Intercultural Communication

An Advanced Resource Book for Students

Adrian Holliday, Martin Hyde, John Kullman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315460635
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Routledge Applied Linguistics is a series of comprehensive textbooks, providing students and researchers with the support they need for advanced study in the core areas of English language and Applied Linguistics.

Each book in the series guides readers through three main sections, enabling them to explore and develop major themes within the discipline.

• Section A, Introduction, establishes the key terms and concepts and extends readers' techniques of analysis through practical application.

• Section B, Extension, brings together influential articles, sets them in context, and discusses their contribution to the field.

• Section C, Exploration, builds on knowledge gained in the first two sections, setting thoughtful tasks around further illustrative material. This enables readers to engage more actively with the subject matter and encourages them to develop their own research responses.

Throughout the book, topics are revisited, extended, interwoven and deconstructed, with the reader's understanding strengthened by tasks and follow-up questions.

This highly-successful text introduces and explores the dynamic area of intercultural communication, and the updated third edition features:

• new readings by Prue Holmes, Fred Dervin, Lei Guo and Summer Harlow, Miriam Sobré-Denton and Nilaniana Bardham, which reflect the most recentdevelopments in the field

• refreshed and expanded examples and exercises including new material on the world of business, radicalisation and cultural fundamentalism

• extended discussion of topics which include cutting-edge material on cosmopolitanism, immigrants' intercultural communication and cultural travel

• revised further reading.

Written by experienced teachers and researchers in the field, Intercultural Communication, Third edition provides an essential textbook for advanced students studying this topic.

Section B
Extension

Units in Section B are centred on texts concerned with issues introduced in Section A, which will also be explored further in Section C of the book. Each unit comprises an introduction, one or more texts accompanied by tasks, and a commentary, in which we point to related issues and perspectives of other writers. For each unit there are suggestions for further reading. Units B0.1, B0.2 and B0.3 serve as an introduction to Section B. Units B0.1 and B0.2 are concerned with a number of issues which we will explore in more depth later in the section, and which were introduced in Section A – for example:

• ■ How our understanding of ourselves and of different people, and of the relationships and communication between these individuals, is often framed by the language (or ‘discourse’) that we use when we speak or write.
• ■ How we tend to group people together under simplistic labels, while not considering the implications of doing so.
• ■ How the language we use all too often exaggerates the differences between people rather than the similarities.
• ■ How the mass media often engages in simplifying issues and exaggerating differences.
• ■ How the ways ‘cultures’ and ‘communities’ are referred to, and talked and written about, often serve particular vested interests.

Unit B0.3 aims to provide an overview of intercultural communication by highlighting older and more recent perspectives in the field. Units B1.1 to B1.5 explore different aspects of and approaches to identity and consider what identity might mean for the individual, as well as how the individual may construct identity, in the contemporary world. Units B2.1 to B2.5 are concerned with ‘Othering’, and with how images of the Other, in both the literal and metaphorical sense, continue both to dominate understandings of, and interaction with, people of different cultural identities. Units B3.1 to B3.5 focus on representation of different individuals and groups in the media, online, in academic and business discourse, and in intercultural training. Unit B3.6 is concerned with considering how we can move beyond the narrow representation and Othering of individuals and cultures in intercultural training.

We have employed a number of criteria when selecting texts for inclusion, as follows:

• ■ Accessibility – the capacity of texts to be accessible to the reader who may not have specialist knowledge of issues being discussed.
• ■ Richness – the capacity of texts, on the other hand, to introduce key concepts and raise important issues in terms of the themes of the book: identity, Othering, and representation.
• ■ Relevance – the capacity of texts to introduce concepts and raise issues which are of relevance to readers studying or working in a range of disciplines or fields.
• ■ Variety – the capacity of texts to provide a variety of perspectives, and to be taken from a variety of genres.

