Cultural Communication and Intercultural Contact

Donal Carbaugh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136691393
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

How is cultural identity accomplished interactively? What happens when different cultural identities contact one another? This book presents a series of papers, from classic essays to original expositions, which respond to these questions. The view of communication offered here -- rather than ignoring culture, or making it a variable in an equation -- is based on cultural patterns and situated communication practices, unveiling the multiplicity of factors involved in particular times and places. The contributors to this unusual volume represent a wide range of fields. Their equally diverse offerings will serve to clarify cultural distinctiveness in some communication phenomena, and lay groundwork for the identification of cross-cultural generalities in others.

I

Culture Talking About Itself

DONAL CARBAUGH

The chapters in Part I share at least three commitments for communication study. First, they focus attention on communication patterns that are culturally identifiable. Each explores a resource for communicating that the people under study could, and do, perform, identify, and discuss. The studies are thus grounded in patterns familiar to participants, and used by them. Second, the chapters in Part I take the notion of situation seriously, exploring how the communication pattern of study is situated socially. Where is the pattern used, by whom, toward what ends? The relationship among the pattern, and social situations, is significant generally because all situations support some sayings, while constraining others, with knowledge of the relationship between situations, and patterns of communication appropriate within them, being central to the practice and theory of communication.

Each chapter also demonstrates, in its distinctive way, a general point: There are situations and uses of communication where cultural identity is on display. With regard to the following chapters, the social situations described are quite diverse, including the street corner, the church, classrooms, the home, and television talk shows. The range of uses to which talk is put in such situations is also diverse including responding to insults by peers, discipling children, spiritual (and secular) “calling” and “responding,” playfully insulting one’s peers, solving personal problems including those of self-identity, griping with friends, and giving personal opinions. But in each situation, through historically grounded and socially constrained uses of speech, a more general outcome is getting done: A culture is being put on display as people symbolize a common identity. This is done of course in various ways, because every social context or community is grounded deeply with its own roots. But each such situation and community, through its unique patterns, situations, and uses of communication, says something about itself, displaying—what could be called—its cultural identity.

A Preview

The chapters in Part I describe patterns of communication in social situations by interpreting, at least in part, a culture, a symbolicly acted meaning system. Each chapter shows how parts of culture, or subsystems of meaning-making, are used by persons to conceive of and evaluate moments of everyday life, thus laying bases for a common identity.

Consider chapter 1 by Gerry Philipsen. We see in one community of Teamsters in Chicago how speaking is in some situations motivated by a common identity, being a man, with male performances sometimes aligned with that gender identity. But more than that, the standards for “manly” speech are applied by Teamsters generally, beyond situations where men are men and boys are boys, especially, and quite tellingly, to situations where the Teamster male must make sense of, and coordinate actions with, an outside male who acts in what is to Teamsters an “unmanly” way. On such occassions, standards for Teamsterville maleness are used in order to interpret and subsequently to evaluate the violation by the outsider of the local communication norms. Speaking “like a man” is thus both a reaffirmation of a shared identity (in situations where actions are aligned), and the creative use of the identity to meet the contingencies of daily life (when dealing with the less usual as with some outsiders). Communication – in such situations – thus displays a shared identity of a community, and its uses both to affirm that identity and to creatively interpret problematic moments in daily life. In this sense, the shared identity – like all situations in which cultural identity is creatively affirmed – displays a way of being, the sense of which provides common bases for meanings and actions that are invoked both when acting with those who share the identity, and when dealing with others who do not, as in intercultural contacts with outsiders.

