|
Few fields are as fuzzy as
that of the study of intercultural communication. A name provides an
identity,
we all know, and as such the use of the term 'intercultural
communication'
as a name for a particular set of scientific objects and approaches to
these objects confers an identity to them. The usual effect of such a
name-and-identity-giving
process is that people tend to think they know what exactly what they
talk
about. The truth of the matter is, however, that very often the name
and
the identity suggested by that name obscure a precise understanding of
the target-object. My own experience is this: whenever I accepted to
speak
in front of an audience of experts on intercultural communication, I
found
myself in front of a very heterogeneous group of people, very few of
which
were actually concerned with the study of communication, very few with
the study of culture, and very many were involved in the study of
fields
of application: education, training, management, even christianization
on one or two occasions.
It is therefore no luxury (and
no rhetorical ploy either) to start an exposé such as this one with
a -- rough -- delineation of the kinds of topics I shall talk about. I
have agreed to talk about different approaches to the study of
intercultural
communication. To me, an anthropological linguist and sociolinguist,
communication
means 'real' communication, that is, what people actually do when they
engage in an exchange of meaningful semiotic symbols. I have been
reared
in a tradition that states its preference for looking at facts first,
take
stock of what is observable and attestable in these facts, and only
afterwards
extrapolate in the direction of categories, types and structures of
communication.
Stating this is not stating the obvious. As I said before, the study of
empirical cases is not at the core of what many people understand by
studies
on intercultural communication. Quite a few well-known and widely read
books on intercultural communication do not provide a single real case
analysis, not even a single example of real-life data of people talking
to one another (or writing to one another, for that matter). But to be
very clear right from the start: my own angle is one which restricts
intercultural
communication to real communication between people. It is from that
point
of view that I will engage on a brief set of comments on the
'mainstream'
tradition on intercultural communication (a fairly well-established
tradition
by now). After that, I will add a number of recently voiced
observations
on intercultural communication from within the tradition in which I
like
to situate myself. I particular, I will use and comment on views
recently
articulated by ethnographers such as John Gumperz, Dell Hymes and Ben
Rampton.
1.
The hypostasis of culture
and difference
Let me start by quoting
the introduction of a book on intercultural communication written in
Dutch,
and very influential in the Dutch-speaking world (Pinto 1990). After
having
introduced the notion of cultural difference (labeled 'cultural
relativity'
by Pinto) and having illustrated it by reference to phenomena such as
negotiation
strategies, respect, ways of questioning and so on, Pinto
summarizes:
"In short, everything
which has to do with communication and management in whatever domain is
largely culturally determined: doing business, negotiating, recruiting
and selecting human resources, information, training (and pedagogy),
cooperating
and dealing with conflict."
Well, in contacts between
people with different cultural norms and values, the intercultural
contacts,
there is a heightened chance of misunderstanding, miscommunication and
mismanagement, of which damage to business and personal interests can
be
the result, if one is not well acquainted with each other's norms,
values,
rules of life and codes of behavior. The greater (and deeper) the
differences,
the greater the risk of the abovementioned errors." (1990: 11-12; my
translation,
emphasis in original)
This quote more or less summarizes
the theoretical and definitional premises of a large body of work on
intercultural
communication. It starts from a rather traditional idealist notion of
culture,
consisting of (a) 'core' values and norms related to (b) a complex of
behavioral
patterns derived from customs and expectations in turn anchored into
these
core values and norms. I have discussed this notion of culture on
various
other occasions (Blommaert 1991, 1995, see also Sarangi 1995 for a
broader
discussion), and I can only repeat what I said before. This notion of
culture
imposes a linear and static grid on empiry. It suggests a direct
connection
between a set of stable, immutable essences -- the core values and
norms
-- on the one hand and all kinds of observable behavior on the other.
If
a Japanese does not directly say 'no' when a business proposal is
unacceptable
to him, then that must be a consequence of his cultural principles of
indirectness
and politeness (and not, for instance, of the fact that he is not
entitled
to say either 'no' and 'yes' then and there, or that he needs to
consult
other people before deciding, and so forth).
