The Handbook of Intercultural Discourse and Communication

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The Handbook of Intercultural Discourse and CommunicationEdited by Christina Bratt Paulston, Scott F. Kiesling, and Elizabeth S. Rangel

The Handbook of Intercultural Discourse and Communication

Edited by

Christina Bratt Paulston, Scott F. Kiesling, and Elizabeth S. Rangel

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

This edition first published 2012© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataThe handbook of intercultural discourse and communication / edited by Christina Bratt Paulston, Scott F. Kiesling, and Elizabeth S. Rangel. p. cm. – (Blackwell handbooks in linguistics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-6272-2 (alk. paper) 1. Intercultural communication–Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Identity (Psychology) I. Paulston, Christina Bratt, 1932– II. Kiesling, Scott F.— III. Rangel, Elizabeth S. P94.6H358 2011 306.44–dc23 2011026132

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Contents

Notes on Contributors viiPreface xvIntroduction xvii

Part I Background 1

1 Intercultural Communication: An Overview 3Ingrid Piller

2 Perspectives on Intercultural Discourse and Communication 19Leila Monaghan

3 Cultures and Languages in Contact: Towards a Typology 37John Edwards

Part II Theoretical Perspectives 61

4 Interactional Sociolinguistics: Perspectives on Intercultural Communication 63John J. Gumperz and Jenny Cook-Gumperz

5 Ethnography of Speaking 77Scott F. Kiesling

6 Critical Approaches to Intercultural Discourse and Communication 90Ryuko Kubota

7 Postmodernism and Intercultural Discourse: World Englishes 110Suresh Canagarajah

Part III Interactional Discourse Features 133

8 Turn-Taking and Intercultural Discourse and Communication 135Deborah Tannen

9 Silence 158Ikuko Nakane

10 Indirectness 180Michael Lempert

11 Politeness in Intercultural Discourse and Communication 205Janet Holmes

vi Contents

Part IV Intercultural Discourse Sites 229

12 Anglo–Arab Intercultural Communication 231Eirlys E. Davies and Abdelali Bentahila

13 Japan/Anglo-American Cross-Cultural Communication 252Steven Brown, Brenda Hayashi, and Kikue Yamamoto

14 “Those Venezuelans are so easy-going!” National Stereotypes and Self-Representations in Discourse about the Other 272Lars Fant

15 “Face,” Stereotyping, and Claims of Power: The Greeks and Turks in Interaction 292Maria Sifianou and Arın Bayraktaroğlu

16 Intercultural Communication and Vocational Language Learning in South Africa: Law and Healthcare 313Russell H. Kaschula and Pamela Maseko

17 Indigenous–Mestizo Interaction in Mexico 337Rocío Fuentes

Part V Interactional Domains 365

18 Translation and Intercultural Communication: Bridges and Barriers 367Eirlys E. Davies

19 Cultural Differences in Business Communication 389John Hooker

20 Intercultural Communication in the Law 408Diana Eades

21 Medicine 430Claudia V. Angelelli

22 Intercultural Discourse and Communication in Education 449Amanda J. Godley

23 Religion as a Domain of Intercultural Discourse 482Jonathan M. Watt

Index 496

Notes on Contributors

Claudia V. Angelelli is the author of Medical Interpreting and Cross-cultural Communication and Revisiting the Role of the Interpreter, and the co-editor of Testing and Assessment in Translation and Interpreting Studies. Her articles appear in Interpreting, META, MONTI (Monografias de Traducción e Interpretación), The Translator, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, Critical Link, TIS (Translation and Interpreting Studies), and ATA Chronicle. She is the author of the first empirically driven language proficiency and interpreter readiness test for the California Endowment and Hablamos Juntos. She is President of ATISA, World Project Leader for ISO Standards on Community Interpreting, and Director of the Consortium of Distinguished Language Centers.

Arın Bayraktaroğlu did her first degree in Turkey and her PhD in the UK. She received her matriculation from the University of Cambridge in 1977 and taught Turkish linguistics at the Faculty of Oriental Studies until the end of her tenure in 1982, although she returned as a visiting member of the Faculty, on and off, until 1995. Apart from publishing papers in various periodicals mainly on politeness, she also co-edited (with Maria Sifianou) a book entitled Linguistic Politeness across Boundaries: The Case of Greek and Turkish. She has been a member of Lucy Cavendish College Cambridge since 1986, Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Linguists (UK) since 2005, and Specialist in Turkish on the Asset Languages project of OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA Examinations) Board since 2006. She worked from 1995 to 1999 as the Editor-in-Chief of TASG News: Newsletter of the Turkish Area Study Group and since 2005 she has been a member of the Advisory Board, Journal of Politeness Research: Language, Behaviour, Culture. Her research interests have been in pragmatics in general and (im)politeness in particular, as well as in the linguis-tic and cultural aspects of Turkish.

