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The discipline strarted within American diplomacy and business culture, then it evolved. Culture can't be portraied and is in constant movement and has to be constructed, e.g. With language. (numbers refer to slide).
- e.g. In news the migratory flux has been called migrant crisis and when there is a discussion, the opponents bring up cultural issues, there are privilegies associated with certains cultures and languages.
- ''culture'' used as an euphemism for ''race'', the difference is difficult to define in academic fields.
- culture has always been present but it became an object of academic studies quite late. Quotation on slide: lists the elements of culture without fully explaining it, culture is not related to a specific notion, but it's something that is acquired and has to be recognised in a way (in contrast with the costant state of flux of culture) --> it has to do with people with power and money.
- says artefacts but focuses mainly on higher things like distinctive achievements of human groups.
- ''culture'' associated with nationality and small culture.
- any kind of small community of practice tends to be associated with culture. Culture vulture: asserting culture in an arrogant way. Collins English Dictionary.
- ''culture'' can be anything that goes without saying (you just do it).
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- renaissance human can progress thanks to the use of scientific method in a neverending process that can only get better --> colonisation of western countries that believed their culture was superior to ''savages''. Unholy alliance between culture and colonisation. Entitlement to dominate and occupy.
- In romanticism culture included more natural elements opposed to XVII progress.
- Herder is one of the founder of romanticism and every nation has its own ''geist'' (informing spirit) and have the right to exist (nation = people / state = organisation). Return to folklore stories that represented the geist of the people that were telling them. For Herder different culture units are homogeneous, nowadays they are distinctive --> origin of idea of culture as potentially clashing (originated in romanticism). Whether something is representative of a culture is based on a constructed vision of society.
- Culture is hybrid but comes from a single ''unum''.
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There is always an element of nostalgia and tradition when we try to define our culture to other people. Stereotypes are questionable but we tend to live up to them because they make us feel secure especially when we are abroad. They tend to focus on external behavior (behaviorist approach to culture), just listing facts. Even scholars that acknowledge differences between different cultures, thought there were more advanced cultures and savage cultures like in a table.
Ingrid Piller --> moral justification for colonization, you are allowed to colonize, export democracy (even today, not so far away from us). Ingrid came up with 3 examples looking up at a nation's website ''china.com'' in the section ''culture'', usually this websites are aimed at business men and tourists. Business travel advisors are also a thing websites and booklets (with different modality over the years because now it says ''may'' not ''can't''). Images of a culture that are different can result in clashes. Then there is culture in news reports --> Ghana quoted: element of essentialism and general idea that all Ghanians are the same and have the same beliefs --> conveys idea that there is no place in Ghana for people who don't think like that. All these examples imply a version of culture that is predominant, hegemonic and exclusionary --> meaning certain ideas of culture implies whoever doesn't follow those rules is exo facto excluded from that culture. Eg ( FdI e Meloni vs Egyptian museum : Arabic speakers --> Muslims) --> associate a language with a set of values. The minute we talk about a culture and name it, we presuppose that it exists (nominalisation) --> existential presupposition. Approaches to study of culture (numbers refer to slide).
- metaphorical images and stereotypes like a postcard (example of behaviorist approach), London stays for Britain as the image suggests in the cover (also marketing element) like a Dickens novel, gloomy, dark, soft day with mist all around --> we know is London, urbancentric view of the country in the book thanks to the cover. The book provides a list of facts without explanation (changing the name you could describe any country) presenting a national culture as superior to other cultures.
- Impermanence about how much people tolerate in their culture, not always aims to surprises.