In chapter 3, Daniel and Smitherman-Donaldson give a detailed interpretation of communication within the Black church. They provide a way of listening deeply to a cultural form, call/response, which is of special importance in the Black church. The call/response form evokes a whole historically grounded system of meanings that is in part constitutive of a Black cultural identity. The centrality of religion, the unity of the spiritual and the material within a hierarchy of beliefs, the harmony of person and spirit as when one is possessed by the spirit, the cyclical conception of rhythm and events, are all cultural premises ignited by and reaffirmed through the call/response form. By hearing this meaning system in the call/response performance, one gains a richer sense of this relatively intense and collective performance. Daniel and Smitherman-Donaldson also show how the form is used in secular contexts as well as in sacred ones, and how an understanding of this Black form and its meanings helps unravel some moments of intercultural communication, especially when this Black pattern confronts distinctive others. By enriching our sense of Black identity through this form of expression, Daniel and Smitherman-Donaldson lead us to see (and hear) more sharply not only some cultural bases of the identity, but also others which it exposes through cross-cultural juxtaposition.

Where Daniel and Smitherman-Donaldson demonstrate the importance of a religious situation, a call/response form, and its historical meanings to a cultural identity, Wieder and Pratt (chapter 5) explore various situations in order to identify how a “real” Osage Indian both cues and enables “real Indianness” with others. Wieder and Pratt, as do the Osage of which Pratt is a member, take cultural identity not as a given but as a problem that must be continually and convincingly performed. The importance of the performance was suggested to them by the prominence among the Osage of the question, “Who is an Indian?” Note that the question motivating their investigation is not just a “research question,” but is moreover a culturally loaded question for the Osage at least in some social situations. In responding to this culturally located question, they show how Osage use norms to structure and evaluate communication, to engage each other in cultural forms such as “razzing” (including how this form is distinct from similar other cultural forms such as Black “ranking”), and to express meanings of harmony and modesty in the performance. The moment-by-moment use of these resources, they argue, is not merely a manifestation of some ascribed or achieved status, but is an essential constituent in the cultural “being” of “a real Osage Indian.” In their epilogue, Wieder and Pratt discuss problems they confronted in coming to know a “native view,” thus sensitizing readers to possible “discordances” between the cultural actors’ and the ethnographers’ meanings.

In chapters 7 and 9, the cultural form of ritual is used to demonstrate how rather routine moments of communication can attain great forcefulness in the construction of cultural identity. In chapter 7, Katriel and Philipsen describe a “communication ritual” that is discussed and practiced by some Americans. They interpret the ritual along dimensions of folk meanings and elaborate its sense with two metaphors, one indigenous (communication as industrious work) and another more analytic (communication as ritual). They describe a sequence of communicative acts that seeks the purposes of solving personal problems and celebrating the cultural identity of “self” and close “relations” among participants. In chapter 9, Katriel describes how Israeli “griping parties” follow a similar ritualized form, but its shape is more cyclical, and its purposes more public, celebrating a cultural identity not of self and uniqueness, but of commonality, with the “common feeling” less as an individual and more as a communal member who shares a fate and feelings of entrapment in a common community life. Because these two studies employ the same conceptual framework, the juxtaposition of them easily reveals what is distinct to each: A tone of seriousness in some American “communication” versus a playfully plaintive Israeli “griping,” personal problems as topics for “communication” versus public problems for “griping,” the culturally sensed goals of self-identity versus communal solidarity, and a linear versus a spiralling form, respectively. Noteworthy as well is the commonality to both ritual forms: They both provide ways for persons to discuss the problems of their common cultural life. Katriel’s and Philipsen’s work further shows how advantageous it can be to work in intercultural research teams, especially with similar analytical tools, for one is positioned better to identify what is distinctive in specific cultural performances, as well as what holds more generally across cultures.

The final chapter in Part I displays a system of communication norms and codes that is used during a popular American media event. The norms, like those reported for the “communication ritual,” include the preference for self-presentation, but unlike the “communication ritual,” they suggest ways for persons to address problems publicly, with the relevant tone being tolerance and respect, rather than closeness and intimacy. Note that resulting from the cultural performance is – at the level of topic – not agreement, but great dissonance. The cultural form for the discussion is, however, agreeable, and is unveiled by exploring a system of rules that persons use to orient and assess the propriety of their communication conduct. Complementing these normative rules are codes that suggest interpretations linking one level of discourse, such as the act of opinion-giving, to another, such as the cultural identity of “self.” Examining mediated communication this way demonstrates how a cultural identity, when spoken, can produce interactional outcomes such as topical dissonance and a cultural personalization of standards. A system of mediated communication thus produces a public situation of topical dissonance through a communal standard of intimacy. A cultural identity, through a situation and uses of communication, is linked closely to intimacy and dissonance as well as to common and cultural norms.