Abdelali Bentahila was born in Fez, Morocco, and after pursuing his undergrad-uate studies in English at University Mohammed V, Rabat, he obtained an MA and a PhD in linguistics from the University of Wales (UK). Since then he has pursued his academic career in Morocco, becoming professor and head of the

viii Notes on Contributors

English department at Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah University, Fez, and later professor at Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Tetouan. He is currently teaching at this university’s business school, in Tangier. He has published extensively on the sociolinguistics of Morocco, particularly Moroccan bilingualism, language planning policies, language teaching, and Arabic–French codeswitching. His own intercultural encounters include a British wife, and life in a bicultural house-hold has given him many insights into the problems of communication across cultures.

Steven Brown is Professor of English and TESOL Director at Youngstown State University, Ohio, USA. He has a BA from the University of California at Santa Cruz and a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. He has co-authored two series of ELT textbooks, Active Listening and English Firsthand, as well as several teacher-education texts, including Topics in Language and Culture for Teachers. He taught English for ten years in Japan, where he also trained teachers in the Columbia University Teachers College MATESOL program. He also more recently taught English for six months at Lunghwa University of Science and Technology in Taiwan, on a faculty exchange.

Suresh Canagarajah is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor in the departments of English and applied linguistics at the Pennsylvania State University. He had his early education in the war-torn northern region of Sri Lanka where he taught English language and literature for students from mostly rural backgrounds at the University of Jaffna. Later, he joined the faculty at the City University of New York (Baruch College and the Graduate Center) where he taught multilingual urban students for a decade. His book Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching (1999) won the Modern Language Association’s Mina Shaughnessy Award for the best research publication on the teaching of language and literacy. His subsequent publication Geopolitics of Academic Writing (2002) won the Gary Olson Award for the best book in social and rhetorical theory. Critical Academic Writing and Multilingual Students (2002) applies composition research and scholarship for the needs of multilingual students. His edited collection Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice (2005) examines linguistic and literacy constructs in the context of globalization. His study of World Englishes in Composition won the 2007 Braddock Award for the best article in the College Composition and Communication journal.

Jenny Cook-Gumperz is professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Gervirtz Graduate School of Education specializing in interactional sociolinguistics and the sociology of literacy. Her publications include The Social Construction of Literacy (2nd edition 2006), Children’s Worlds and Children’s Language (edited with William Corsaro and Jurgen Streeck, 1986), Social Control and Socialization (1973), and numerous papers. She is currently working on a new book with John J. Gumperz, Communicating Diversity, to be published in 2012.

Notes on Contributors ix

Eirlys E. Davies was born and raised in Wales, UK, but after obtaining a PhD in linguistics from the University of Wales, she moved to Morocco, where she has now lived for almost thirty years. She was formerly a professor at Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah University, Fez, and now works at the King Fahd School of Translation, part of Abdelmalek Essaadi University, in Tangier. She has taught courses in semantics, stylistics, and pragmatics, and at present teaches translation and translation theory. Her publications range over the fields of bilingualism, particularly codeswitching, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and translation. Many years of frank discussion with Moroccan students, together with marriage to a Moroccan, have inspired in her an abiding interest in intercultural dialogue and the relations between the Arab world and the West.

Diana Eades (adjunct associate professor, University of New England, Australia) works on language in the legal system, particularly the language used by, to, and about Australian Aboriginal people. Her latest books are Courtroom Talk and Neocolonial Control (2008) and Sociolinguistics and the Legal Process (2010). She has been President, Vice-President, and Secretary of the International Association of Forensic Linguists, and is co-editor of The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law.

John Edwards is professor of the history of psychology at St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He edits the Routledge Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, and the Multilingual Matters book series for the Bristol publisher of the same name. His own books include Language, Society and Identity (1985), Multilingualism (1995), Language in Canada (1998) and, more recently, Un mundo de lenguas (2009), Language and Identity (2009), Language Diversity in the Classroom (2010), Minority Languages and Group Identity (2010), and Challenges in the Social Life of Language (2011).