- Important for international affairs, many multinational seminars are influenced by cognitive approach, before understanding other culture you have to understand the process of your mind, the observer is at the base (reflexive turn) before looking at a foreign culture that is not better or worst than others --> different cultures model reality in a different ways. 1+2+3 have in common the categorizing in cultures, but we have to try to look at culture in a way that doesn't emphasize regularity, but variability. 1+2+ problems are essentialism (idea that cultures have essences and it is possible to find it and describe a a whole culture) and reductionism. 1+2+3 are taken to extreme lead by othering and sort of freezing of culture that doesn't change overtime and the idea that they emphasize differences rather than similarity. Believing one's culture is ''one, normal, superior'' --> within the same national culture the government can create an ''in group'' and ''out group'' (Ghana example) --> also happens in sexism and classism (in comedy, concepts are easily conveyed, like differences in gender etc.). ''Punch'' was a famous Victorian comedy magazine, they used cartoons where the part of savages was played by colonials presented as apes. The concept of creating your own group of peers with comedy, even with horrible jokes (eg. men in gym). Othering. World fairs were popular in XVIII to display a country's industries and progress, a simplified version of the country focused on differences with others, they shared typical images of certain countries (of colonised countries too) --> othering that can lead to raifying the other into something that can be displayed. It implied that cultures can be assimilated as nations, stereotyped.
considered as static.. There are different approaches to culture, the dynamic approach has a lot to do with the performative turn, cultures are not perceived as in a frozen state, culture doesn't stand still for the picture. We are aware of this element and culture is always influenced but not determined, always negotiated by past meanings. Culture can also not be changing in every moment, because it is still recognizable with a dialectical process and it will influence the future culture. ''teaching at this levels..'' quote in slides, it can't be reduced to a list of facts, but sometimes in books there is still this kind of approach. We use the verb ''to be'' when talking about culture, in 1993 scholar said that culture is a verb, you do culture. Existential presupposition of assuming that culture is a homogeneous entity frozen in time, focusing on differences between cultures. That's why we say we perform our culture every single day, always in the making. Piller sees culture as created through language. On one hand an essentialist view of culture, on the other the process, the dynamic approach where culture is performance. The entity of culture is constructionist: it treats culture as something people do, which they perform. The discipline of intercultural communication, many books call it different way, confusion of different name used: cross-cultural/trans-cultural communication/learning...etc.
- Cross-cultural communication is often seen is linguistic books, started in 50s talking about pragmatics, the focusing and case studies are different, focus on languages and how different cultures and languages perform similar actions, it is a comparative view (like in comparative anatomy with different animals to see if they belong in the same family). Studies about how Russians and Italians apologize and how costumer care workers behave in the same companies but in different states (Italians bend the rules more), or how different people protest. Comparing how people behave doing similar activities, assumption that culture are separated entities.
- Intercultural communication instead focuses more on how people from different culture interact within the same environments. Anyway recently scholars have started to focus more on languages because the reality around us is created to languages and for their importance for mediation in countries. Languages are more easy to define as an object of studies, while cultures are not so easy to pinpoint. There has been over the last 50 years a strong focus on how language construct the world around us.
- Mediation, an intercultural mediator doesn't mimic native speakers, but hybridized their own culture with culture they are learning. These words have been used inconsistently because the field itself was changing and scholars wanted to find common ground looking at different approaches, since the Renaissance it has become crucial to society and we tried to find words to describe it.
- Interculturality, Wielsch introduced the term summing up different ones used to describe the issue, the idea of cultures being spheres different from one another only lead to cultural clashes. Culture are more nuanced than what we use to think, but this idea of homogeneity is still widespread, that is because of banal nationalism. Hannerz is one of the key scholars of the discipline and say it could be a culture-shock- prevention industry (es.."I could never eat beans for breakfast" from an
Italian in Britain), it originated because if we know another culture, then we can avoid the shock and understand each others. Using it as a technique for businessmen to do business in other countries (one in USA one from Japan that learned so much about the other culture that when they met the A bowed and the J shook his hand). The emphasis of interculturality is on differences and difficulties, seen as opportunities and not as sources of miscommunication (Holliday).
- Multiculturalism, Franz Boas was a scholar that first introduced the concept of multiculturalism and celebrated cultural diversity. The term has a history of being a symbol in the history of the world during political decolonization, former colonies becoming independent and the cultural issues they had being the center of an empire and then no more, moment of political debates, human rights, etc. The idea was to accept different cultures that could live together and be cohabitant in the same society (they used the term races, not cultures). A lot of scholars came from the US, Britain and France because they had a lot to explain for their empirial politics. Interculturality in the concept of multiculturalism has the same idea of cultures being different, in France general attitude to accept it and emphasize the different leading to ghettoization of certain groups that live with one another, in England and America general attitude to assimilate the culture, foreigners becoming part of the local community. A lot of scholars realized that cultural fundamentalism was potentially dangerous and didn't led to pacification, the only way of dealing with cultural differences was crossculturality.