Remarkably, though, whereas
the intercultural object -- the 'Other' -- is usually pictured as
caught
in a web of age-old essential and inflexible values and customs, those
who have identified the other claim to be free of such determinism.
Their
values are immutable, static, always valid and in action. We, on the
contrary,
have been able to develop 'intercultural awareness' (Pinto 1990: 12).
Our
intercultural training programs attempt "to develop the qualities of
effectiveness
identified by scholars interested in adjustment to other cultures"
(Brislin
1989: 441). This basic distinction between 'cultures' that can be
characterized
by simple propositions summarizing linear relations between values and
behavior, and cultures that seem to be capable of absorbing the
culturally
different ways of thinking and acting of others, has characterized the
tradition of intercultural communication studies ever since its
beginnings
in the 1970s. The first Handbook of intercultural communication
(Asante,
Newmark & Blake [eds.] 1979) set the tone. In papers such as
that of
Melvin Schnapper, the well-trained intercultural executive must
"utilize
different behavior -- through the process of intercultural adaptation,
the manager learns to internalize and/or accept new values,
assumptions,
perceptions, and to risk different and more appropriate behaviors."
(Schnapper
1979: 456)
And coincidentally, we were
the well-trained and interculturally aware ones, who learned how to use
the behavior of them, subjects from of the nonwestern world. Such views
were echoed in ambitious works such as that of Edmund Glenn (1981), who
using his long experience as an advisor on foreign policy to American
presidents
was able to draw a ranking of cultures on the basis of their degree of
appropriateness qua negotiating style. The 'best' style was a rational
and matter-of-fact like style. Our style. Lower on the scale came
cultures
who mixed issues with feelings, rigid ideological dogmata, or who
couldn't
stick to an issue anyway (the Arabs, according to Glenn). The solution
to world problems would thus be for other cultures to adopt our
rational
style. We should exert patience and self-control in the meantime. The
West against the Rest: we are no longer static and traditional, we can
adapt and adjust ourselves to cultural values other than our own. They
remain the same, we adjust. They are rigid, we are flexible. They are
the
known object, we are the knowing subject.
But this hardly hidden old style
ethnocentrism is not the only problem related to this tradition. The
biggest
problem is the linear connection between 'culture' and 'communication',
which suggest that 'culture' can be scraped off the surface of modes of
communicative behavior. Everything in communication is culture (cf.
Knapp
& Knapp Potthoff 1987: 3). And culture, as seen earlier, is a
static
and essentialist notion which apparently provides all the necessary
clues
for detecting and interpreting what happens in communication. The issue
becomes even more problematic when we take a look at who is culture.
Cultures
are usually associated with groups of people that bear a name:
nationalities
of known ethnic groups. Thus, who is the Japanese culture? the
Japanese,
all Japanese, every Japanese. This identification of group labels with
identities, for that is what is happening, accounts for the structure
of
quite a bit of empirical research in this tradition. One takes a test
group
of Korean students, one of Italian students, and one of American
students,
all studying at the same US college, and performs tests on them
(questionnaires,
interviews, observations). The result will be a set of differences in
response
behavior between the various groups. Since these groups are marked by
different
nationalities, the differences can be interpreted as differences
between
cultures.
Apart from the fact that nationality
in itself is a bad index of cultural identity (as a Belgian, I am
rather
well placed to make that observation), there is no way in which
nationality
or ethnic membership would guarantee the salience, the relevance or
indeed
the presence of 'culture' or 'ethnicity' in communication. I shall come
back to this later, when I discuss the work of Gumperz, Hymes and
Rampton.
Regardless of any definition of 'culture' and its derivatives such as
'ethnicity',
a heuristic should not be transformed into an analytical statement. The
nationality or ethnic membership of people may suggest the possibility
of ethnic or cultural marking in communicative behavior. If you want to
elicit Italian speech styles, the chances of finding them are usually
higher
when you select Italian subjects rather than Danish
or Icelandic ones.
But it in no way imposes ethnic or cultural characteristics onto the
communicative
behavior a priori. Finding an Italian speaker does not solve your
problem
of finding Italian cultural or ethnic speech styles. The only thing it
does is to allow you to start your research. Many people seem to stop
their
research as soon as they have found the Italian speaker.