Lars Fant is professor of Ibero-Romance languages at Stockholm University. His research interests include cross-cultural and intercultural communication, semantics, pragmatics, general and critical discourse analysis, conversation and dialogue analysis, politeness studies and second-language acquisition, in particular with regard to high-proficient second-language use. He has con-ducted several large research projects, e.g. “Negotiation interaction: cross- cultural studies of Scandinavian and Hispanic patterns,” “Activity types and conversation structure in native and non-native (Swedish) speakers of Spanish,” and “Interaction, identity and language structure.” He is currently co-conducting a research program on “High-level proficiency in second language use” and is also involved in several co-operation projects with Latin American higher educa-tion institutions.

Rocío Fuentes (PhD, University of Pittsburgh) is a visiting assistant professor of Spanish, and faculty member of the Latino and Latin American Studies Committee at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her main fields of

x Notes on Contributors

interest are the education of linguistic minorities, educational discourse analysis, and intercultural communication.

Amanda J. Godley is an associate professor in the Department of Instruction and Learning at the University of Pittsburgh. A former middle- and high-school teacher, she now researches critical grammar and language instruction and issues of language, literacy, and identity in urban high-school English classrooms.

John J. Gumperz is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Among his best-known publications are Directions in Sociolinguistics (co-edited with Dell Hymes; 1972, 1986 re-issued 2001), Discourse Strategies (1982), Language and Social Identity (1982); and Re-Thinking Linguistic Relativity (co-edited with Stephen Levinson, 1996). Gumperz is currently at work on two volumes: a follow-up to Directions in Sociolinguistics entitled New Ethnographies of Communication (co-edited with Marco Jaquemet) to be published in 2012, and Communicating Diversity (co-written with Jenny Cook-Gumperz) to be published in 2012.

Brenda Hayashi is associate professor in the Department of Intercultural Studies at Miyagi Gakuin Women’s University, Sendai, Japan. She has an MA in TESL from the University of California at Los Angeles and is presently in the linguistics doctoral program at Macquarie University. She has co-authored English textbooks for Japanese high-school and university students. Witnessing cultural “bumps” that arise when Japanese students venture to the United States, England, Scotland, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, Oman, and Tanzania, she firmly believes in the importance of cross-cultural communication training.

Janet Holmes holds a personal chair in linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington. She teaches sociolinguistics courses, specializing in workplace dis-course, New Zealand English, and language and gender. She is Director of the Wellington Language in the Workplace project (see www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/lwp) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Her books include Gendered Talk at Work, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, now in its third edition, and the Handbook of Language and Gender (co-edited with Miriam Meyerhoff). Her recent work focuses on leadership discourse and the relevance of gender and ethnicity in the workplace. She is co-author of Leadership, Discourse and Ethnicity to be pub-lished in 2011 which examines effective leadership in Māori and Pākehā organiza-tions. Most recently she has been investigating the discourse of skilled migrants as they enter the New Zealand workplace.

John Hooker is T. Jerome Holleran Professor of Business Ethics and Social Responsibility, and Professor of Operations Research, at Carnegie Mellon University. He holds doctoral degrees in philosophy and management science. His research interests include operations research, business ethics, and cross-cultural issues. He is founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Business Ethics

Notes on Contributors xi

Education and a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. He has published over 130 articles, five books, and five edited volumes, including the textbook Working across Cultures. He has lived and worked in Australia, China, Denmark, India, Qatar, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Zimbabwe, and has extensive experience in Germany and Mexico.

Russell H. Kaschula is an award-winning author of a number of academic works, novels, and short stories, in both isiXhosa and English. He is Professor of African language studies and Head of the School of Languages at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa.

Scott F. Kiesling is associate professor of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh. He served as chair of the department from 2006 to 2009. His work includes areas such as language and masculinities, sociolinguistic variation, discourse analysis, ethnicity in Australian English, and Pittsburgh English. His publications include the books Linguistic Variation and Change (2011) and Intercultural Discourse and Communication: The Essential Readings (2005, edited with Christina Bratt Paulston). He is probably best known for his article “Dude” (2004), which appeared in the journal American Speech.