- Transculturality, Wielsch insisted that it was a way of acknowledging you can't really distinguish between cultures because they are always hybridizing, that is the focus of transculturality and a product of globalization. Globalization started after the Age of Exploration with the Age of Empire and then with Age of Industrialization, it is a slow process that now consists of mixing and matching. Cultures today are extremely Interconnected and entangled with each other: it is almost impossible to disentangle, cultures, they emerge from one another. Culture interpenetrate and are no longer between the border of national countries. Forms of entanglement are a consequence of migratory processes, worldwide communication systems, economic dependency and interdependence. One thing we should never forget is that these are also economic processes: this entanglement and hybridization comes especially from the interconnections created also from merchandise (goods), populations and information. 50 years ago things were created locally, now all that we use comes from different countries. When we talk about hybridization we are not only talking about mixing with other people and cultures, but also the fact that we all have in our everyday life multiple hybrid identities at the same time (cross-cutting identities): identity of students, identity with our family, with our colleagues, with teachers. We behave and use language and different interactions based on the environment we are in, in different places and with different people (what we call "multiple attachments"). Sometimes even at the same time time thanks to technology, talking with someone and texting someone else. The main point of transculturality is that it aims for a multi-meshed and inclusive, not separatist and exclusive understanding of culture. Society exists with its ability to link transitions. Cultures are hybridized and
The 2 origins of the discipline are business transactions and diplomacy. FSI was an institution for military and diplomats that would have had to deal with Iraq soldiers, so they had no interest in semotic nor antropology, students wanted to know how to behave when going abroad and meet politicians, soldiers, etc. Edward T. Hall instead focused on micro-analysis, there are cultures connected to one another and people belonging to certain culture would behave in the same way: big generalization --> structuralist approach (structure governs all shared elements of culture and from one element we understand all the others). He came up with a set dimension of aspects that could be identified also in the field of business --> one of his most famous books. G.H. Tried to apply E.T.H.'s model to employees of IBM and carried out a survey worldwide and came out with a way of describing 6 dimensions of core values. Power distance is the distance between workers and bosses people are willing to tolerate, these models are based on a huge amount of quantitative data. Criticism to G.H. Dimension: nation and culture match according to this model, it is an overgeneralization, he describes the attitude worldwide by focusing on a sample of IBM employess in the 60s. (Problem, this is one of the highest quoted survey in studies). In other countries they made samples of 60/70s employees that were men working in IT companies. Shock preventing industry had a time when the world was seen as a competition or a threat (eg. USA vs Japan), they had to know about them to prevent accidents. (TV show: The Americans where everything can be reconducted to the cold war and 2 cultures couldn't communicate, that is to say Western World vs Middle East). The moment in which transculturality was prominent, transculturality would allow all country to have an opportunity to shine. --> video ''the danger of a single story'' shows problematics because she falls victim of biases and stereotypes that comes from novels, movies, news, plays. There is an expectations of what we think of a country or culture, everytime we approach cultural products or people, we approach them with biases. In the video she was only reading British novels because of colonialism, empirial power would use the same books in schools in an attempt to homogenise the culture of the empire. On the other hand, kids in the UK would not be exposed to Nigerian novels because of power relations, that can be economic, political, cultural egemony that comes from the econiomic power. The depiction of places gives the idea of an hierarchy and what was produced in the Western World would be consumed in colonised countries. Whatever culture is good for, it would be considered infantilised and seen as worthless. She talks about the white man's burden and reducing the others to one thing → as a society we made certain elements more relevant than others, but we can acknowledge it and be concious about it. She says that they only want to portray her as African, poor and low class, but in reality everyone has different characteristics and they only made those ones relevant. White man's burden: it was written to defend American actions in 1899 as the Us were trying to occupy Philippines, as if colonization is a task and a mission to civilize people seen as inferior (new-caught, sullen people) → reductionism (like we see not only, but also in comedies and TV shows) comes from this belief. Sullen people were seen either as devils or children in need of minding, mission to govern them, eg during the British empire, Irish people were
compared to children or females in order to downgrade them. The empire needed to create this image of other population as different from them and in need of their help, so that they could export democracy. In the poem sons (not daughters!) need to be sent abroad to civilize, they can't be naive and sensitive (be a man! And go civilize!) → elements of toxic masculinity, civilization is seen as something heroic → lack of balance with issues concerning transculturality. Previous criticism in the video of Chimamanda where this lack of balance can lead to uniformisation, so everyone is listening to, watching, reading the same things → it is a process that started during the Renaissance and is more obvious now. Pratt worked a lot on travel writings and stereotypes. This shift to transculturality has significance in the relationship between center and periphery. There is a contact zone of postcolonial encounter where the 2 of them clash with one another in this kind of vision, British culture contrasts local culture that is seen as childish and is infantilised. This also has to do with the costant neoliberal practices that are part of howvglobalization works.
