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Theme 1
Identity
This theme will explore how people construct their own identities.
PEOPLE LIKE ME
‘This is whom I want to be represented by’
Experience
This unit explores the complexity of people’s cultural identity in terms of how they want to represent themselves. Consider Example A1.1.1.
Example A1.1.1 Being represented
Parisa had been coming to international conventions on food processing for several years. She had made several good friends, especially from among the Europeans; but there was a gnawing problem which always came back unresolved. She was the only person at the convention who came from Iran; and no matter how friendly and sincere, she knew that her European colleagues saw her in a particular way which just wasn’t her at all. It was from their passing comments, their casual, unguarded turns of phrase, in which they seemed to show surprise when she was creative, assertive or articulate, as though she ought to be somehow unable to be good at all the things she did. One of her colleagues did not actually say ‘Well done!’ but certainly implied it in her tone of voice. She also felt isolated as the only person from her particular background at these conventions. There was nobody else to represent who she was. It also hurt her when someone said that she was ‘Westernized’ and ‘not a real Iranian’. This seemed like a no-win situation. If her behaviour was ‘recognized’, she was not real; and if she was considered ‘real’, she wasn’t supposed to behave like that. Then something happened which both confirmed her fears and gave her support. She invited three of her colleagues to see one of the films which was showing as part of a festival of Iranian films at the local university. They came willingly – very interested
- and then to another one. When she asked one of her colleagues what she found so fascinating, her colleague replied that she was particularly impressed by the female characters who portrayed such strong women. Indeed, one of them played a major executive role in a film crew. She hired and fired people and drove around in a jeep.
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Her colleague said that she had no idea such women existed in Iran, and that she always thought Muslim women were supposed to be subservient. Parisa was also pleased because the women on the film were certainly ‘real’ Iranians in that they wore the hejab, and the woman who drove the jeep wore the black hejab and long coat that she imagined fitted the ‘stereotype’. Shortly after this, another Iranian arrived at the convention. Parisa was very pleased that he was educated, worldly, urbane, well-dressed and also extremely articulate. This was no more or less than she would expect of an Iranian man; but she was pleased because here was further evidence for her other colleagues of the sort of people she belonged to. Moreover, it was very clear that he had tremendous respect for her as an equal, an academic and a professional. Parisa wondered though if they considered him a ‘real Iranian’. After all, he wore a tie and didn’t have a beard.
Deconstruction
Apart from the problem of being stereotyped and otherized, perhaps on the basis of the popular media images, which may depict Muslim women as lacking in power, Parisa’s predicament in Example A.1.1.1 is that she lacks other images on the basis of which the people around her can judge who she is. Although her colleagues have got to know her and see her as their friend, they lack real knowledge of what sort of group she belongs to in order to place her. In this sense, they are also in a predicament, and indeed vulnerable to the stereotypes with which they are presented from other sources. Two concepts which need to be focused on are:
■ the multi-facetedness of Other people and societies ■ the way people talk.
Multi-facetedness
At one level one might say that Parisa wants to be associated with a certain type of Iranian person – educated, worldly, a working woman in the same way as her new male colleague is a working man – which she does not perceive as conforming to the popular stereotype. However, at another level it is more complex than this. Her society, like all others, is complex and multi-faceted, and in order for anyone to show who they really are, this complexity has to be visible. The Iranian films that her friends saw show this complexity, as often art forms are able to do more than any other media form. The woman, covered in black Muslim clothes, driving a jeep, being her own person, educated and a working woman, yet looking like all other women, hiring and firing extras for the film she is involved in making, begins successfully to show the layers and depths of a complex society in which identity is multi-faceted and shifting. Another element in Parisa’s quest to be recognized is her desire to be associated with other people. Again, at one level she wants to be associated with people like her in that they are middle class and so on, but at a deeper level, they should represent the same many-faceted complexity that she sees in herself. Thus, the new male colleague is also
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not being ‘real’. The fact that her colleagues consider her Westernized is more to do with their essentialist view of culture and the way in which they construct her particular ‘national culture’. Because they see it as essentially different (Table 1 cell v) from their own ‘Western’ culture they cannot imagine that it would share features which they consider essentially Western. There is also a marked ‘us’–‘them’ attitude. Hence, if Parisa in any way behaves like ‘us’, she must have become like ‘us’ and left the essentialist attributes of ‘them’ behind. The non-essentialist view has no difficulty with the notion that cultural attributes can flow between societies (Table 1 cell vi). Parisa desperately needs her colleagues to understand that her society is sufficiently complex and big to include the cultural attributes which they consider Western, but which are in fact normal for many people who come from Iran.