As research in various sub-fields in the related disciplines of cultural studies, media studies, and applied linguistics has demonstrated, the selection of a text is in itself significant, and reflects a certain personal standpoint. The texts in Section B do indeed reflect our own interests, and, in some cases, our own experiences, and we have sometimes included personal reflections in introductory sections and commentaries. Taken together, the texts reflect our belief that it is engaging with the ideas of others that plays an important part in understanding ourselves and our own contextual realities. ‘Engagement’ does not necessarily involve ‘agreement’; we do not expect you to agree with all the ideas in the texts, and we do not do so ourselves.

With regard to the tasks designed to accompany texts, these are designed as a way of helping you to consider the implications and applications of issues raised, and perspectives provided in the texts and to consider them particularly as they relate to yourself. We, like anyone else writing tasks to accompany texts, are open to accusations of leading you towards certain conclusions and positions. We have tried to avoid doing so, and have deliberately made tasks generally open-ended, but we are aware that the very questions we have asked you to consider will inevitably reflect our own preoccupations and concerns.

Introduction

Unit B0.1 ‘Culture’ and ‘Community’ in Everyday Discourse

The first text in this unit was written by the social anthropologist Ulf Hannerz, who is particularly concerned with how the term ‘culture’ is used in everyday discourse, and emphasises the need to ‘keep a critical eye on the varieties of culturespeak both among ourselves and in society at large’ (1999: 396).

Ylanne-McEwen and Coupland (2000: 210) state that ‘studies aiming to describe “intercultural” communication should ideally be linked to studies of how individuals and social or cultural groups define themselves and others’. The second text, by sociologist Gerd Baumann, is an extract from such a study, which was the result of extensive ethnographic research carried out in Southall in west London, England.

Task B0.1.1

• ➤ The word ‘culture’ is used in many different ways (often in combination with other words) and with a variety of different meanings.
• ➤ Note down a number of different uses of the word ‘culture’ (as well as ‘cultural’) which you have come across recently in the media and everyday use.

Hannerz, U. (1999) ‘Reflections of varieties of culturespeak.’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 2/3. pp. 393–407 (extracts)

Text B0.1.1 U. Hannerz

A sunny morning a few years ago, at my summer house in southern Sweden, with a national election season approaching, I found a leaflet in my mail box. In blue letters against a yellow background (the colours of the Swedish flag), an extremist group in a nearby town argued that the country had turned from a folkhem, a ‘home of the people’, into a ‘multicultural inferno’.

One could reflect that this suggests two things about the place of the culture concept in contemporary discourse. One is that ‘culture’ is no longer a notion occurring mostly among the well-educated, within the confines of their scholarly, intellectual, and esthetic [sic] preoccupations. Increasingly it, and other concepts deriving from it, seem to be just about everywhere, from public commentary and political agitation through organisational consultancy to commerce and advertising. And there are no real barriers separating different uses and different users. Researchers and policy makers now share the term ‘multiculturalism’ with ethnic minority politicians, as well as with the xenophobia activists claiming to represent a silent majority. One has to be sensitive, consequently, to those refractions of meaning which may occur as a vocabulary of culture moves between contexts.

The other thing to note, with regard to that suggestion of a ‘multicultural inferno’, is that while ‘culture’ in the past was probably a term with mostly consensual and positive overtones, it now very often shows up in contexts of discord – ‘culture clash’, ‘culture conflict’, ‘culture wars’; and perhaps also, at a different level, ‘culture shock’. A major reason for this, no doubt, is that culturespeak now very often draws our attention to what are taken to be the interfaces between cultures; a tendency which in its turn has much to do with that polymorphous global interconnectedness through which such interfaces become increasingly prominent in human experience.

Scrutinising culturespeak

… Cultural study is not only a summarising label for all those inquiries we conduct into the wide range of things we consider cultural, but also (not least in the present period) a study of popular theories, prototheories and quasitheories of culture.

