the world, examine specific cultural traditions in the study of communication, and thus inform readers about the range of ways in which communication is understood around the world. The focus of the handbook is dual in that it brings into view communication as an academic discipline of study and as a culturally situated practice—with these treated as not mutually exclusive. By attending to communication in these ways, the handbook is focused on, and will be, according to Gerry Philipsen’s Epilogue, an authoritative resource for understanding communication in cross-cultural perspective.

The handbook, however, does more. An additional objective is to demonstrate how the study of communication can embrace, rather than abstract from, cultural diversity in the conception and evaluation of communication practices. Designed at the nexus of various intellectual traditions such as the ethnography of communication, linguistic ethnography, cultural approaches to discourse, and kindred others, the handbook employs a general approach that, when used, understands communication in its particular cultural communities, that is, as it is conceived and evaluated by people in specific discursive practices and events. And so, while the concrete subject matter of the handbook is communication as particularly practiced by people in various cultural places, the investigative approach of the handbook provides a general way of discovering and studying what those particular cultural practices of communication indeed are. The handbook as a whole thus functions as a rich resource as it demonstrates perspectives that honor cultural variability in communication practices.

The ethnography of communication is one prominent member of the research traditions described above, has enjoyed an illustrious past few decades, and can be consulted to address the particular problematic suggested above. That is, how does the academic study of communication, language, or discourse, relate to the local communication system(s) in use? From its inception, this program of study has been attentive to this type of question by examining the social and cultural foundations of communication (see Hymes, 1962, 1972). As is evident in a published bibliography (Philipsen & Carbaugh, 1986), early studies in this tradition explored how various peoples around the world conceived of and evaluated their communication. Donald Brenneis (1978), for example, explored Fijian discourse. He discovered a kind of “parbachan” or “sweet talk” parading as a religious form of communication but through allusion and indefinite pronouns publicized the wrongdoings of another while seeking mediators to the conflict. Brenneis contrasted this discursive form with a Fijian type of “straight talk,” which uses threats and insults in verbal sparring between religious groups. When communicating in this way, Fijians claim the point is to “attack and shame your opponents,” to make members of the other group “so mad they cry” (1978, p. 162). The study yielded an understanding of Fijian communication along a cultural dimension of sweet and straight talk, each with its own cultural design, its own uses and interpretations. Around the same time, Michelle Rosaldo (1973) was studying Ilongot oratory in the Philippines. She discovered a style of “crooked language” that is generally similar to the Fijian style of sweet talk as a strategy of indirection. Both the Fijian “sweet talk” and the Ilogot “crooked language” use veiled references, allusive devices, and indefinite formulations as a way of structuring communication in a public situation. Both cultural forms convey meanings to participants that are known to be active in that type of talk, but which are unknown to those uninitiated in its use. Brenneis and Rosaldo found, as did Hymes earlier, that communication in local communities had its own shape, meaning, and use. And these of course need to be discovered, described, and interpreted to be understood.

Many other ethnographers and cultural analysts were exploring communication similarly through the analytical framework developed by Hymes (1972). Tamar Katriel (1986) examined an Israeli form of “straight” speech, “dugri,” interpreting its meanings as a direct and forthright way of speaking the truth. The cultural gravity of this style of communication was strong as an effort to ensure one’s voice would be heard against pressures to be silenced. Carbaugh (1989) reviewed works of this kind, examining fifty terms for communication across seventeen societies—and the events they made relevant. Through this comparative study of cultural terms for communication, and their related practices, he induced an investigative framework for the study of communication in cross-cultural perspective. Since its publication, several research reports have used, among other investigative tools, this investigative framework (e.g., Baxter, 1993; Baxter & Goldsmith, 1990; Bloch, 2003; Boromisza-Habashi, 2007, 2013; Carbaugh, 1999; Carbaugh, Boromisza-Habashi, & Ge, 2006; Carbaugh, Nuciforo, Saito & Shin-shin, 2011; Carbaugh, Nurmikari, & Berry, 2006; Fitch, 1998; Garrett, 1993; Hall & Noguchi, 1995; Hall & Valde, 1995; Hastings, 2000a, 2000b; Ho, 2006, 2015; Ho & Bylund, 2008; Katriel, 2004; Philipsen, 1992; Sawyer, 2004; Townsend, 2009; Wilkins, 2005, 2009; Witteborn, Milburn, & Ho, 2013). This program of work has now explored more than one hundred such practices in several different languages including American Sign Language, Chinese, Danish, English, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. Based upon this comparative work, as others (e.g., Braithwaite, 1990; Goldsmith, 1989/1990; Scollo, 2004), a generative framework has been developed for such study, and for the comparative study of cultural models of communication as these are active in social scenes around the world today. While the handbook includes studies beyond this tradition of work, this body of research illustrates how communication has been studied at two levels, that is, (1) by careful attention to local conceptions and practices of communication, (2) through a general theoretical framework of communication. In this way, the academic study of communication can, as Hymes called for earlier, encompass and embrace, rather than abstract from discursive diversity.