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Dialogue McDonalds → something we consider American can become very local, given the worldwide spread, changing even with slight differences from country to country (in this case, kind of meat, portion sizes, ''experience'' that changes through restaurants). The experience can also change according to time, McDonald used to be a treat for kids in the past, nowadays is more of an ordinary thing. We use this example to talk about the reflective turn. McDonalization: the product is ordered and consumed briefly since it is a fast food and this process is applied to other areas of society, the price is affordable, people expect almost the same service worldwide. This kind of relation between shops is what we expect to find in big chains and multinational companies, but even in smaller business (eg. Kebab shops). This is an element of transculturalism, there are fewer things that shock us when we are abroad, it is a product of globalisation. In websites there is an enormous amount of stereotypes to which the local menu is adjusted according to the place. Can McDo be local? Not really because the characteristics can be less predictable, even if not that much. In some cases the experience can change completely → video opening the 1st^ McDonald in Russia: the main points that were not expected are the long queues, the cost that is half a day wage, how the locals were treated by waiters (smiling, spilling milkshake etc.). Kramsch talks about McDo in 1995 and of the differences between Russia and America. When multinationals go global, sometimes they stay the same, sometimes they change to acquire local colors and that is a result of transculturality and hybridization. There is no black/white, but a cultural mix between local and global, an entanglement between cosmopolitan and local sides. Chimamanda, ted talk, she grew up in Nigeria being fed with English products, but then she travels the world to less influential countries that are local products of periphery. There is not only a one-way influence from colony to
A constructionist observe any instance of socially cohesive behaviour, we tend to follow a certain set of behaviours to conform to a small culture → cultural significance of community practices and a common purpose, high level of commitment to the small culture. There is a bond between people in the same group that is expressed using a certain register, rituals, language and preferable topics discussed, even social classes and dress code are important sometimes. Even within this structure there can be irregularities and different attitudes, like similar habits performed in different ways. This would not anyway lead to clashes, but only to the enrichment of the small culture. In small culture systems a person can belong to different groups and there is no subordination, as opposed to large cultures.
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How is language made relevant as a part of an identity? Discourse community refers to language within a community (small culture is similar but it doesn't necessarily focus on language) ≠ speech community which is usually not a product of choice (speakers of Italian etc.). Discourse communities are much more thought about, there is more reflection (set of linguistic behaviours, class and registers). Language reflects the fact that we are often dealing with a small portion of the world. Discourse community has specific purposes and the search of use of language is a powerful tool to identify members of that community. Society is organized as complex social networks that can overlap (eg. Local online game community that has subgroups that have different languages between them, or students) There are shared global patterns of shared global things. Language can be used to create common ground or differentiate. We can identify people based on our perception (even in the McDo clip, the Russians are depicted as hungry etc.). If we associate a culture to certain stereotypes, we focus on a set of characteristics that exclude everything else (eg. Is Balotelli Italian?), these characteristics are geographical or concerning language and they follow a standard. In Europe, identity has often been based on language: after Latin was not spoken in Middle Ages there was a differentiation of language (it is a process of continuity where languages become estrange gradually) and once you passed the borders, language was abruptly different. A lot of languages in the past were not associated with different people (''lang dock'' ''lang d' oil'' → name for French and Italians). Worldwide a lot of national community where different languages are spoken and not mutually intelligible, but there is a national identity (eg. China, Switzerland, India, Canada, Belgium) even within the same country (Calabria and Albanian community) → nationalist ideas in Catalonia and rise of Catalan speakers, even Croatia and Serbia need to differentiate and create groups that are homogeneous and closed nets. Speaking a certain language is a political act (Irish in Ireland). In 1800 governments promoted the creation of a national language to also achieve capital power. Eng and FR have institutions that rule language and this creates inequality between groups speaking different varieties of language. In Ireland, Irish was the most spoken language, then there was a famine and people had to emigrate so they started to speak a lot more English and at the end of the famine only few people spoke in Irish, today only a minority (12% of
