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Riassunti reading assignments TEXT B0.2.1 (FAY) Fay, B. (1996) Contemporary Philosophy of Social Science: A Multicultural Approach, Oxford: Blackwell pp. 55–60 (extracts) Brian Fay provides a summary of differences between ‘standard’ and ‘complex’ views of culture. According to a standard view, a culture is a complex set of shared beliefs, values, and concepts which enables a group to make sense of its life and which provides it with directions for how to live. This set might be called a basic belief system. According to this standard view, culture is learned. A culture penetrates its individual members mentally, physically and socially. This penetration produces in them their distinctive capacities and characteristics. However, it is a mistake to think of culture as a coherent set of beliefs: all cultures consist of conflicting beliefs and rules which offer mixed messages to its followers, because the interpretation of those rules is subjective. Another important fact about cultures is that they are essentially open. Cultures are ideational entities; as such they are permeable, susceptible to influence from other cultures. Wherever exchange among humans occurs, the possibility exists of the influence of one culture by another. TEXT B0.2.2 (ROBERS & SARANGI) Roberts, C. and Sarangi, S. (1993) ‘“Culture” Revisited in Intercultural Communication’, in Boswood, T., Hoffman, R. and P. Tung (eds), Perspectives on English for International Communication, Hong Kong: Hong Kong City Polytechnic pp. 97–102 (extracts) Celia Roberts and Srikant Sarangi discuss how a ‘standard’ view has tended to dominate the fields of applied linguistics and intercultural communication studies. ‘Culture’ often comes to be viewed too simply as either behaviour (e.g. x people don’t smile in public), or as fixed values and beliefs, separated from social interaction and socio-political realities REDUCTIONISM In the context of interactional studies, this has amounted to explaining behaviour away. ‘Culture’ has become an explanation for understanding differences and difficulties in communication in multi-ethnic societies. 3 problems in applied linguistics & intercultural communication:
- The focus is on the difficulties “culture” = miscommunicationculture” = miscommunication
- ‘Culture’ is conceived of in a limited way to refer to resources, behaviour patterns and fixed values.
- Culture becomes the necessary and sufficient explanation of intercultural misunderstandings.
UNIT A1.
ARTEFACTS OF CULTURE
Example A1.2.1 Chinese teachers Janet is American and got to know Zhang and Ming, who are Chinese. Zhang talked a lot about Confucianism and how it was the basis of Chinese culture. Discussion about what teachers and students could be expected to do in his university English classes: he said that because of Confucianism, it was impolite for students to question their teachers. Janet had noticed that Zhang was very silent when there was a class discussion, and she asked Ming if this was to do with Confucianism. Ming said that this was certainly a factor; but when Janet told him what Zhang had told her about students having to obey their teachers in China, Ming said that this was not strictly true. Janet then read an article which said that people in the developing world had tended to exaggerate their own cultural identity to counter the powerful influence of the West. DECONSTRUCTION The first impression that Zhang presents Janet with tends towards the essentialist view. The conflicting impression that Ming presents is more non-essentialist. What are the reasons for Zhang’s essentialist point of view?
- When people are in a difficult, strange environment, they can close ranks and exaggerate specific aspects of their cultural identity.
- Different cultural resources can be drawn upon and invoked at different times depending on the circumstances.
- What people say about their cultural identity is the image they wish to project at a particular time rather than as evidence of an essentialist national culture. Confucianism for the Chinese teachers thus becomes a convenient cultural resource around which to marshal their threatened identity Cultural resources: aspects of culture that exist in our society which we can draw on at different times and for different reasons. UNIT B3. The division between ‘collectivism’ and ‘individualism’. Triandis, H. C. (1995) Individualism and Collectivism Boulder: Westview Press pp. 2–3, 4– Collectivism may be defined as a social pattern consisting of closely linked individuals who see themselves as parts of one or more collectives; are primarily motivated by the norms of those collectives; are willing to give priority to the goals of these collectives over their own personal goals; and emphasize their connectedness to members of these collectives. Individualism is a social pattern that consists of loosely linked individuals who view themselves as independent of collectives; are primarily motivated by their own preferences; give priority to their personal goals over the goals of others;
- At the individual, psychological level, the Japanese are portrayed as having a personality which lacks a fully developed ego or independent self. Loyalty to the group is a primary value.
- The Japanese attach great importance to the maintenance of harmony within the group. To that end, relationships between superiors and inferiors are carefully cultivated and maintained.