The studies in the handbook as a result demonstrate the diversity of communication as something culturally shaped, linguistically coded, and interactionally employed. On a theoretical level, the use of this general, shared investigative framework invites comparative analyses of the deeper meanings communication has in relation to sociality (social identities, roles, institutions) and personhood (what a person indeed is and should be). On a methodological level, the reports focus on local language(s) as it is used naturally in social contexts, as well as the ways it identifies beliefs about communication, its value and efficacy. On the substantive level, the handbook gives attention to the study of communication as formative of particular social interactions, and as constructive of sociality and personhood.

Focus

Every communication system includes terms, phrases, symbols, and/or gestures within it that are used to comment upon that system. These have been variously understood as a meta-discourse (Craig, 1999a, 1999b; Taylor, 1992, 1997), as a meta-language (Lucy, 1992; Jaworski, Coupland, & Galasinki, 2004), as language action verbs or meta-pragmatic terms (Verschueren, 1985), and as key cultural terms (Wierzbicka, 1997, 2003). One subset of these meta-communicative phenomena can be understood as cultural terms for communicative action, that is, as terms and phrases that are used prominently and routinely by people to characterize communication practices that are significant and important to them. This sub-set of meta-pragmatic terms is not just any such terms about language or communication, such as all language action verbs, but specific ones participants use to characterize communication as significant and important to participants. For example, Mary Garrett (1993) has analyzed a complex form of talk in ancient China that is identified, in its English translation, as “pure talk.” This form was used to characterize prominent debates, disputations, and verbal contests, which targeted the truth through rigorous and witty events of speaking. Leslie Baxter (1993) has identified two principal, yet differently valued, channels for communication in an academic institution. These are discussed by participants as “talking things through” and “putting it in writing.” Each—but not the other—was crucially important, and valued to some segment of a college community, as the administrators wanted “things in writing” while faculty preferred “talking things through.” Models for interacting socially, being a professional participant in the college’s life, and creating institutional records were all being constructed, albeit differently, through these aptly named cultural channels. Similarly, Hall and Noguchi (1995) identified “kenson” as a Japanese expressive form for the prominent, cultural communication of common sense. More recently, Katriel (2004) has powerfully explored “soul talk, talking straight, and talk radio” as three forms of cultural communication that gave, incrementally, developmental shape and meaning to 20th-century Israeli society. Boromisza-Habashi (2013) has explored the charged nature of “hate speech” in Hungary including its conflicted commentary concerning morality, social action, political identities, and public debate.