native speakers). In multilingual communities, speaking a certain language can be a political act ( eg. Troisi speaking Neapolitan on national tv), using a certain language can create distance and barriers even towards friends or partners, or can create solidarity if you find other speakers abroad. Language crossing can be used to kill gaps and show solidarity. Speaking a language is a way to perform our identity, there is not a national association between language and identity, but this has been going on for years. eg. Radio interview: in term of language, words can be used to create solidarity, distance, but also perform an act of affiliation to a certain group (we know if someone belongs to an in-group for their accent and choice of vocabulary). Bilingual kids from Mexico: as soon as something like playing the piano (which is a big deal in certain social classes) is brought up, they change their language because they make the piano correspond to a different social context, but then return to speak Spanish to create solidarity with the other classmate. → This has political and ideological connotations, probably their parents also do it to create distance or solidarity. Some people may feel more or less intimidated or confident by speaking a certain language (''M'' perceived he was linking himself to a higher category by speaking English). In society we tend to have a limited set of categories and to ascribe people to certain categories. ''Call center example'' → we tend to associate skills with a certain language (if we hear broken language, professionals tend to be trusted less) even when we talk about presidents, if they speak a refined variety, they give an idea of competence, eg. there were classes for the reduction of the accents in the US because some accents can be associated with rural communities. Call centers in Guatemala used 2nd^ generation teens that spoke standard American and were sent to a detention center back in Guatemala as operators when they ran out of personnel, all because people associated the accent with a certain set of competences (eg. Gloria in Modern Family).
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We are not trying to have a monolitical approach to culture, we want to question it. Statistical approach to culture (lingua culture) → some things are more likely to happen, the scholar approaches can be questioned even if it is widely quoted up to today. Culture can be seen as a product of certain narratives. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is incredibly popular. (eg. Inuit have hundreds different words to say snow, proven to be fake), this interest in people is because early anthropologist were interested in what they considered primitive or exotic. Their approach was ethnocentric considering one's own culture as one's center and viewing that as the norm everything must be evaluated with. People are culture-bound and limited to what other cultures could mean or express. Malinowski introduced 2 concepts that are crucial when we asset the link between culture and language: context of culture and context of situation →
and 100 Mexican students were interviewed to make a list of words they associated with the theme ''United States''. This led to different outcomes and association (see semantograph) because the same thing can be perceived differently and trigger different feelings in people. Americans listed values related to government and institutions, while Mexican saw the industrialisation and progress' side. → connected to the McDo in Russia, we cannot assume that the same thing has the same meaning within different cultures. Study Tim Lomas on feelings (but also study on translations) where the semantic meaning of words that are cognates doesn't develop completely. It is useful to figure out the way feelings are dealt with in different cultures (eg. Schadenfreude). There are untranslatable words like ''wabi-sabi'' and if we lack a translation we cannot grasp the real meaning. When we encounter concepts like these and we can't come up with an exact translation, we attune with the emotions that the thing conveys and become more attune to the experiences.
