Intercultural Communication & Ideology

SAGE Publications

Adrian Holliday

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781446243190
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Taking on issues normally left in the margins, Intercultural Communication and Ideology revises the way we think of intercultural communication by insisting that we consider its ideological component. In this brilliant and engaging book about culture and the interstices that comprise the grounds for our interactions, Adrian Holliday shows us the necessity for a cosmopolitan process that expands the basis of our intercultural work.
- Molefi Kete Asante, Temple University "Adrian Holliday's highly readable and thought provoking volume is a welcome addition to the existing body of work on intercultural communication and ideology... With its comprehensive coverage of studies in the field and critical discussion of dominant theoretical paradigms, this refreshing book provides a valuable resource for both students and experienced researchers but also everyone interested in intercultural communication. An authoritative and open minded book the field will embrace."
- Jo Angouri, University of the West of England Although communication is central to the humanities and social sciences, the inter-cultural level is often, peculiarly, left out of accounts. So what is intercultural communication? How does it relate to global processes and questions of identity? This comprehensive book examines the main features of intercultural communication. It critically examines the main positions in the field. It addresses intercultural communication within the context of global politics, both addressing the specific problems that derive from Western ideology and setting out an agenda for research.

The book investigates categories of cultural action and itemizes the machinery for the illumination of inter-cultural processes. Holliday shows how a dialogue between national structures and creative universal cultural skills can be carried on in new locations, relating intercultural communication to theories of multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism and globalization, while also exploring how ideology permeates inter-cultural processes and develops an alternative ?grammar? of culture.

1

Key Discussions

In this book I will present culture and intercultural communication as movable concepts with fluid and negotiable boundaries. While national structures are important and influential in framing our lives, they do not confine or explain some very important aspects of our cultural behaviour. The book will explore the possibility of significant underlying universal processes which provide people from all cultural backgrounds with the potential to dialogue with and transcend national structures, to cross boundaries and contribute to and enrich cultural practices wherever they find them. This cosmopolitan potential may well have always been there; but it is becoming increasingly evident within a globalized world.

There is, however, another side. Theories of culture are also employed by social groups to construct ideological imaginations both of themselves and others. I will argue that this takes place in everyday life and in the academy, and that current common and established theories of culture are ideological in nature. This relationship with ideology is complex, for it may also be argued that constructing imagined theories of culture is an innate part of the way in which to be is at the same time an artefact of their cultural make-up. Investigating the relationship between culture and ideology is therefore not simply to untangle fact from fiction but also to understand more deeply the workings of culture itself.

The concept of discourse is used as an instrument of analysis throughout the book. It is at the level of discourse that individuals are able to negotiate, make sense of and practise culture; and it is within this process that imaginations about culture are generated and ideology is both experienced and manufactured. It is from an interrogation of the discourses of and about culture that the book builds a new ‘grammar’ of culture and suggests its implications for understanding a cosmopolitan world.

The relationship between ideology and culture cannot, however, be left as an aspect of how culture works. Ideological imaginations of culture very often lead to the demonization of a particular foreign Other. While it is very clear that this Othering happens at all levels of national and international life everywhere in the world, I shall focus on the Western imagination for three reasons. First, the majority of the established theories of culture within the academy derive from Western sources. Second, the West is the major driving force in current global politics, operating from a position of political, economic and cultural dominance in relation to the rest of the world, and these theories of culture impact on the desire to export ‘democracy’ and somehow ‘improve’ the imagined culturally deficient non-West. While people are Othered in all walks of life, the global politics which is dominated by the West permanently positions large parts of the world. Significant here is Kumaravadivelu’s (2007b) statement that a major feature of the 20th century was the West defining the rest of the world – a state of affairs which I feel still continues, and which is (has been) embedded in history to the extent that it is very hard to undo.

Third, Western theories of culture also demonstrate a high degree of denial of ideology. In the academy there is a powerful emphasis on the scientific neutrality of theories of culture, and in recent years the sub-discipline of intercultural communication has claimed to move away from Othering. In society generally there is the major irony that the West claims a high degree of awareness and understanding. Hence the primary research question which the book seeks to answer – how is it possible that, in such a climate of sensitivity towards people from other cultural backgrounds, there is still such a lack of awareness and understanding?