The way people talk
At a deeper level than these issues is what Parisa gleans from ‘passing comments, their casual, unguarded turns of phrase, in which they seemed to show surprise when she was creative, assertive or articulate’ – ‘no matter how friendly and sincere’ her European colleagues seemed. There are several possibilities here.
- The thinking implicit in these comments is essentialist. Once again, there is the belief that the behavioural traits belonging to ‘that’ culture must be all packaged in the same stereotypical personality (Table 1 cell ix). Hence, if Muslim women are ‘subservient’, they cannot be ‘creative, assertive or articulate’.
- This thinking is deep in everyday discourse; and people are probably unaware of it.
- They do not see it as derogatory.
In all three cases the passing comments are in conflict, in Parisa’s view, with apparent friendliness. The possibility of 1 is especially worrying because it implies a deep-seated essentialism in people’s attitudes and socialization – an issue which will be taken up in Theme 2 Otherization. If 3 is the case, her colleagues are in effect being profoundly patronizing in that they assume they think it appropriate to comment on, perhaps praising, unexpected ‘achievement’ for someone from ‘her culture’ – rather as they would a child who achieves above their years – ‘well done!’
Communication
Especially considering the above points about the way people talk, there are important considerations in this unit with regard to communication. We have seen how Parisa herself feels, not only about direct communication but also about asides and tones of voice. Parisa may be more sensitive than many, but this one instance – as in the case of any qualitative analysis – illuminates a particular predicament which makes one see intercultural communication in a certain way. It becomes clear that for Parisa’s colleagues to communicate with her effectively they do not need information about her presumed national culture. This would be prescriptive and indeed essentialist in that it
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would tend to define the person before understanding the person. Rather than being a matter of prescribed information, the non-essentialist strategy is a moral one to do with how we approach and learn about a person as a human being (Table 1 cell xii). There are several disciplines that might be observed here.
- Respond to people according to how you find them rather than according to what you have heard about them.
- Avoid easy answers about how people are. Bracket – put aside simplistic notions about what is ‘real’ or ‘unreal’ in your perception of ‘another culture’.
- Appreciate that every society is as complex and culturally varied as your own.
- Learn to build up thick descriptions of what happens between you and others – to work out how to communicate as you go along.
Task A1.1.1 Thinking about Parisa
➤ Think of a situation you have been in that is like the Parisa example and describe it in similar detail. ➤ Explain how you can better understand one or more people in the situation with the help of Figure 1 and the disciplines listed above. ➤ What can you learn from this about intercultural communication?
ARTEFACTS OF CULTURE
Telling cultural stories, closing ranks
Experience
This unit continues to unravel the complexities of cultural identity by looking at what might lie behind what people say about their culture.
Example A1.2.1 Chinese teachers
Janet is American and got to know Zhang and Ming, who are Chinese, when they were doing their master’s course together. She found that Zhang talked a lot both in class and at other times about Confucianism and how it was the basis of Chinese culture. They soon got into an ongoing discussion about what teachers and students could be expected to do in his university English classes. He said that because of Confucianism, just as it was impolite for children to question their parents, it was impolite for students to question their teachers. This meant that all sorts of things which happened in class- rooms in the West, like discovery learning and classroom discussions, were culturally inappropriate in China.
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UNIT A1.
■ Different cultural resources can be drawn upon and invoked at different times depending on the circumstances.
In both cases, because of the strength of statement, there can be an appearance of essentialist national culture. We shall now look in more detail at these phenomena, and at a related third.
■ What people say about their cultural identity should be read as the image they wish to project at a particular time rather than as evidence of an essentialist national culture.