As is shown in these chapters, the possibilities for, and consequences of cultural communication are quite varied. For example, cultural resources of communication can identify the conditions and constraints for proper communicative performance itself, how these resources are socially enacted and evaluated, their moment-by-moment use in the local management of sequences, and how some such resources even assume the status of ritual. Taken together, then, the chapters show how some situations and uses of communication display parts of a culture and, in turn, how various communication resources perform, coordinate, and evaluate cultural identities. As such, the chapters suggest ways to hear – in communication patterns, situations, and uses – a display of cultural identity, culture talking to and about itself.

Cultural Communication

The chapters presented in Part I can be conceived broadly as exercises in cultural communication, that is, each chapter shows how socially situated knowledge is necessary for interpreting the common meaningfulness of communication to its participants. Although the authors of these chapters do not label their contributions as “cultural communication studies,” I treat them as such in order to highlight some of the issues that – taken together – the chapters raise, and note why such an exercise is fundamental for developing a cultural understanding of communication (the focus of Part I), and intercultural practices (the focus of Part II), which has some degree of cross-cultural utility (the focus of Part III).

The general approach addresses three fundamental problems. The first is a problem of shared identity or group membership: How does communication create, affirm, and develop a common identity? This problem in turn is based on three fundamental subissues: of symbolic meaning, the common sense of the identity; of symbolic form, the episodes in which the identity is creatively played out; and of social function, the union of people through some degree of identification. The second problem is the more general problem of shared, public, and common meaning: How does communication create, affirm, and develop common meanings? The third problem is the problem of dialectical tensions intrinsic to cultural communication itself: How does communication create yet reaffirm, individuate yet unify, stabilize yet change common meanings and members?

Respective to these problems, cultural communication can be conceived as the creation and affirmation of a shared identity, through specific domains, which mediates between basic discursive dialectics, such as autonomy and union, individual and community, powerful and powerless. I comment briefly on the three basic elements in this statement, shared identity, domains, and dialectics, with reference to the chapters in Part I.

Note that cultural communication, so conceived, includes, first, a sense of shared identity that is not only affirmed or reaffirmed, but also created in contexts. In this sense, the communication of culture involves not merely a reproduction of a historical and common sense, but also its fluid shaping and use to meet the various contingencies of everyday living. As Wieder and Pratt discuss the Osage communication of a “real Indian” identity, they show not just that the Osage have patterns that display a common identity, but moreover that these are variously pitched and combined to meet the contingencies of daily life. Exigencies for asking, “who is an Indian,” ways for evaluating whether or not this is the right thing to ask, and when asked appropriately, ways for responding to the question, as well as criteria for evaluating responses, all such concerns vary, but they do so in a patterned way, according to the culture system used, and the social situations in which participants find themselves. Consequently, Osage who find themselves in classrooms with other Osage may avert eyes, be silent or defer to others, but when with peers elsewhere, may engage in a kind of raucous verbal dueling. Both performances – in their proper places – are constitutive of “real In-dianness.” But it is not only that cultural identity suggests patterns of variability across situations in one community’s life, but also that such patterns are invoked sometimes to meet the contingencies of life outside one’s community, as when Philipsen early on used academic patterns to guide his communication with Teamsters, rendering his performances ineffectual to them, just as Teamsters used their local patterns to interact with and evaluate him. Cultural communication is not just a simple playing out of broad common patterns; it is the variable and moment-by-moment use of these inside and out – to produce one’s actions as a kind of person and to hear other’s actions so produced – to guide the senses, performances, and evaluations of communication, within and across social worlds.