In a never published paper,
Volker Hinnenkamp once
formulated the problematic very sharply. To him,
"even if we found a good
concept of culture (...), we would still not know how it translates
into
human
communicative interchanges,
and even less how it affects interchanges between members of
thus
culturally defined entities"
(Hinnenkamp 1987: 1)
The fact is that people's stated
identities -- the things they tell about themselves -- are only
circumstantial
elements in describing and interpreting their behavior in communicating
with members possessing other stated identities. Suggesting that
intercultural
communication is above and beyond all else a matter of colliding
cultures,
of culture clashes and culture gaps, of uncertainty, stress and loss of
confidence, often contributes to the construction of problems. It often
generates stress, anxiety and so on, by presenting it as something
strange,
weird, unusual, in short by abnormalizing it. The abnormalization of
intercultural
communication is based on a gross hypostasis of 'culture' as the
all-eclipsing
contextual factor, and a massive overestimation of the degree and the
nature
of differences in speech styles. The way in which empirical answers can
be found for patterns and problems in intercultural communication is a
detailed and nuanced analysis of concrete communicative events. To that
kind of study I shall now turn.
2. Ethnographic
approaches:
from difference to inequality
We seem to live in a world in
which difference has replaced inequality as the main focus of social
science.
Preference now seems to go to horizontal differentiation within and
across
societies -- differences in terms of nationality, ethnicity, culture,
gender,
age, and so on -- rather than to vertical differentiation --
differences
of power and status, hierarchies, degrees of inequality within and
between
societies. Part of the reason for this is the upsurge of nationalism
and
identity politics, in Europe and elsewhere, in the last decade,
combined
with the collapse of rigid ideological oppositions encapsulated in
sociopolitical
and economic state-systems caused by the dissappearance of the Iron
Curtain.
Market capitalism and liberal democracies won the day. And together
with
them, their scientific dogmata won too. The focus on horizontal social
stratification is part of this victorious scientific apparatus, and it
replaced (or at least, defeated) so-called 'outmoded' models of society
based on vertical stratification. The best selling book for the last
months
in Belgium is Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, and a couple of
years
back Fukuyama's End of History broke all sales records. That tells the
whole story. The paradigm through which we now look at the world in all
its complexity is made up of grossly misrepresented cultural
relativism,
revived Herderianism and blatant essentialism (or primordialism, the
often
used alternative term).
What it defeated is not just
a dogma. It is above anything else a complex of valuable analytical
tools
and insights, sometimes of greater realism and interpretive punch than
the paradigm that replaced it. The point is that models adopting a
vertically
layered model of society kept track of the following elements:
1. Matters of production and
reproduction of culture and cultural phenomena. It never comes in an
abstract mode, but it is always encapsulated
in a concrete context of production, tied to conditions of
production, and influenced by who produces
it for whom, when, why and most of all, how.
2. Realism with regard to cultural
diversity and cultural relativity. In real societies, cultural
differences
are rarely treated as equivalents.
One may feel that all cultures, languages, indeed all people should be
equal, and one can fight for those
principles. In reality, however, they are not, and it makes no sense to
talk about them as if they are..
Although connections such as
these have rarely been noted, both points are shared by materialist
approaches
to culture, society and speech (e.g. Bernstein and Bourdieu) as well as
by ethnographic approaches to communication (see Hymes 1996). I will
elaborate
these two points in greater detail now, referring to the work of
Gumperz
and Hymes respectively. After that, I will turn to a work that, in my
view,
combines the virtues of linguistic ethnography and sociolinguistics
with
those of solid and mature social theory: Ben Rampton's Crossing
(1995).