To address these issues I will adopt a critical cosmopolitan approach in which common perceptions of culture are recognized as being ideological and constructed by political interest. While there will be a postmodern orientation, in appreciating that the many established ‘truths’ about culture are in fact socially constructed, there will also be an acknowledgement of cultural realism in that there is a cultural truth which is hidden by these ideological constructions. This will be supported by empirical investigation involving interviews with 32 informants from a wide range of national locations across the world and with reconstructed ethnographic accounts and evidence from the media and literary fiction. This fits with the critical cosmopolitan view that there are unrecognized cultural realities which have been pushed to the margins by Western definitions, and that it is therefore from the margins that we must learn the real nature of culture (Hall, 1991b).

At a practical level, the success of intercultural communication will not be modelled around awareness of and sensitivity to the essentially different behaviours and values of ‘the other culture’, but around the employment of the ability to read culture which derives from underlying universal cultural processes.

The discussion of culture and intercultural communication is difficult at all times. The approach taken in this book is further problematized by the insurmountable dangers of falling into the same trap of overgeneralization and Othering that is being addressed. The terminology – ‘the West’ and ‘the non-West’, ‘Centre’ and ‘Periphery’– which any discussion of global Othering has to employ, is clumsy and creates a seductive ease which could paper over the complexity that I am trying to represent. It is hoped, however, that the necessary sense of complexity will be rectified in the breadth of examples and issues posed.

In this chapter I will rehearse some of the major themes which underpin a critical discussion of culture. The discussion of essentialism and non-essentialism will be traced back to established theories of national cultural difference and how they have been sustained in current views within the academy. The familiar themes of individualism and collectivism will be critiqued as basic icons of an idealized Self and a demonized Other, to be interrogated further throughout the book. The critical cosmopolitan approach, which recognizes the influence of ideology and the marginalization of non-Western cultural realities, will then be introduced to counter these discussions.

Chapter 2 will present the interpretivist methodology for a critical intercultural awareness which supports the critical cosmopolitan approach and enables a non-aligned reading of culture. The concept of critical reading and categories of cultural action will be introduced, to form the basis of cultural awareness tasks throughout the book. Chapter 3 will make the first reference to my major data set of interviews and use them to establish a cultural complexity which begins with the individual and presents a cross-cutting dialogue with national structures. This picture of culture will be aligned with the social action theory of Max Weber and set in contrast to the structural-functionalism of Emile Durkheim which has been the basis of established essentialist thinking.

Chapter 4 will look in detail at how the deep narratives of an idealized Western Self have penetrated everyday life and lead to a demonization of a non-Western Other. The strength and sustainability of these narratives as apparently positive, sensitive and ‘helping’ will be located in a liberal multiculturalist ideology which denies the chauvinism implicit in the individualism–collectivism divide and persists in a disbelief of non-Western cultural proficiency. Chapter 5 will present the alternative, Periphery narrative of the non-Western Other struggling to establish visibility against the dominant imagination of the Centre-West. The purpose here will not be to speak for the Periphery, whose arguments are well rehearsed in postcolonialist theory, but to unpick the common narratives of modernity and Westernization which continue to cast the foreign as only able to succeed through learning the values of the West. The basic tenet that one does not have to be Westernized to be modern will be established.

Chapter 6 will pull together observations regarding the nature of culture from previous chapters in order to construct an alternative grammar of culture which indicates the loose, negotiated relationship between the particularities of national structures and cultural resources and the universality of small culture formation at a discoursal level. Chapter 7 will continue with the notion of discourse in small culture formation and explore how within everyday and professional contexts it can also work to generate cultural disbelief in the foreign Other. The notion of an uncrossable line between Self and Other and the resulting concept of the third space will be critiqued as discoursal products of this disbelief.