Ryuko Kubota is a professor at British Columbia University, Vancouver, Canada. She obtained her PhD in education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at University of Toronto in 1992. Before her current post, she taught at Monterey Institute for International Studies and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her areas of specialization include second-/foreign-language teacher education, critical pedagogies, and multiculturalism. She is an editor of Race, Culture, and Identities in Second Language: Exploring Critically Engaged Practice (2009). She has published many book chapters and articles in such journals as Canadian Modern Language Review, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, Foreign Language Annals, Japanese Language and Literature, Journal of Second Language Writing, Modern Language Journal, TESOL Quarterly, Written Communication, and World Englishes.

Michael Lempert is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and previously taught linguistics at Georgetown University. He received his PhD in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and spe-cializes in the study of face-to-face interaction. His first book, Discipline and Debate: The Language of Violence in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery, details how interaction rituals like monastic debate and public reprimand are changing as reformers take seriously liberal-democratic ideals. Lempert has also written on poetic structure in discourse, stance and affect, addressivity, and gesture, and is presently co-authoring a book on US political communication.

Pamela Maseko is a senior lecturer in the African language studies section of the School of Languages at Rhodes University, South Africa. Her research and

xii Notes on Contributors

teaching interests are language policy and planning and language development, particularly the intellectualization of African languages. She holds a PhD.

Leila Monaghan teaches anthropology and disability studies at the University of Wyoming and the University of Maryland, University College. She received her PhD in linguistic anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles and her dissertation work was with the New Zealand Deaf community. Her publications include a co-edited book, Many Ways to be Deaf (2003), on the inter-national development of Deaf communities, a 2002 Annual Review of Anthropology article with Richard Senghas, and HIV/AIDS and Deafness (co-edited with Constanze Schmaling, 2006). She also does research on the history of linguistic anthropology and wrote the 2010 review of the year in linguistic anthropology for the American Anthropologist on the revival of interest in historical approaches in the field. Monaghan was a visiting scholar at the University of Wyoming Department of Anthropology’s George C. Frison Institute from 2008 to 2009 when the majority of this chapter was written and thanks the Frison Institute for its support.

Ikuko Nakane is a senior lecturer in the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include silence in intercultural com-munication and more recently language and the law, in particular analysis of courtroom and police interview discourse. She is the author of Silence in Intercultural Communication (2007).

Christina Bratt Paulston, born in Sweden, is Professor Emerita of linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh. She served as chair of the department from 1974 to 1989 and as director of the English Language Institute from 1969 to 1998. Her numerous publications include Intercultural Discourse and Communication: The Essential Readings (2005, edited with Scott F. Kiesling), Sociolinguistics: The Essential Readings (2003, edited with G. Richard Tucker), and Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Bilingual Education (1992).

Ingrid Piller is professor of applied linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. She holds a PhD from the Technical University of Dresden, Germany, and has taught at universities in Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. She has published widely on the sociolinguistics of language learning, multilingualism, and intercultural communication. She is the author of the text-book Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction (2011). She blogs about her research at www.languageonthemove.org.

Elizabeth S. Rangel is a research associate at Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC), a cognitive research institute at the University of Pittsburgh. She is earning her PhD in foreign-language education from the University of Pittsburgh. Before completing her doctorate, she taught college-level Spanish and courses in language acquisition, cultural diversity, and sociolinguistics. Her research on early elementary language learners has focused on native-language phonological inter-

Notes on Contributors xiii

ference in the reading acquisition process. Her most recent publications include chapters in the third edition (2009) of the International Encyclopedia of Education, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ’s (OECD, 2010), Innovative Learning Environments.

Maria Sifianou is professor of linguistics at the Faculty of English Studies, University of Athens. Her publications include the books Politeness Phenomena in England and Greece (1992/1999/2002) and Discourse Analysis (2006) and a number of articles in edited books and international journals. She has co-edited Themes in Greek Linguistics (1994), Anatomies of Silence (1999), Linguistic Politeness across Boundaries: The Case of Greek and Turkish (with Arın Bayraktaroğlu, 2001) and Current Trends in Greek Linguistics: Essays in Honour of Irene Philippaki-Warburton (2003). She was a member of the scientific committee on intercultural communica-tion in the framework of the Thematic Network Project in the Area of Languages of the European Union (1997–). Her main research interests include politeness phenomena and discourse analysis in an intercultural perspective.

Deborah Tannen is University professor and Professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. She is author of eleven books and editor or co-editor of eleven others. Among her books, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation was on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly four years, including eight months as No. 1, and has been translated into thirty languages. Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk Among Friends and Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse have been reissued in second editions. She is Associate Editor of Language in Society and is on the editorial boards of many other journals. Her cross-cultural communication research has addressed the conversational and narrative styles of New Yorkers and Californians, Greeks and Americans, and women and men. She has won many fellowships and awards including a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She received her PhD in linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, and has been awarded five honorary doctorates. Her website is debo-rahtannen.com.