Note that cultural identity is being proposed here as a broad communicational and cultural concept, entitling a system of practices that spans many types of persona, each of course embedded within the broader discursive formations of social life. The intent is to exclude none. The concept thus includes identities based on various criteria including gender and occupation (Teamsterville male), race (Black), ethnicity generally (Osage), and some more broadly geographic and national in scope (Israeli, American). The theoretical point is an organization of particular discursive practices as they position identities, as they situate the communication of personhood, within an identifiable context or sociocultural (including political, economic, and historical) field.

Note also how various cultural domains can serve as bases for identity displays. The identity(ies) of a culture may revolve around one substantive area more than others involving claims in an idiom of persons, or communication, or may be grounded in others such as religion, politics, history, society, nature, or some creative combination of these. For example, the call/response form occurs within and elaborates a domain of religion that itself, in some situations, becomes a marker of Black cultural identity – expressing in a social situation a cultural identity through a religious domain – just as the domains of public problems for Israelis, or personal problems for some Americans, become socially situated markers of cultural identity. For any given people in a place, some domains are elaborated, and some are not; and, for every people, the domains used, are developed in local and particular ways. So tailored, they become markers of cultural identity.

Third, notice how cultural communication is heard as a dialectically elastic process, including tensions between creation and affirmation, the individual and communal, closeness and distance, equal and unequal, resource endowed or deprived, the social goals of autonomy and union, or between personal and social orders. One goal in such study is interpreting, in culturally situated practices, whether and if such tensions operate, their local conception and power, their role in shaping patterns of interaction, as well as the possible means available for their resolution. Cultural communication may thus range from moments of integrative and ritualized recreation, as in some Black churches, to hotly contested, creative, and discordant battles, as on “Donahue.” Displayed across such moments, as shown in the following chapters, are the tensional bases of communication performance and their role in motivating, affirming, and transforming cultural identities.

Norms, Forms, and Codes

By viewing communication as the creation and affirmation of cultural identities in social situations, several theoretical issues are highlighted, such as problems of common identity, symbolic meanings, forms, social functions, common meanings, and dialectical tensions, among others. Here I suggest three...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Culture Talking About Itself
• 1 Speaking “Like a Man” in Teamsterville: Culture Patterns of Role Enactment in an Urban Neighborhood
• 2 Reflections on Speaking “Like a Man”in Teamsterville
• 3 How I Got Over: Communication Dynamics in the Black Community
• 4 How I Got Over and Continue to Do So in Our Mothers’ Churches
• 5 On Being a Recognizable Indian Among Indians
• 6 On the Occasioned and Situated Character of Members’ Questions and Answers: Reflections on the Question, “Is He or She a Real Indian?”
• 7 “What We Need is Communication”: “Communication” as a Cultural Category in Some American Speech
• 8 Reflections on “Communication” as a Cultural Category in Some American Speech
• 9 ‘Griping’ as a Verbal Ritual in Some Israeli Discourse
• 10 Reflections on the Israeli ‘Griping’ Ritual
• 11 Communication Rules in
• Part II: Intercultural Communication
• 12 Intercultural Communication in Central Australia
• 13 An Ethnomethodological Agenda in the Study of Intercultural Communication
• 14 Force Fields in Black and White Communication
• 15 Cultural Pluralism: Black and White Styles
• 16 The Interactional Accomplishment of Discrimination in South Africa
• 17 Reflections on Language, Interaction, and Context: Micro and Macro Issues
• 18 Athabaskan-English Interethnic Communication
• 19 Epilogue to “Athabaskan-English Interethnic Communication”
• Part III: Cross-Cultural Comparisons of Communication Phenomena
• 20 “To Give Up on Words”: Silence in Western Apache Culture
• 21 Communicative Silence: A Cross-Cultural Study of Basso’s Hypothesis
• 22 Some Sources of Cultural Variability in the Regulation of Talk
• 23 Epilogue to “Some Sources of Cultural Variability in the Regulation of Talk”
• 24 A Classification of Illocutionary Acts
• 25 The Things We Do With Words: Ilongot Speech Acts and Speech Act Theory in Philosophy
• 26 Epilogue to the Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts
• 27 Epilogue to “The Things We Do With Words”
• Author Index
• Subject Index