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National stereotypes are a social construction, received images of culture. If I have an idée reçue, I get it from media, pop culture, but this dissemination of nation started through literature, arts, historiography, travel logs (travel books especially important in Romanticism or even earlier, for example a book about German people from Tacitus). Image studies focus on stereotypes attached to certain national culture, we have to historicized them, how they change through history and how they are used in different fields. Imagotypes is the preferred term because ''stereotypes'' give a sense of stability, while the other term is ever-changing and found in a vast range of products. (Madame De Stael → book about creative women in Italy that became widespread, magology). There is a relationship between self-image and other-image and it finds its way in a variety of everyday discourses (eg. Jokes about other ethnicity or nationalities, for France is Belgium, to provide a self-image of being clever, they have to make the other nationality appear naive or dumb). Self-image can be reinforced by a negative other-image (eg. Britishness is associated with elegance, authority, respectability, order; they saw these characteristics in themselves and in order to enhance that they created a negative image of Irish people portraying them as apish and unconscious → these 2 images work together, as in the North and the South of Italy). Creating these images implies creating a negative counterpart, both of them are the result of a process of selective observation and selective values judgments. Group identities are not a matter of reality sort of speech, but of perception that creates them → when we create a stereotype, we look for confirmation of it and we expect it. Piller focuses on the fact that stereotypes reflect on national character, but many of them go beyond class, gender etc. because there is no diversity in the stereotype, ahistorical idea of national character. Meeting between Swedish ambassador and Iran's president Ahmadinejad → he was sat and offended the Iranian delegation (sitting too comfortably), but most of the press came out with the idea that sitting crossing the leg or showing one's shoe
sole was irrespective and offensive, which is not true, but nevertheless the most popular version of the story is the stereotyped one, where the Iranian delegation is irrationally offended by the shoes. Stereotype simplifies reality so we can better understand it, but it can cause a lot of harm and filter our attention. Experiment run in Germany, sending application letters, identical data only changing the name or headscarf of the girl and this led to many different results. There are a lot of these experiments and stereotypes tend to be more attached to men rather than women, especially concerning religion and ethnicity. Experiment done with appearance and accents. (Many scholars like Piller realized that if we hear the sound for the syllable ''ba'' but seeing it with a video of someone articulating ''ga'', our mind mixes the two creating ''da'' → our mind creates a perception of reality even when our senses tell us something else → experiment of 1975). A lecture was recorded in standard American and played to 2 groups of undergrads, in one case the picture of an Asian lecturer was shown, in the other of a Caucasian one. The class with the pic of the Asian woman commented and claimed they heard a non-standard American accent because they were influenced by what they were expecting to hear from the pic. Stereotypes filter our attention and make us see things that may or may not be there, we tend to associate identity with certain physical characteristics. How we perform our identity → clip that shows that identity is dynamic between how we see ourselves and how other see us. She revers the stereotype and attaches his identity to the country of origin, it has to do with physical appearance. Her supposed Korean identity only goes back to recent generations and it is considered more acceptable to ask her rather than him. Stereotypes are dependent on historical context (his history of imagination is far back in time, but she question his ''native'' American identity as he did with her). They both mentioned food, superficial levels of culture, greetings, language, using greetings of a specific variety, gestures, prosody (using an accent), she gets louder while talking and quotes Macbeth, the tone of her voice is different, she puts on a a show to perform identity. When self-orientation corresponds to ascription by others = alignment, otherwise misalignment. When we perform a cultural identity and use a language, we use indexical cues with also elements of body language, we focus our attention on some elements to make them relevant and define a certain identity (eg. Gloria from Modern Family, her son is also Colombian, but he does the opposite of her because it's a sign of misalignment, that is to say not to be ascribed to an identity). When our identity is made relevant by the context we are in, we can align it to the stereotypes attributed to us (in multicultural couples, the element of the identity difference comes out in the beginning and then other differences are made relevant, but initially it is normal to categorize in order to perceive and understand). Not long ago, a scholar started talking about Mediterranean cuisine with wheat-based products, oil, wine, tomatoes and it changes throughout each zone and it's made thanks to a selection of characteristic chosen, underlined and in need to be historicized.
appearance (nobody is working, just enjoying themselves). Negative stereotypes are used in a jokingly way, most of time they are very generic and address emblematically, sometimes vaguely like ''goodfellas pizza''. Elements of multilingualism and symbolic power. In global advertisement English people play different role. English is not the most spoken language, but is used in a way in which people can understand. There is an egemony attached to language that is accepted between rulers and subjects, it is our default language, even a basic level of understanding is expected (eg. Self service, bars, shops with fake construction are accepted as words and we decided to use English to name them) → symbolic power and accessibility of the language (eg. Juve quoting Nietzsche in English).