Closing ranks
The factor which Janet read about, reaction to a powerful cultural threat from the West, could certainly be a reason for closing ranks – though there could also be threats from other national, international or global quarters. In this case they could be invading a person’s, or indeed a whole society’s, home territory. There may indeed be a connection here with religious and ethnic fundamentalism. Difficult, strange environments are also encountered, as Ming states, when travelling to foreign places. Adrian Holliday remembers an example of this where otherwise left-wing, long-haired young English- men displayed a deep interest in British military music from the Coldstream Guards while living in Iran in the 1970s. An interesting inverse of this may be where people in strange environments also construct essentialist descriptions of ‘local people’. British people in very diverse foreign locations commonly see the ‘locals’ as ‘subservient, hierarchical, corrupt, inhibited by extended families and arranged marriages, lacking in individualism, unable to make decisions’ and so on. Such descriptions are more likely to be British constructions of the opposite of what they consider themselves to be than grounded in the behaviour they observe around them. The case of the Chinese people reported by both Zhang and Janet’s British colleagues to be Confucian in all their actions, and that of the interest in military music for the young Englishmen abroad, may be a reaction to perceived Western pedagogies or at least ‘modern’ pedagogies which they find too difficult to deal with. This reminds one also of the observed behaviour of Japanese students in British classrooms. Their silence and apparent ‘passivity’ may be more a reaction to the, to them, strange classroom rules which confront them than an effect of cultural behaviour in Japan.
Cultural resources
Confucianism for the Chinese teachers thus becomes a convenient cultural resource around which to marshal their threatened identity (Table 1 cell x). As can be seen by the way in which the British abroad define the foreign Other as opposite to themselves, the particular resources which are chosen may well be the ones which are most opposite to the cultural features of the threat. There are also arguments that the very strong description of Japaneseness which has recently pervaded international commerce is actually a ploy to promote a marketable exoticness (e.g. Moeran 1996).
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Figure 2 is a rough attempt to show how different cultural resources can be used by a particular person in particular settings. By cultural resources we mean aspects of culture that exist in our society which we can draw on at different times and for different reasons. The central bubble lists quite randomly the sorts of things which might be resources. There could be many other things on the list. The surrounding bubbles are examples of cultural settings which are ‘foreign’ and present a particular threat in dif- ferent ways. The arrows match resources to settings, showing that only some resources would be relevant to dealing with each setting. ‘Particular’ is the key word here because this is by no means a set of universals. Every person who reads this would use different resources to deal with each setting, and you might indeed find it fascinating to imagine how the arrows might link different resources to the settings if it were you. It is also important to note that you would appear quite culturally differently in each setting. If you used the resources in the same way as in the figure, in each setting your ‘culture’ may appear to be characterized by the following.
■ You find the politics of the society or social group in Setting 1 ‘distasteful’. You counter this by drawing on a particular aspect of personality, literature and ideology from your own society or group and present your culture as being left-wing activist. ■ You find the moral code in Setting 2 ‘strange’. You reassure yourself by drawing on religious beliefs, clothing and etiquette in your own society or social group and present your culture as a religious one with particular dress codes. ■ The people in Setting 3 do not understand who you are because they have no knowledge of where you come from. You strengthen your identity by drawing on ceremonies, festivals and family values in your society or social group and present these as the basis of your culture.
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Setting 1 Politically distasteful to you
Setting 3 Does not recognise who you are
Setting 2 ‘Strange’ moral code
Setting 4 Big C culture you cannot identify with
Cultural resources, e.g.: ceremonies clothing etiquette family festivals fine arts food ideology language literature music personality religion
Figure 2 Making use of culture
qualified, based on no more than what can be observed. Indeed, the non-essentialist descriptions should also be ephemeral – that is, perhaps true at a particular time, but changing. For those British readers, the bottom left statement will show the ridicu- lousness of some essentialist comments; yet it would have been easy for Iranians to generalize thus when they saw the way two particular British people behaved while in their country.
Communication
The lessons to be learnt about communication from Example A1.2.1 build on those in the previous unit. Janet has indeed learnt some of the lessons from Unit A1.1 and listens carefully to Zhang and Ming and places what she learns against what she has heard from her own compatriots about things related to Confucianism – thus creating her own thick description. Taking a non-essentialist line, she sees Ming, despite his doubts about Confucianism, as just as ‘real’ a Chinese as Zhang. If she believes Ming’s doubts about Confucianism, how should she therefore respond to Zhang? The answer may be that she should follow these disciplines, which follow on from the four disciplines listed on page 10.
- While respecting whatever people say about their own culture, take what they say as evidence of what they wish to project rather than as information about where they come from.
- Take what people say about their own culture as a personal observation which should not be generalized to other people who come from the same background.
Task A1.2.1 Thinking about Zhang and Ming
➤ Think of a situation you have been in that is like the Zhang and Ming example and describe it in similar detail. ➤ Explain how you can better understand one or more people in the situation with the help of the explanations in the Deconstruction section, Table 2 and the disciplines listed. ➤ Use Figure 2 and describe what sorts of cultural resources were being used by one of the participants and why. ➤ What can you learn from this about intercultural communication?