- At the intergroup level, the literature has emphasized that integration and harmony are achieved effectively between Japanese groups, making Japan a ‘consensus society’. However, it is a mistake to think that all Japanese share these attributes. Japanese culture comprises a multitude of subcultures. Some are dominant, powerful, and controlling (called “culture” = miscommunicationcore subcultures”). Other subcultures are more subordinate, subservient, or marginal (called “culture” = miscommunicationperipheral subcultures”). Core subcultures have ideological capital to define the normative framework of society. Core subcultural groups overshadow those on the periphery in inter-cultural transactions too. Numerically small but ideologically dominant, core subcultural groups are the most noticeable to foreigners and can present themselves to the outside world as representative of Japanese culture. UNIT C3. There can be no doubt that we absorb the messages around us about ‘the Other’ that the media and the culture we are in project. There is also no doubt that today the media is a very powerful tool for those who want both to control society and to sell ideas and products to its members. “culture” = miscommunicationRepresentation” is the way the world is presented to us. Representation and otherization are similar processes: the first one is more political and controlled by others, whereas the second one is a natural consequence. Representation leads to stereotypes. Once cognitive schemas (mental frames of reference) are in place they become the lenses through which the world is observed, and it is difficult to change them. UNIT C3. ‘SCHEMAS’: FIXED OR FLEXIBLE? It is inevitable that we carry around with us mental structures which we impose on the world to make sense of it. These cognitive structures, or schemas, are essential for us to navigate our way through life and are the building blocks of learning. The first time we encounter something new we form a mental schema of that event and then the next time we encounter a similar event we use the schema from the first encounter to help us navigate and understand the event the next time. It is, however, unwise to let a mental schema become hardened. Schemas, while psychologically inevitable, need to be constantly updated and seen as imperfectly constructed models, not absolute replacements for reality. Ethnographic observation The term ‘ethnographic eyes’ means that you should strive to make the familiar ‘strange’. You need to act against the taken-for-grantedness that familiarity brings and try to see the event from the perspective of a cultural debutant – an outsider. The mediated nature of schemas While many mental schemas come from our own experience, it is also probably true that many of them are mediated (we are offered the schemas before we experience situations and when we enter these situations, not finding our own way, we imitate a blueprint that has been offered to us). This mediation may be through what other people tell us, through TV and film or via the printed word.
The need for flexibility in schemas A type is therefore a schema; it is a pattern of typicality that helps us to organize the world around us so that events can have meaning. If a schema does not become modified each time a person experiences a certain event then it can become hardened and can help less and less with offering a path through the reality of the changing world around us. A schema thus may become a stereotype when this occurs. A stereotype is thus the point at which a schema becomes rigid and no longer capable of, or indeed a genuine attempt at, describing or understanding the object it is focused on in a full and non-reductive manner. Again, the media can encourage this by repeatedly portraying objects in reduced and inaccurate ways. This may of course serve certain political purposes. MEYER (pt.1) – THE CULTURE MAP Step-by-step approach to understand the most common business communication challenges that arise from cultural differences and offer steps for dealing with them more effectively. Example 1. French businesswoman moving to America for work Miscommunication: her boss is happy about her attitude but has told her several times that she has to be more prepared during meetings. She, however, only takes account of the positive remarks and therefore feels like she is doing great. Americans often do tend to be more explicit than the French exception when managers give feedbacks to the subordinates: they usually give positive feedback directly, trying to turn negative messages into encouragements (3 positives for every negative). In a French setting negative feedback is given directly, while positive feedback is indirect. Accidents like this one are very common, especially when exchanging e-mails or videoconferencing with an international counterpart. UNIT B2. Cooke, M. (1997) ‘Listen to the Image Speak’, Cultural Values1: 1 pp. 101–2, 104, 105, 106 (extracts) Cooke explores how our preconceptions intervene in how we perceive and communicate with each other. The major block to respect of and communication with the unknown is preconception built on the weak and resilient foundations of myth and image. Images are flat impressions that provide pieces of information. What was dynamic and changing becomes static. Example: Just as the image of the amoral, free-living American woman epitomizes for many pious Muslims all that is wrong with Western culture, so the image of the veiled woman encapsulates for the Western observer all the coercion imagined to mark Islamic culture. No matter how many non-promiscuous, modest Western women the Muslim may meet, no matter how many assertive, independent, unveiled Muslim women the Westerner may meet, there is a possibility that the basic image will not change as these individuals come to be seen as exceptions to a rule that they thereby serve to reinforce.
Deconstruction In this example we see a group of schoolgirls asserting their cultural identity to the outside world who are represented by the culturally different Other people on the bus, who are in turn shocked and perhaps disgusted by their explicit display. There are several related concepts at work: -the multiplicity of identities: The two girls derive and achieve an identity by signalling belongingness to the particular culture of swearing girls on the bus. Belongingness among the members of any group partly involves the learning and use of particular discourses. It is a person’s familiarity and ease of use of these discourses that demonstrates their membership of a particular group. -the creation of an identity card: The two girls are not simply being members of a culture; they are doing the culture in order to communicate something to the people around them. In this sense, they are playing a particular identity card. -the marking out of territory: By being creative with the act of swearing, the girls are in effect marking a powerful new territory – an identity terrain which they occupy in their struggle for presentation of self against the identities that are imposed upon them by others. UNIT A3. Complex Images Example A3.2.1 Indian or British art? Discussion programme about the arts in India. The discussants include two women writers from India, a writer and a film-maker who are both British Asian women, an academic and a presenter who are both white British. The point being made by the majority of the speakers is that Indian art is being changed by new art produced by British Asians. The two British Asians try to counter this idea by insisting that their art is not part of Indian art at all, but contributes to a growing multicultural British art form. However, they fail to make any impact in the discussion. The majority of viewers would most probably see things in the same way as the majority of the discussants
- that British Asian art is part of Indian art. Inability of the discussants to respond to the idea that the art of these two British Asians could be considered British rather than Indian is because it does not conform to a dominant discourse – that all people and what they do can somehow be traced to India as part of ‘Indian culture’. It is an essentialist dominant discourse which insists that once born in India, simplistic notions of national culture will follow even the adult activities of one’s children who are born and brought up elsewhere
- Dominant discourses are ways of talking and thinking about something which have become naturalized to the extent that people conform to them without thinking.