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Banal nationalism → most of his elements go unnoticed (weather forecast), for example in the school system (studying national literature, geography in word map, language), they have monolingual stand that conveys not only our actions, but also the way of programming our future actions. Subjects are always taught in the national language (if not, they are taught in a language chosen following a hierarchical structure). This is a way for schools to convey that the national language has a higher status than other language. There is an hidden curriculum that is conveyed through sheer habits and it acknowledges the global statute of a language. There can also be behavioural and social expectations associated to schools, depending on the country we are in. Language is used as a medium to convey information, dialects and regional varieties are silenced in order to make the language an instrument of power (eg. Teaching proper English to the working class). This power is also conveyed by mass media and social media. Language can be used to create ghettos and impose superiority. While schools became very conservative institutions, the view of literacy has become more pluralistic. School starts as a national project to asset national values and knowledge. Literacy has become a social practice overtime because schools have foreign pupils that encounter difficulties and are expected to know the national language, history,literature, the right set of behaviours to keep, cultural references, ethics and values, how the interaction works and the way conversations go. We tend to associate being part of a minority with a weak position. Albanian pupils born to Albanian family emigrated in Greece that then returned to Albania had issues with the Albanian language and lacked familiarity with the hidden curriculum even if they were perceived as Albanians. Part of their culture was Greek, but it was silenced to enforce the Albanian one, they had an hybrid identity and only part of it was valued and they had to learn a language they only partly knew but were expected to know, including cultural aspects. Schools aren't made to promote multilingual and cultural habits. English has a global power worldwide (eg. With documents) for the institutions associated with the hierarchy of the languages, English is the default language. This hierarchy is showed in the example of Tommy, Hande and the teacher
(incorrect use of pronouns). There are variables present in people coming from different school systems, but they have nothing to do with ethnicity and we should be wary of that → overgeneralisation, that students coming from a certain schools systems wouldn't be able to behave differently. (active/passive participation, foreign students can have language learning anxiety, but can also not know how to interact). In student-teacher interactions there can be a communication mismatch, we can make assumptions, but when it comes to institutionalized environments there is a set of attitudes that comes with the language. (eg. Email → communicative turbulence).
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Email requests or class interactions are interesting because we find any sort of structures characterized by defined differences between discourses and based on the background and habits of the speakers. They also concern the power imbalance between teacher and students. Teachers are generally ready to accept language mistakes and grammatical issues, but less keen to accept rudeness (even knowing the background of the Greek student, as in the example). A cultural schema refers to unspoken rules of communication or behaviour (eg paying in advance in bars, etc.), we take these things for granted because we grew up knowing them, but they change when in another country, for example, they are made in a different way and we have to learn them from scratch through culture learning, we can even look at them with prejudice (thinking there is only one right way to do things, etc.) and we tend to associate certain characteristics with certain cultures → if we are used to a certain way of doing things, it is easy to misunderstand others ways to do them and to socially partake in classes or any social situation, this can lead to the stereotype that the cognitive skills of people not accustomed to specific cultural habits can be misjudged based on a racial prejudice. In Germany there is a strong phenomenon of Turkish immigration and Turkish people were believed to be less intelligent and Becker decided to do a research on pre-scholars belonging to 5 different groups of families from various generations of migrants and melanges. The children from intermarried families performed better than the other groups, the German group of children placing 2 nd^ (they were already participating and accustomed to their society). In reality, the results did not depend on the cultural aspects, but on the socioeconomic status of the parents and their educational resources, that's why children from interracial marriages and German parents performed better that children of other groups. If we look in detail at these dynamics, we see that they are not related to race or culture, but to the economic status. Schema (schemas/schemata) = this concept was at first introduced in psychology and it's a structure we use to understand reality (experiment: dfferent people with different culture were told a story and each re-exposed it with slight differences adjusting it to their own culture, modifying the story). Eg → Olympics: reference to the fact that they happen every four years and the