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IDENTITY CARD
‘I am who I can make myself and make others accept me to be’
Experience
This unit explores the principle that while one person may be exchanging information with another person, they are both, be it intentionally or unintentionally, also sending messages about their cultural identity – about how they want the other person to see them. The example is different to those in previous units in that it does not concern people from different societies. It is about people in the same society, but from very different cultural groups. This is to illustrate the non-essentialist point that cultural difference by no means has to be connected with national difference (Table 1 cells vi and viii). Also, by looking at a small, rather than a large culture, it is easier to see the details of cultural formation. See the discussion of small cultures in Holliday in Text B0.2.3, Unit B0.2, Section B. Consider the event given in Example A1.3.1.
Example A1.3.1 Girls on the bus
A public bus in south-east England was mainly occupied by school children returning home to the villages after attending school in the city. Several of the other passengers were annoyed by what they considered noisy bad language from some of the children. The most vociferous and extreme swearing was from a group of girls. The bus stopped and a further schoolgirl got on. She joined the group, one of whom shouted, ‘Hello, you big fat tart’, to which the new girl loudly retorted, ‘Fuck off bitch’. This exchange seemed to serve as a greeting as the two did not appear in any way genuinely angry with each other. The volume of their utterances was also noticeably loud enough for all the bus occupants to hear – in other words, it was unnecessarily loud for communication to occur just between themselves. The first interactant then admired a new item of jewellery her friend had around her neck: ‘Where did you get that, you dirty slag?’ The friend answered: ‘None of your business, you fucking nosy cow!’ After this, the first interactant’s attention became fixed upon a school boy, who was smaller than the girls, sitting several seats away. ‘Darren! Oi, Darren! Fucking listen to me Darren! Are you a poof, Darren?’ The girls laughed and the boy looked embarrassed and at a loss as to how to reply. ‘No I’m not,’ he finally protested, and looked out of the window, no doubt hoping the girls’ attention would wander to someone else. Then another girl’s voice: ‘Darren, Michaela says you’re a poof.’ Darren’s bus journey was going to be a longer one than he might have hoped!
There are a lot of terms you might not be familiar with in this example. See Task C1.4.2, in Unit C1.4.
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UNIT A1.
Identity card
There is also a very strong sense of cultural assertion in Example A1.3.1: ‘ This is how we are! We use bad language; we shock; we make boys feel uncomfortable; we don’t care about annoying people around us.’ And in the paragraph above we use the term ‘define themselves’ rather than simply ‘are’. 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. In a way they are playing with the cultural stereotypes expected by other members of their society. Swearing is often considered a territory occupied only by males displaying their toughness. Indeed it would seem that girls have invaded this traditional male territory and taken it over. They have also invaded the misogynistic male lexicon of derogatory terms for women: ‘slag’, ‘bitch’, ‘tart’, ‘cow’. They thus subvert the potentially wounding power of these terms, neutralize them by their frequency of use, and convert them into the normal phatic functions of greeting and ‘small talk’. And in so doing, they increase the shock effect by voicing yet twisting what the audience of bus passengers may consider taboo. On the other hand, these terms have become very much the domain of women generally in their in-talk, whereas outsider men will use them at their risk. The girls are very vocal and thus also occupy the acoustic space of the bus: the old notions of men not swearing in the presence of the ‘weaker’ and ‘daintier’ sex are completely challenged – indeed inverted – here. This incident would seem to have a lot to do with the notion of ‘girl power’. Further attack is made upon maleness by the bullying of the boy and the questioning of his sexuality. Again the weapons of reductionist and derogatory sexual labelling are used by the girls on the boy rather than vice versa. Although we are not fully in control of the resources that make up our identity, and we cannot choose our ethnicity, sex and so on, we can decide how to play the hand of cards that we have been dealt. We can work with the discourses available to us according to how we wish others to see us and how we wish to influence others’ perceptions of the hand of cards we have been dealt. Indeed, through such discourse action over time these very cards can become viewed in different ways. This is true, for example, of how women have changed the way femininity is constructed and perceived over the last century, or of how anti-slavery discourses in the early 19th century changed the way that Black Africans were perceived in British society. Identity is therefore not in essence a stable concept, but one that is achieved through the skilled manipulation of discourses in society.
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. This territory is fought over and at times conceded during interactions. In the case of Example A1.3.1, the act of swearing becomes a critical marker of this territory.