The first point to be elaborated
is that of the contextualized production and reproduction of cultural
phenomena
and products, including forms of communication. Perhaps the greatest
contribution
of John Gumperz's work on intercultural communication (e.g. Gumperz
1982,
Gumperz & Roberts 1991) is the attention he has drawn to the
contingent,
situational and emergent nature of cultural phenomena in speech. A
first
point he underscores is the fact that 'culture' in the sense of a
transcendent
identity composed of values and norms and linearly related to forms of
behavior is not necessarily there. What can be observed and analyzed in
intercultural communication are different conventions of communication,
different speech styles, narrative patterns, in short, the deployment
of
different communicative repertoires. For as far as 'identity' is
concerned
(cultural, ethnic identity), identity can be an inference of these
speech
styles: people can identify selves or others on
the basis of such
speech styles. But in actual fact, not 'culture' is deployed, but
communicative
repertoires. In Gumperz's work, such repertoires can be traced into
traditions:
ethnic traditions, traditions that have to do with the use of other
languages
(creating forms of 'percolation' of e.g. Hindi speech styles into
English),
class traditions, and so on. But we are far removed here from the
'norms
and values' of which Pinto said that they actively influenced
communicative
behavior. For this is a second point: when, why and how do such
influences
occur?
Gumperz calls attention to the
highly critical role of context in intercultural communication. It
makes
a world of difference whether someone talks to the police or to a
co-worker,
in a formal and administrative setting or in a loose, informal chat. It
also makes a world of difference whether the 'ethnically marked'
interlocutor
(e.g. a Pakistani man in London) is the dominant party in an
interaction,
or the dominated party. For instance, whether the Pakistani man is the
one who needs something from someone else, or vice versa. And also,
what
makes a world of difference is the larger context of interethnic
relations
in an area, a city, a community, at a particular historical point in
time.
It is this larger context that accounts for aspects in intercultural
communication
such as racism, stereotypes, cultural schemata and so on. It is
immensely
relevant to realize that most of what we call intercultural
communication
occurs in an urban context, between people
who are multilingual, and
with socio-historical
dimensions of immigration, labor relations involving immigrant workers
in particular roles, ethnic antagonism and stereotyping and so on. If
'cultures
meet', they usually do so under rather grim socioeconomic
circumstances,
with a clear societally sanctioned power difference between the various
parties involved. It is, from that perspective, also useful to point at
the abnormality of many studies of intercultural communication that
focus
on elite forms of interaction such as business negotiations,
technological
cooperation, international management or diplomacy. Some people seem to
restrict the scope of intercultural communication to domains in which
at
least one party can afford to have its culture made into something that
needs to be taken into account. Some groups can be made objects of
processes
of 'ethnification' -- identification by others in terms of ethnic
identity,
of the type 'oh, but you are Jewish!' -- others are invulnerable to
such (often unwanted)
processes (see Hinnenkamp 1991, Day 1994; attribution theory can be a
useful
instrument here, see Lalljee 1987). Differences such as these account
for
basic facts such as the multitude of books and training programs on
contact
with South East Asian people (notably the Japanese) and the absence of
such books and programs for interactions with the Sudanese, the
Angolans
or the Samoans.
In sum, 'culture' in all its
meanings and with all its affiliated concepts, is situational. It
depends
on the context in which concrete interactions occur. Studying speech
conventions
of certain groups of people, and then contrasting them with those of
other
groups of people, is of little use to the study of intercultural
communication.
Nothing can a priori be inferred about what will happen when members of
both groups meet. And if and when they meet, all kinds of things happen
in the interaction itself: adaptation is often mutual, people shift
into
a medium which is no one's property, cultural conventions get
sacrificed
in a split second while others are given overwhelming prominence, and
so
on. The emergence of 'ethnically' or 'culturally marked' aspects of
communicative
behavior is most often dominated by other than cultural factors.
Frustration
and anger, powerlessness or a feeling of threat may trigger ethnic
style
(cf. Giles & Johnston
1986).
In our own research on immigrant
women in refuges for battered women in Belgium, most of the younger
Turkish
women spoke near-native Dutch (Bulcaen & Blommaert 1997). But
in some
cases, they lapsed into "Migrantennederlands" (Immigrants' Dutch): a
recognizable
variety of Dutch used by mostly immigrant second language speakers and
marked by inflectional errors, errors in grammatical gender marking and
article attribution, ill-chosen or contaminated idiomatic expressions
and
so on. The points in the interaction where such lapses occurred were
those
fragments where the girls told the most sensitive and painful aspects
of
their story: narratives about being beaten, breaking down, violent
incidents
between herself and members of her family and so on. The shift into an
ethnic style goes hand in hand with the shift into a particularly
emotional
and highly sensitive domain of experience -- things one hesitates to
tell,
but that need to be told in order to be
accepted in the refuge
and to be entitled to help from the social workers, the lawyers and the
police people. In other words: ethnic styles indicate salient places in
the interaction, places that require extra attention and careful
inspection.