Chapter 8 will explore the more positive, creative side of small culture formation in order to make sense of the behaviour of cultural newcomers. The discoursal strategies which they employ will be explored. The phenomena of silence and withdrawal will be framed as strategies of resistance; and the principle of transferring cultural experience from familiar to unfamiliar settings can enable newcomers to change and enrich the practices which they find. Chapter 9 will conclude with a discussion of the relationship between the imagined and real cultural worlds discussed throughout the book. This will be set within a framework of cultural realism in which the social construction of culture is related to a false consciousness.

The rest of this chapter will introduce some basic concepts that structure this discussion and indicate issues which will be developed in the rest of the book.

Essentialism

I shall begin with essentialism because it is commonly felt to be a bad thing, and yet, as I shall argue, continues to sit at the centre of common perceptions of culture both in the academy and in everyday life. Essentialism presents people’s individual behaviour as entirely defined and constrained by the cultures in which they live so that the stereotype becomes the essence of who they are.¹

The most common aspects of essentialism are listed on the left of Table 1, and are to do with separate cultures as physical territories. Much of this essentialism will seem natural and normal because it is in many ways the default way of thinking about how we are different from each other. There is, however, only a short, easy distance from this apparently objective essentialist thinking to chauvinistic statements such as ‘in Middle Eastern culture there is no concept of individualized critical thinking’. As I shall demonstrate later, this statement carries a moralistic judgement because of the positive status given to ‘individualized critical thinking’ in the mind of the speaker. This statement Others Middle Eastern people in the sense that they are lumped together as though all the same under a grossly simplistic, exaggerated and homogeneous, imagined, single culture. In Chapter 4 I shall explore in detail the indelible manner in which such Othering persists from an excuse for colonizing foreign societies into the present day. The discourse of Othering is so powerful that anyone who does not fit the essentialist definition is thought to be not a ‘real’ Chinese, Arab, Muslim or whatever; and in the case of non-Western cultures it is thought that they must be ‘westernized’ to have left their true nature behind. The serious implication here is that people are not allowed to step outside their designated cultural places.

Table 1 Essentialism and non-essentialism⁷

Whereas essentialism, on the left of Table1 , claims certainty about what sort of people can be found where, non-essentialism, on the right of the table, presents a more complex picture which is less easy to talk about. The statements are more cautious and shrink from pinning down the nature of individual cultures. There are serious disciplines implicit in these restrained statements, which I shall look at in detail in Chapter 2.

Neo-essentialism

While appreciating the artificiality of such dichotomies, and that there will be many positions in between and crossovers, I am going to base the discussions in this book around two basic paradigms – neo-essentialism and critical cosmopolitanism. I use the term neo-essentialism to refer to the dominant approach within the sub-discipline of intercultural communication studies which follows the essentialist and highly influential work of theorists such as Hofstede, while claiming a more liberal, non-essentialist vision. Critical cosmopolitanism is an established movement within sociology which I shall describe below. I will first briefly critique the work of Hofstede, and then demonstrate how neo-essentialism has developed from the type of thinking which he promotes.

The Hofstedian legacy

While the problems with essentialism are generally accepted, the temptation to be essentialist is quite deeply rooted in a long-standing desire to ‘fix’ the nature of culture and cultural difference. A particularly influential example is in the work of Hofstede. Based on data from IBM subsidiaries in 72 countries in 1968 and 1972 (Hofstede, 2001: x), Hofstede’s model presents culture ‘as a collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another’ (ibid.: 9). Hofstede does acknowledge the dangers of ethnocentric stereotypes such as ‘all Dutch people are honest’ (ibid.: 14) and recognizes that a culture can be ‘any human collectivity or category: a profession, an age group, an entire gender, or a family’ (ibid.: 10). Nevertheless there is a tight comparison between national cultures as complete and self-sufficient social systems (ibid.). Each system governs the way in which the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface and Methodology
• 1 Key Discussions
• 2 Critical Cultural Awareness
• 3 Cultural Complexity
• 4 The Indelible Politics of Self and Other
• 5 Unnoticed Periphery Identities
• 6 A Grammar of Culture
• 7 Discourses of Cultural Disbelief
• 8 Creative Cultural Engagement
• 9 Culture, Real or Imagined?
• Glossary
• References
• Index