Jonathan M. Watt is professor of biblical studies at Geneva College (Beaver Falls, PA) and adjunct professor at the Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary (Pittsburgh). His publications often address the intersection of sociolinguistics and biblical or religious issues. They include Code-Switching in Luke and Acts, a chapter on religious literacy in Blackwell’s Handbook of Educational Linguistics (Bernard Spolsky and Francis M. Hult, eds.), and a forthcoming volume on Colossians-Philemon in the new Brill Exegetical Commentary Series.

Kikue Yamamoto has worked in and outside of Japan as a corporate trainer, executive coach, and management consultant for about twenty years. She has co-authored a book titled Competencies on Relationship Building at Multi-cultural Societies with Kyoko Yashiro. Among many articles, one is based on her three-time

xiv Notes on Contributors

research (1987, 1991, 2005) at NUMMI, the Toyota and GM joint-venture, USA. She teaches at Miyagi Gakuin Women’s University and Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. She has a BA in English and American literature from Hosei University, a second BA in Mass Communication from San Francisco State University, and an MA in Communication from the University of New Mexico. She has her own business: Office Yamamoto Ltd.

Preface

When we set out to compile a handbook for the vast field of intercultural discourse and communication, we knew that we wanted to have something that was in some sense really a handbook. A book you keep returning to to jog your memory about how to do something, or remind you not to forget something. In Intercultural Discourse and Communication (IDC), that means having a perspective that is both theoretical and practical, that keeps in focus both the discourse and the commu-nication, and that is truly intercultural (and, although not in the title, multicultural and cross-cultural, the definitions of which we will not dwell on, but are discussed in several of the chapters, especially Chapters 1 and 2). Our audience is thus an eclectic one: people who will read to understand the state of a field that really isn’t a single field, students just learning how to do analyses and also to theorize their ideas, and we hope also people “in the trenches” doing work in intercultural situations.

The first two parts comprise an overview handbook, containing chapters that provide historical context as well as theoretical perspectives. Our experience teaching also suggests that readers will be interested in surveys of different kinds of discourse phenomena that repeatedly arise as problematic in intercultural dis-course contact. So the third part forms a mini-handbook on these phenomena: turn taking, silence, indirectness, and politeness.

Some of the most useful things in any handbook are examples, so the fourth section is that: several examples of researchers analyzing particular cross-cultural situations. Such a section could of course fill a library (or we could just refer the reader to a journal), but we have asked a number of researchers with varying interests in diverse cultural combinations and situations to provide a few. These studies of course do not exhaust the types of situations or the possible cultural combinations (an impossible task), but we have tried to make sure there is not a heavy focus on Anglo-American contexts, and we have also tried to include diverse ways of conceiving the analysis. Finally, we know that for most people IDC is not a theoretical endeavor but a practical one, and so we have included some overviews of how the study of IDC has been applied in different domains.

This handbook can be used in a number of ways, including for a course in IDC. However, we would encourage anyone so using the handbook to supplement it

xvi Preface

with either some more original readings, such as those contained in our reader Kiesling and Paulston (2003) or in a textbook on intercultural or cross-cultural communication (such as Bonvillain 2003 or Scollon and Scollon 2001) or linguistic anthropology (such as Foley 1997 or Duranti 1997). Journals that contain impor-tant IDC articles include the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, the Journal of Pragmatics, Language in Society, Language and Intercultural Communication, Multilingua, and Pragmatics.

We would like to thank a number of very patient people who have helped this volume become a reality. First and foremost are the authors of these contributions. Some have been waiting literally years to finally see their chapter in print, and some have graciously stepped in at the last minute to fill a gap that suddenly appeared. The team at Wiley-Blackwell has put up with us graciously, and we are grateful for their patience and persistence. Specifically, we want to thank Danielle Descoteaux, Rebecca du Plessis, Julia Kirk, Sue Leigh, and Eunice Tan. We have also insisted on thanking those who have filled normally invisible roles in book production but who are essential, our proofreader Glynis Baguley and our indexer Zeb Korycinska. Last but certainly not least, we want to acknowledge that this volume would not have happened if there had not been mentors who over the years helped us along, some of whom have contributions in this volume.