And for as far as Pinto's rule goes, that culture influences everything
all the time: it is dead wrong.
Let us now turn to the work
of Dell Hymes. In his latest book (Hymes 1996), this master of
linguistic
ethnography again turns to issues of diversity and inequality. His case
is quite clear. Every language name ('French', 'German', 'English')
hides
and obscures a multitude of varieties within these languages. We no
longer
live in a neatly Herderian world in which every person has only one
language
and belongs to one culture. In fact we never did. We never use 'a
language',
we always use a variety of a language: a genre, a speech style, a type
of interaction (that is why he makes an appeal to "getting beyond
language
names to varieties": 1996: 67). And the fact is that every society
makes
distinctions between such varieties: some are 'better' than others,
genre
X is better suited for this purpose than genre Y, when you are with the
mayor you better use so-and-so a variety, when you are with your
girlfriend
you better use another one. Inequality of language varieties is a fact
of life -- it is a central aspect of sociolinguistic dynamics, and need
to be given full attention over and beyond principled calls for an
acceptance
of the intrinsic or potential equivalence of all forms of language. A
language
or a language variety is always someone's language or language variety,
always a variety controlled by a social group, an institution or an
individual
(cf. Jacob Mey's well-known Whose language?, Mey 1985). Rights to
speak,
and to speak in particular ways, are not evenly allocated in a real
society.
Hymes notes, for instance that "one form of inequality of opportunity
in
our society has to do with rights to use narrative" (109) and that
"only
the anecdotes of some would count" (114). Ethnically marked narratives,
or narratives expressing a lower degree of education or literacy and
thus
indexical of a lower social status, are valued less highly than
well-cut
highly literate narratives in contexts where 'serious' talk is expected
(academia, the media). Such 'low' voices are denied access to the
category
of 'expert voices', and are relegated to that of 'laypersons'.
Hymes calls our attention to
issues such as property rights, social status, prestige and
consequentiality
in relation to modes of communication. Communicating in a particular
way
can be disastrous or of great benefit. The choice of a particular way
of
interacting can impose a power frame on the whole interaction -- it can
almost a priori minorize one party and privilege another. (As a
side-remark
in this respect, it has always amazed me how some intercultural
training
programs inform American business people about the fact that Japanese
business
people bow and nod instead of shaking hands, that they eat raw fish
with
chopsticks, that they are very sensitive to group pressure and so on.
But
at the same time, the type of negotiations for which they are being
trained
is supposed to be in English. Quite a few training programs inform
people
about norms, values, ways of doing things, but do not contain language
classes.) It draws our attention to the fact that all of us associate
particular
attributes with particular language varieties. None of them is neutral,
unmarked, consequential, all of them are embedded in a
repertoire which
allocates particular social functions to particular ways of speaking
and
all of them are in one way or another controlled or dominated by
particular
parties in an interaction.
Let us bring this around to
the issues of globalization and intercultural communication. From an
ethnographic
perspective, globalization has not entailed the massive spread of
cultural
norms and modes of communication. Neither has it entailed the massive
increase
of intercultural communication. It has spread highly particular modes
of
interaction, containing extremely specific rules of communicative
behavior,
across a thin layer of communicators worldwide. Most of these
communicators
are (and were prior to its introduction) highly literate people, most
often
multilingual, highly educated. The effect of this elite globalization
and
the increase of worldwide electronic interactions -- mostly conducted
in
English -- has generated a very peculiar and highly exclusive form of
intercultural
interaction, one in which 'culture' is a topic rather than a factor in
communication, and in which the difficulties called 'intercultural' can
be reduced, upon close inspection, to matters
related to the channel
and the medium of communication. Electronic interaction is written
interaction
in English performed on an electronic communication device. On a
worldwide
scale, this type of medium and channel is the object of extreme
inequality.