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(Far right politicians have used languages and national language to separate and decrease immigration). Communicative turbulence (using the word ''misunderstanding'' gives the idea that any incomprehension can be solved with enough time and information and we can get to truth, but this is not always the case especially with hierarchy etc.) is an issue that doesn't have an easy solution because we would have to acknowledge political and class issues. An example is the pic of 4 English politicians (one of them is David Cameron, former PM) → red poppy with black and green leaves, British people wear it in November to commemorate the deaths of WW1, behind them there is the Great Wall of China, they were visiting and wearing poppies → China and England fought over opium (1838-1842 Opium War), so it was a sensitive topic (should they have taken it off? Should China be more accepting?) → none of them is right, there no greater principle to decide this. People in a non-dominant group are usually penalized for intercultural differences (email example again, or the English type of cover letter that tend to be more focused on your achievements and selling yourself and if you don't comply to this rule, you risk not being selected). They have the burden of adaptation. Pecking (beccare, gerarchico) order that has to do with symbolical and political power of certain languages concerning also subtle aspects of communication. This creates groups that belong to the dominant language and convey an internalized sense of inferiority. There is always going to be a pecking order to gatekeep people from positions of power. This political distance creates many issues, like the British poppy in China because it seems like an imposition and statement of superiority. Script → Encounter between costumer and cashier in America in a Korean shop, the costumer is trying to engage in a conversation, the cashier is very distant and keeps this distance (by packing the bag, that is also something culturally expected). The customer asks personal questions and questions about the shop, he tries to find common ground, but the cashier never starts the conversation and keeps everything in the frame of a business transaction. → In this interaction, there are many types of schematas that are mismatched like context, roles, procedures. The customer has different ideas of how a transaction works, Korean and Afro-American people had many issues in Los Angeles (the AA said the incapability of communication was based on racism, while for K talking about personal issue was uncomfortable). → clash of styles because they have 2 different styles of conversations. The 1st^ style could be perceived as imposing, the 2nd^ one as arrogant. Again there is no right or wrong, they are in a transnational place where the 2 communities live. The customer's style is an high involvement style, we usually use it with people we share a lot with ≠ low involvement style. The characteristic of this style are the use of colloquial words, dialect, fast way of talking, gestures, colloquial register, personal questions and topics covered. The communicative turbulence doesn't lead to a breakdown of the conversation that can still go on and finish
successfully, like in this example. With different language communities, we can study how people do the same thing with different languages. In interlanguage pragmatic, we focus on how non-native speakers perform knowledge and skills pragmatically. When we all speak English, we have a pragmatic accent that conveys our nationality and reveals parts of our culture. eg. the fact that being in one's early 20s and still living with the parents can be perceived differently by different communities, if you say ''still'' you convey the meaning that this is not a common practice in your country, eg. arbitro cornuto because Italians view being cheated on as a major insult, in other countries they don't say this. These elements translated in another language convey and reveal parts of our culture of origin. Pragmalinguistic failure has to do with the use of similar structures between different languages, it can also reveal the incapability of fully translating similar structures. eg. ''of course'' in English and in Russian, in English there is the subtle meaning that the question is too obvious. There can be an inability of understanding the pragmatic meanings of two words that could be synonyms, but convey slightly different meanings depending on the language. Sociopragmatic failure occurs when certain attitudes and behaviours in a certain language can be considered rude in another (eg. Korean shop). Formal and functional equivalence are 2 ways of looking the same linguistic features across language (formal) and how to achieve a comparable function in another cultural context (functional). eg. ''Please take care of me'' in Japanese introduction that shows the need of being taken care of, the direct translation could fail to acknowledge that language covers different functions in different ways, in English it just translates with ''how are you doing''.
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Using hybrid variety of language can be crucial. People on the move = umbrella term for people that live transnational lives and move from the place they were born in. They find themselves in hybrid contexts in a new country, at a crossroad where the linguistic identity is foregrounded and there are different values and culture. We associate different labels to people who are displaced. We do it for economic status, work related motivations. We define people on the move as migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, resident aliens, but we would not call ourselves that way, we'd rather use ''expats''. They are not equivalent terms, we associate migrants with economic or political issues assuming class and social connotations, that are not present when we talk about expats because the idea we have is that of a relocation, of cosmopolitan people that travel where they want ≠ migrants because the term is just related to their legal status. Asylum seekers' status prevents them from being sent back to the country of origin thanks to international laws. There are so many economic, social, legal differences between the types of migrants, the terms are used to differentiate between them. (During Brexit, there were a lot of migrants for settlement in Spain even though