In each of these studies, the author has explored indigenous practices of communication by identifying cultural terms for them; observed routine enactments of the practices so identified; and investigated the various meanings, premises, and rules for these practices. Bringing together studies of this kind, and similar others, should prove invaluable to understanding communication, cultural variability, and ways of studying communication as such. Each explores meta-communicative vocabularies that actively create a view of communication in a specific locale in the world today. The studies explore cultural terms for communication of various kinds, including varieties of Arabic (Suleiman), being “irreverent” in Australian English (Goddard and Cramer), or Belarusian and US English varieties of “mediation” (Vasilyeva). Each brings into view acts or styles of situated practice, and ways a community of people think it is or should be done. The focus on important cultural terms and normative matters is important today. These are often deeply active when cultural communication is getting done, as when different vocabularies for “dialogue” are co-active in many languages around the world (e.g., Carbaugh, Boromisza-Habashi, & Ge, 2006; Carbaugh, Nuciforo, Saito, & Shin-shin, 2011; Wierzbicka, 2006).

Design of Chapters

Each chapter in the volume has the following features: (1) each chapter will include a focus on communication as it is conceived and studied in a particular region of the world. The regions covered are broad geographically and include, albeit unevenly, a variety in languages: Akan, Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, English, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Ojibwa (Anishinaabemowin), Russian, Spanish, and Taiwanese/Chinese (Hoklo). Varieties within languages are explored such as Australian and British Englishes (Chapters 8, 9, 11), as is the combination of languages as in styles of speaking as with the Taiwanese Hakka (Chapter 10); (2) each chapter reports, and subsequently analyzes a selection of prominent cultural terms about communication in the local language(s) used in the region of concern. This analysis gives some attention to the ways the local language is used to construct a local view of communication; (3) each chapter, following the terms for communication analyzed, describes related routine communication events, acts, or social styles in which these valued (and perhaps by contrast non-valued) practices of communication are active. The idea, then, is not only to examine the meanings about communication within a local language—varieties included—but also to identify how those meanings are active in particular practices and places within the region of concern. (4) Authors also comment, if possible, on the way the study of communication is structured in academic units, or university curricula within the region of concern. This type of comment, when it occurs, provides bases for understanding not just local communication practices, but ways it is studied academically. (5) Authors at times also critically reflect upon the relation between communication as it is conceived through a local set of terms, and communication as it is studied in the region’s colleges and/or universities. Each chapter, then, to the extent possible, comparatively analyzes the local language about communication and its related practices, with that prevalent in the (mostly but not exclusively western) field of communication. Authors were invited to comment on the relation between the local language and the vocabulary for communication study most active in the field of communication generally including reference to academic terms like Communication (as an unmarked term), Interpersonal Communication, Organizational Communication, Mass Media, Rhetoric, Speech, or the like.

The editor admits that these features undoubtedly appear in an uneven way across chapters. Some authors give more emphasis and detailed treatment to linguistic analysis, others to cultural analysis, while others may focus on the structure of academic units, with some unable to do so, and so on. This is seen not as a disadvantage as much as a necessity for the work the handbook sets for itself. The intellectual virtue is in having reports or chapters that share most of the above common features, to some degree, and thus provide some bases for comparatively studying communication in cross-cultural perspective.

Organization of Chapters

The organization of the handbook is into eight imperfect units. The units illustrate some of the key features of communication that are addressed in the volume. The units reflect spheres of concern when examining communication and culture in a comparative perspective. Questions arise such as how communication, and effective communication is conceived and evaluated; what prominent styles of communication are active in a place; how, if at all, is this style associated with an identity; is this based in national, ethnic, gendered, political, institutional, religious and/or other concerns; what role do channels and mediated instruments play? By raising and addressing questions as these, the authors place their understanding of communication in cultural contexts specifically.

The handbook, so designed and executed, demonstrates communication in cross-cultural perspective. Here is how it is organized: Part II discusses the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Editorial Team
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Introducing the Handbook
• Part II: The Idea(l)s of Communication in Cultural Context
• Part III: Critical Inquiry through Plaintive Forms of Cultural Communication, National Identity
• Part IV: Cultural Styles of Communication with Special Attention to Identity
• Part V: Electronic and Written Media, Mobile Communication
• Part VI: Interpersonal Communication, Gender, Respect, Sociability
• Part VII: Organizational Communication
• Part VIII: Political Communication
• Part IX: Religious-Based Communication
• Author Index
• Subject Index