- Discourse , in this sense, is a way of using language which promotes a particular view of the world.
- Naturalization occurs when a social phenomenon becomes sufficiently routine and natural to be internalized into everyday ‘thinking-as-usual’. This process can happen by itself as part of the natural way in which society works, or be socially engineered by governments, the media… Discourses are used in such a way that the ideas behind them are promoted as normal for the group who use them. Discourses can thus be associated with group identity and exclusivity. A discourse becomes
dominant when it begins to rule over other discourses in a larger group or society. Dominant discourses can be so naturalized that people become unaware of them. Thinking-as-usual is a term used in sociology to mean what people have got used to thinking of as being normal. Example A3.2.2 Middle East travelogue Series of programmes on Middle Eastern countries: the next programme would take place in ‘fundamentalist’ Syria. The next programme on Syria fronts images of men in kufiyahs and women in abayahs (traditional Arab women’s dress) in the old quarters of Damascus and Aleppo. Matthew recently visited Damascus with a group of colleagues. He found himself on the edge of a discussion of how the dress code for women visitors might be relaxed because there was ‘now’ a new president. He had been in Damascus fifteen years before when the previous government had prohibited university students from wearing Islamic hejab and abayahs on the campus; however he didn’t feel like bringing this up and thus allowed the dominant discourse to rule. The dominant discourse is so strong that the correspondent probably did not notice the other images, which prevail in Damascus, of young men and women, intensely conscious of high European fashion, which they integrate into their own styles, walking by elegant boutiques and sitting in restaurants. And of course it might well not occur to someone with these dominant views that people wearing the traditional dress of the region might not be fundamentalist at all, and might not even be Muslim but Christian. Example A3.2.3 Traffic problems In a popular tourist guide series, which has the reputation of being progressive and culturally sensitive, there is a reference to traffic problems in Tehran. It is commented that the inhabitants of this country are just beginning to learn to use traffic lights. The reference to traffic lights is motivated by what appears to the writers of the guide to be a less improper use of traffic lights than might have been observed elsewhere. It is however factually inaccurate to say that Iranians are just learning to use traffic lights. If there is a change in the behaviour at traffic lights, it might be more a result of globalization than anything else. Example A3.2.4 Israeli schoolchildren There is a short piece on a news programme about how children in an Israeli school are coping with the atmosphere of terrorism surrounding the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. The school and the children look affluent and middle class. Those who are interviewed speak calmly and articulately. This is followed by a scene of Palestinians throwing stones at Israeli soldiers in a West Bank urban setting with dust, rubble and unfinished building sites. It’s easy for a middle-class viewer to identify with the middle-class image of the Israeli school children, who seemed ‘normal’, ‘calm’ and therefore more ‘civilized’, than of the stone-throwing Palestinians. The author also wondered why we in the West do not see comparable images of middle-class Palestinians in the media, which might help to break the dominant discourse of ‘them as terrorists and fundamentalists’ but he doesn’t represent them Who are we to presume the images by which we would like other people to be represented simply in order for me to undo our reductive preoccupations?
Example C2.4. When Peter, an Englishman, had been working for about a month in a town in the north of Morocco as a teacher he decided to try and further a friendship he was developing with several local Moroccan teachers in his school. He decided to invite them for supper to his apartment. This they readily accepted and agreed to turn up at 8pm that evening. He prepared a meal. By 9pm he began to realize that his guests were not coming and cleared away the food. The next day he went into school wondering what excuse they would have. Instead of showing any embarrassment they seemed to regard their relationship as not soured in any way. He enquired what had happened the night before and why they had not turned up. One of them then explained that they had been on their way to his flat but on passing a café they noticed that there was an interesting football match on, so they sat down and watched it. FACE: This is a concept that refers to a person’s self-image and to how a person’s self-esteem and sense of identity are related to the degree to which that person’s self-image is supported in encounters with others. A threat to a person’s face is therefore a threat to a person’s self-concept – to how that person prefers to see himself or herself and to be seen, or at least regarded, by others. OTHERING: Otherization is based on the assumption that the cultural Other is not as complex or as sophisticated as the cultural Self, and that the Other can therefore be reduced to essential and often negative characteristics. This rendering of the Other as inferior or bad may be a psychological prop to make the Self seem superior.