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Figure 3 shows two sides to cultural identity. The left-hand bubble represents a state of affairs which, though imposed by the way in which society defines us – and indeed other societies define us, in the case of national cultural perceptions – can be seen as the resources of the material that we have to work with. In the case of the girls on the bus, these might comprise ‘traditional’ notions that girls do not swear, but are sworn at. The right-hand bubble signifies a dynamic movement away from this establishment, in which, through playing with the resources, individuals or groups can create new identities and, indeed, create culture change. Although a similar process, this is subtly different to what can be seen in Unit A1.2, as represented in Figure 2. There, cultural resources are used ephemerally to defend identity; here they are used to create the fabric of identity.
Communication
Being sensitive to and understanding others’ cultural productions and the way in which they play with the various identities available to them (discourses on their identities currently available in the context of their interactions) is a crucial part of good intercultural communication. A good interpersonal communicator, therefore, needs to be aware of issues surrounding the concept of identity. Before we can communicate with people who are different to ourselves, we need to understand something about how they present themselves as being or belonging to certain groups. This goes deeper than the observations about Zhang in Unit A1.2, where we note that one should respect what people say about themselves and see this as an artefact of who they are without over-generalizing. The creative element in Example A1.3.1 takes this further. Hence the first discipline for this unit must be that we should do the following (disciplines 1– appear on page 10, and 5–6 on page 15).
- Understand how people are creating and indeed negotiating their cultural identity in the very process of communicating with us.
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Traditional, imposed, presumed
Inherited cultural identities
Stereotypes, milieus, structures
Creative cultural identities Turning, invading, manipulating resources Playing, establishing territory Cultural change
Figure 3 Two sides to identity
Theme 2
Otherization
This theme will explore a major inhibition to communication by looking at how, so easily, we can construct and reduce people to be less than what they are. Continuing from Units A1.1, A1.2 and A1.3 within the Identity theme, the angle on communication will be how we must discipline our own perceptions if we are to communicate successfully. However, Units A2.1, A2.2 and A2.3 will look more deeply at the forces that prevent us all from seeing people as they really are. The weight of responsibility is on ‘us’ to understand ourselves, rather than on essentialist categories of ‘them’.
COMMUNICATION IS ABOUT NOT PRESUMING
Falling into culturist traps
Experience
Continuing to follow the principle that we should try to understand people before we can communicate with them, in this unit we explore how easy it is to be misled by our own preconceptions and to fall into the trap of otherization. As with Unit A1.3, we use an example from within our own society to demonstrate how the tendency to reduce the foreign Other is deep within the roots of society generally. We hope therefore to show how even easier it is to misconstruct people from other societies. Consider the experience given in Example A2.1.1.
Example A2.1.1 The Smith family
A while ago John had neighbours, the Smiths, who belonged to a Christian sect related to the Amish. John and his family took this as a matter of fact because Mr Smith told them so several weeks after moving in during a residents’ meeting. However, from the very first John’s family saw of them they had suspected something of the sort. There were six children. The girls and Mrs Smith were dressed in long dresses with aprons, which came down to their mid-calf, and wore headscarves over long hair. The boys had long shorts with braces [US, suspenders], which also came down to mid-calf. Mr Smith was clean-shaven, except for a beard around his chin. As they were moving in John and his family could see that their furniture was like old-fashioned wooden school furniture; and they didn’t seem to have a television, stereo or video. There was, however, a piano
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and John could hear them making their own music for entertainment in the evenings. They were also American. Several events took place after the family moved in which began to reveal the way in which John was thinking about them. One afternoon, John was in his garage pottering about when Mr Smith came out and got into his large people carrier. He guessed he was waiting for the rest of his family before going out with them. He really was amazed when Mr Smith turned on the car’s CD player and listened to music. He had thought that because the Smiths didn’t have a television or stereo in the house their religion forbade them from listening to such things. It was the time when the whole country seemed involved in the events surrounding Princess Diana’s death. Mr Smith’s American parents were staying with them and his wife had encountered his mother in the driveway. Mrs Smith senior told her that because there was no television or radio in her son’s home, and no one was allowed to read newspapers, it was difficult for her and her husband to find out what was going on, and they felt they were missing a critical aspect of being in England. Despite the incident with the car stereo, this confirmed to John that the Smith family were indeed funda- mentalists, and that he had been right all along about how they abstained from modernity. He was therefore shocked and indeed concerned that it would be an inconsiderate invasion of their religious culture when his wife suggested inviting Mr and Mrs Smith senior, and indeed the whole Smith family, in to watch Diana’s funeral on the television. John really felt that this invitation would put the whole family in a very difficult position. It would be like inviting Muslims to eat pork. His wife said that it would be impolite to invite Mr and Mrs Smith senior alone, and that anyway they all had the choice to refuse. John was amazed again when the whole Smith family accepted the invitation and all ten of them came into their living room, the children sitting on the floor, to watch the whole funeral. He was even more amazed when Mrs Smith later wrote his wife a note to say that they had all really appreciated the opportunity.