Cultural fundamentalism is only one of these. They may develop in different contexts, shaping themselves to meet different requirements, and they need not be all malignant. I mentioned above the concept of ‘culture shock’, diffusing widely in the late 20th century as a way of referring to the kind of emotional and intellectual unease that sometimes occurs in encounters with unfamiliar meanings and practices. Rather facetiously, I have also occasionally referred to the growth of a ‘culture shock prevention industry’. The proper term for its practitioners, I should quickly note, is ‘interculturalists’ – a new profession of people working commercially as trainers and consultants, trying to teach sensitivity toward cultural diversity to various audiences through lectures, simulation games, videos, practical handbooks and some variety of other means. From an academic vantage point one may be critical of certain of the efforts – they may seem a bit trite, somewhat inclined toward stereotyping, occasionally given to exaggerating cultural differences perhaps as a way of positioning the interculturalists themselves as an indispensable profession …

It would seem helpful to make more continuously visible how both persistence and change in culture depend on human activity; and how in contemporary, complex social life, the combined cultural process, and the overall habitat of meanings and practices in which we dwell, is the outcome of the variously deliberate pursuit by a variety of actors of their own agendas, with different power and different social and spatial reach, and with foreseen or unanticipated consequences. Such an approach to cultural process would be a challenge to each of us, layperson or scholar, to try and work out what ingredients go into situations that may puzzle us or annoy us …

The attention to processes and people may also help unpack the assumption of the unitary, integrated culture which may not be unique to cultural fundamentalism but which goes well with it. We have an old habit of speaking about ‘cultures’, in the plural form, as if it were self-evident that such entities exist side by side as neat packages, each of us identified with only one of them – this is indeed a time-worn implication of at least one ‘anthropological culture concept’. And the notion of ‘cultural identity’ often goes with it. It may well be that some considerable number of people really live encapsulated among others who share most of the same experiences, ideas, beliefs, values, habits, and tastes. Nonetheless, it appears increasingly likely that many people have biographies entailing various cross-cutting allegiances – they share different parts of their personal cultural repertoires with different collections of people. And if there is an ‘integrated whole’, it may be a quite individual thing. Under such circumstances, people may well value some parts of these personal repertoires more highly than others, identify themselves particularly in terms of them, and identify in collective terms more strongly with those other people with whom they share them. It could also be, on the other hand, that they may resist attempts to categorise them unidimensionally in terms of any single cultural characteristic.

… and the point here must be that whatever is most enduring is not necessarily also at any one time most central to people’s cultural preoccupations, and to their sense of who they are. There are now surely many different ways of being more or less Christian, more or less Muslim, more or less Confucian; and of being at the same time some number of other things. Most significantly, finally, an emphasis on process may entail a subversion of a kind of mystique of cultural difference which seems to be an important part of cultural fundamentalism.

Task B0.1.2

• ➤ In the text Hannerz writes that ‘… while “culture” in the past was probably a term with mostly consensual and positive overtones, it now very often shows up in contexts of discord’.
• ➤ In looking back at the notes you made in Task B0.1.1 on different uses of the words ‘culture’ and ‘cultural’, do the examples you listed reflect Hannerz’s view that today the term ‘culture’ has negative overtones?

Task B0.1.3

• ➤ In the text Hannerz also writes that ‘It would seem helpful to make more continuously visible … how in contemporary, complex social life, the combined cultural process, and the overall habitat of meanings and practices in which we dwell, is the outcome of the variously deliberate pursuit by a variety of actors of their own agendas …’
• ➤ What ‘actors’ and ‘agendas’ do you think Hannerz is thinking of ?

Task B0.1.4

• ➤ Considering a society you have lived in or are famili...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contents cross-referenced
• List of illustrations
• Series editors’ preface
• Acknowledgements
• How to use this book
• SECTION A: INTRODUCTION – DEFINING CONCEPTS
• SECTION B: EXTENSION
• SECTION C: EXPLORATION
• References
• Further reading
• Index