To illustrate this: despite the fact that many African states are
officially
Anglophone, few states are known where active competence in English can
be said to be shared by more than 15% of the population. Of this 15%,
the
overwhelming majority is concentrated in large urban areas, has
white-collar
jobs and an income higher than the average. If any culture is
globalized,
it is theirs, but not that of the remaining 85% of the
population.
The great relevance of Hymes'
work on inequality lies in the fact that it removes some of the naivité
that surrounds ideas of culture in relation to communication. He points
the finger at burning issues such as whose culture is being used in
intercultural
communication? How, and why? Why do we hold conferences on specific
forms
of communication (business communication, diplomacy, technology) and
not
on others? And why do we say that in these specific forms of
interaction
intercultural differences are great, dangerous and problematic? We can
say this because quite a few other domains offer themselves in which,
if
similar standards were to be applied, critical intercultural
differences
could be found and discussed. The interethnic make-up of contemporary
western
urban areas, and the everyday interactions between members of
ethnically
different groups in these areas, is of course a case in point. Me
buying
a loaf of bread in my Moroccan neighborhood bakery is as much an
instance
of intercultural communication as an American electronics executive
negotiating
a difficult business deal with his Japanese counterparts. Similarly, me
doing research on African forms of communication is as much an instance
of intercultural communication as anything else. Research on other
societies
involves exactly the same factors of difference and similarity as
direct
contact with members of those societies. In that sense, our standard
linguistic
and anthropological theories contain huge deposits of past
intercultural
interactions, some successful and many hopelessly gone wrong (Fabian
1983
and 1986 offers incisive analyses of anthropology and linguistics from
this point of view; see also Fabian 1991).
3.
Crossing ethno-linguistic
boundaries
We are now in a position to
take a look at what is probably the most important recent study in the
field of intercultural interaction: Ben Rampton's Crossing: Language
and
ethnicity among adolescents (1996). Let me briefly recall some of the
points
made in my discussion of the work of Gumperz and Hymes. Together, they
provided us with an analytical framework for studying culture in
communication
which placed great emphasis on (a) context as one of the major factors
in treating the phenomenon in itself; (b) the importance of social
differences,
hierarchies and evaluative differences in assessing the role and
function
of culturally marked varieties of communication. Gumperz and Hymes
offer
interesting antidotes against simplistic views of cultural differences.
Indeed, the world is full of differences. But that is not all there is:
the differences are not always there, they do not always appear in the
same form, and when they appear the are caught in patterns of social
evaluations.
Difference, in sum, does not replace inequality: understanding
difference
is conditioned by understanding inequality. Culture never works without
society.
Rampton investigated small groups
of adolescents in urban areas in Britain. The groups were ethnically
mixed,
they contained Anglo's as well as youngsters from Caribbean, Indian or
Pakistani descent, boys as well as girls. Rampton followed them and
observed
them in a variety of situations: he had group interviews with them,
individual
interviews, he recorded their talk during sports events, group chats,
music
performances, in private as well as in public contexts. The
multidimensional
nature of this fieldwork revealed quite substantial insights with
regard
to the relation between ethnicity (i.e. ethnic identity and symbolic
attributes
of this identity: accents in speech, dress, behavior) and language.
First,
the members of the groups performed 'crossing'. That is, members
sometimes
switched into the ethnically marked varieties of English of other
members
of different ethnic descent. Anglo's sometimes switched into Jamaican
Creole
or used a Punjabi word, thus moving out of their 'Anglo-ness' and into
their friends' ethnic identity. In most instances, no damage was done,
on the contrary. The boundaries of ethnicity proved to be flexible and
permeable, allowing the inclusion of others in a play of moving in and
moving out. The symbolic repertoire usually associated with ethnic
identities
proved to be open for negotiation and manipulation by members of
multiethnic
peer groups.
But there is more. Depending
on who is addressed, when and in what particular type of activity (e.g.
playing, discussing, listening to music), the role and function of
ethnically
marked communication styles differ. In some circumstances, the use of
'Indian
English' is a strategy of contest, the subversion of existing dominant
ethnic stereotypes and so part of the disarming of the adversary. In
others
it can be an expression of group solidarity, feelings of respect and
even
an expression of the recognition of prestige contained by, for
instance,
Pakistani or Carribean music. So there is no single one strategy
associated
to the use of ethnic styles: they are a repertoire which can be
activated
in different circumstances, for different purposes and with different
effects.