Deconstruction
This example shows John reducing his neighbour according to a prescribed stereotype
- very much as Parisa’s colleagues reduced her to a stereotype in Unit A1.1. What makes this particularly significant is that it is so easy to fall into traps like this. It is therefore extremely important to deconstruct exactly how this can happen. It seems clear from Example A2.1.1 that John had made a mistake both about the nature of the Smith family and about how to communicate with them, whereas his wife had been successful at least to the extent of achieving significant interaction that seemed to be appreciated by both sides. In an attempt to explain why this happened we are going to explore the four interconnected concepts, some of which will be familiar, some less so, and link them with the concept of essentialism introduced in Units A1.1, A1.2 and A1.3:
■ stereotype ■ prejudice
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Culturism
The lower half of Figure 4 reveals another aspect of otherization, which addresses the issue of culture. Following our comment regarding bubbles A and C (23), the groups of people who we characterize as the ‘foreign Other’ can be said to share between them something cultural. The problem is that ‘we’ can very easily take this too far and allow the notion of ‘culture’ to become greater than the people themselves. Just as we too easily form stereotypes which can pre-define what people are like, we can imagine or reify ‘cultures’ as objects, places and physical entities within which and by which people live (Table 1 cell i). By reification we mean to imagine something to be real when it is not. Hence, essentialism is born (bubble D). Therefore, in Example A2.1.1:
■ John saw the Amish as a religious culture characterized by the stereotypical traits of austere appearance, disdain for modernity and so on, which would govern the behaviour of the Smith family. He thus saw them through the filter of ‘in Amish culture... .’ (Table 1 cell ix)
From essentialism there is just a small step to culturism (bubble E). This is similarly constructed to racism or sexism in that the imagined characteristics of the ‘culture’ (or ‘women’ or ‘Asians’) are used to define the person. Thus:
■ whatever Mrs Smith did, John explained it as being Amish. And if she did something which did not fit the explanation, it was that she had somehow lost her culture, was no longer, or ‘not really’ Amish, or had been ‘secularized’.
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Ideal characterization of the foreign Other
A Stereotyping (^) Judgement made on the basis of interest rather than emergent evidence
B Prejudice
Reducing the members of a group, to the pre-defined characteristics of a cultural label
E Culturism
Reducing the foreign Other to less than what they are
C Otherizing
D Essentialism
Figure 4 Constituents of otherization
Again, the reader might think this argument inconsequential, because ‘everyone knows’ that the Amish ‘are in fact like that’. Nevertheless, if one applied the same culturist rule to women, we would get:
■ whatever Mrs Smith did, John explained it as being due to her being a woman. And if she did something which did not fit the explanation, it was that she had lost her femininity.
Communication
The disciplines for intercultural communication arising from this unit carry the same basic message as those in Unites A1.1, A1.2 and A1.3, except that here they can draw attention to the factors which help prevent us from misinterpreting other people’s realities. In the light of the experience of this unit, we must therefore do the following (disciplines 1–4 appear on page 10, 5–6 on page 15 and 7–9 on pages 19–20).
- Avoid falling into the culturist trap of reducing people to less than they are – in the same way as we must avoid racist and sexist traps.
Task A2.1.1 Thinking about the Smiths
➤ Think of a situation you have been in that is like the Smiths example and describe it in similar detail. ➤ Pinpoint where the elements of otherization depicted in Figure 4 show themselves in the situation, and list the perpetrators and victims. ➤ What can you learn from this about intercultural communication? How might you go about conforming to the discipline described?
CULTURAL DEALING
What we project onto each other
Experience
This unit looks at the problem of otherization on a macro scale when two communities of people come together and behave according to their images of each other. Consider this example (first used in Holliday 2002):
Example A2.2.1 Tourists and business
Agnes has joined a tour group which is travelling through North Africa visiting archaeological sites. The group is made up of German, Italian, French, Swedish and
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UNIT A2.