Rampton summarizes his findings emphasizing "how crossing varied in
character
according to the kind of event (...) in which it was embedded" (1995:
265)
and how it "involved the active ongoing construction of a new
inheritance
from within multiracial interaction itself" (297).
Important to note, Rampton's
analysis demonstrates that culture need not be 'traditional'. It need
not
be seen as something which is deposited in every member of a particular
society. It can be made, changed, manipulated and dropped on the spot.
The culture brought in by the adolescents serves as a joint and
sharable
set of resources, part of which is operated 'automatically' and part of
which operates strategically in plays of contest and solidarity. The
backdrop
for this process is the modern multi-ethnic make-up of large
post-industrial
urban areas in Europe, with an undercurrent of immigration policies,
racism
and social problems connected to the socioeconomic and political status
of ethnic minority groups. We have here a completely anti-essentialist
notion of culture, empirically demonstrated in great detail. As a
consequence
of this, Rampton offers a powerful challenge against established views
of singular ethno-linguistic belonging. The one person/one culture/one
language
doctrine is challenged with a battery of data which demonstrate how
identities
can be picked, dropped, altered, combined and so on, in ways that
defeat
any form of simplism or singularity.
Above all, Rampton's analysis
demonstrates how studies of intercultural communication require access
to information on the social dynamics in which these types of
communication
develop. The urban youngsters investigated by Rampton are subcultures
in
a larger society, which utilizes ideologies, norms and structures of
regimentation
and social streamlining. For the youngsters, school and playground are
major social arenas, complemented by neighborhood centers, disco's and
other social meeting places. Among the youngsters, intricate networks
are
formed and sustained through rituals, routines and diverse forms of
interaction.
All this is of crucial importance for understanding the patterns of
intercultural
communication and the play of ethnicity in language among these people.
Undoubtedly, what Rampton finds in relation to these adolescent groups
is not representative of Britain at large. Neither would it be
representative,
I suspect, of Pakistani or Jamaican society at large. But that is
precisely
the point: culture is rarely unified, and new contexts generate new
cultures
and new forms of intercultural communication. Rampton demonstrates how
one society can hide many societies, how one culture can hide many
cultures,
how one language can hide many others. The theoretical point is not
new.
It suffices to read classic historiographic works such as Carlo
Ginzburg's
The cheese and the worms (1992) or the works of E.P. Thompson (e.g.
1993)
to see that the uniformizing connotations of singular terms such as
'culture'
or 'society' (and one could easily add 'language') have long ago been
recognized
in the social sciences. But the remarkable thing is that the study of
intercultural
communication still seems to suffer from these homogenizing
tendencies.
4. Concluding remarks
Works such as Rampton's do not
particularly make life easier for the student of intercultural
communication.
The further we develop our analytical tools, the more complex and
unclear
the object of study becomes. But a number of questions can no longer be
avoided in the field of intercultural communication. These questions
have
to do with the nature, structure and workings of our central concepts:
culture and communication. I have come full circle here: are we sure we
know what exactly we are talking about? When we formulate general
formulas
and recipes about intercultural communication, are we sure that we have
looked at all aspects of the phenomenon?
Speaking from the vantage point
I have outlined at the outset, i.e. the perspective of an empirical
analyst
working on instances of real language use, I can only say that we have
merely begun to scratch the surface. We now realize that the study of
intercultural
communication should be more firmly integrated in ethnographic studies
of multiethnic and multicultural societies. The opposite is also true,
of course. Scholars of intercultural communication would benefit from
some
exposure to ethnographic studies of the abovementioned kind. The
exercise
I have attempted in this exposé was inspired by precisely that motive:
to look for ways in which different traditions, basically involved in
studies
of the same topic, could be merged and so mutually enriched.
Paraphrasing
Hymes, respect for cultural diversity is not served by shoddy work. We
shall only be able to gain a precise understanding of the value of
cultural
diversity if we apply the best methods
and the best theories in
studying it.
|
Update: 29 oktober 2005