REFERENCES

Bonvillain, Nancy. 2003. Language, Culture, and Communication: The Meaning of Messages. 4th edn. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Duranti, Alessandro. 1997. Linguistic Anthro­pology. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguis-tics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Foley, William A. 1997. Anthropological Lin­guistics: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Kiesling, Scott F. and Christina Bratt Paulston (eds.). 2005. Intercultural Dis­course and Communication: The Essential Readings. Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell.

Scollon, Ron and Suzanne Wong-Scollon. 2001. Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.

Introduction

From the earliest times that we have language written in a more convenient form than clay tablets, steles, or rune stones, we find travelers writing anecdotes about strange peoples. Herodotus (c.484 c.425 BC) was called not only the father of history but also the first travel writer. He was fascinated by the Scythians, whom he visited on the northern shore of the Black Sea, and so gave us the first description in western literature of a people living beyond the pale of civili­zation, as Casson puts it. He “describes the various tribes and how they live (by agriculture, grazing or hunting), how hard the winters are, how this affects horses very little but mules and donkeys very much” (Casson [1974] 1994: 108). We have Abu Rayhan al­Biruni, born in Uzbekistan but Persian in language and culture (c.973 c.1048 AD), sometimes named the first anthropologist, who focused in his description of India on caste, class system, rites and customs, cultural practice and women’s issues. And there is Ibn Khaldun of the fourteenth century from Morocco, historian and inventor of sociology, also writer about strange facts.

Cultures may have been in contact since time immemorial but the means of sharing such experiences long­distance and over time did not exist as it does today. It does not need much reflection to realize that such sharing as did then exist was based on features which struck the writer as noticeable and unusual. In other words, consciously or not, these descriptions were based on a comparison with the writers’ native culture. Ethnographic descriptions still tend to be based on some comparison. That is why Nacirema works as a parody. These rather simplistic statements about comparison carry implications for the field and schol­arship of intercultural discourse. The occasional reflections in this Handbook on culture as a process of social construction as well as critiques of an understanding of culture as reified and essentialist are certainly appropriate but become at times in the field at large somewhat strained by excess, given that such discussions of data are based on assumptions that people possess a culture, certainly a reified view.

Let us use an illustrative example of the same phenomena from another aspect of the study of language. Most researchers now agree that a man and woman exchanging meaningful utterances in society belong to a class called gender which is a social construct, not the essentialist class of sex which belongs

xviii Introduction

to biology. But still the operational definition of gender in most if not all experi­mental research is one based on biological primary and secondary sexual characteristics. In other words, a certain degree of inconsistency thus holds between our theoretical and operational definitions. The careful reader will see traces of the same kind of inconsistency between some of the theoretical claims and intercultural phenomena of discourse. Inconsistency can be a good thing when it gives us Lebensraum to find new thoughts and not be boxed in by official theory as we were for example by Skinnerian habit­formation theory and audio­lingual language teaching methodology. But we should admit that such is the nature of our beast.

Another implication which follows from this background is that the ancient travelers were rarely idle tourists, but men (and they were men) of a practical bent, traders and businessmen, soldiers and explorers in search of gold and treasure. They had no interest in languages per se and got by with pidgins such as Sabir and lingua francas – in 250 AD you could travel from the shores of Euphrates to Britain under the pax romana with only two languages, koine Greek and Latin (Casson [1974] 1994: 122). Even today, many scholars writing about cross­cultural communication tend to ignore language. For example, under the Wikipedia heading of “Cross­Cultural Communication” there is no mention of linguistics or anthropology as disciplines which promote the study of cross­ cultural communication, nor does the bibliography cite a single linguist. Nor has the subject received much interest or respect from linguists; communication is after all a topic with language at its core. Or as Piller puts it, if in another context: “Intercultural Communication [has had] a somewhat old­fashioned, dowdy, not quite­with­it . . . image”(this volume, p.3).

So called “Cross­cultural Studies” has fared differently in anthropology. During World War II and thereafter, various governmental departments turned to anthro­pologists for an understanding of national character (essentialist and implicitly comparative in nature); highly respected work by Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict was the result (Scollon and Scollon 2003: 542). George Murdock’s renowned data set “The Human Relations Area Files” and later Douglas White’s “Standard Cross­Cultural Sample” (see Murdock and White 1969) are collections of field data from a large sample of societies in a format which enables cross­cultural comparisons in quantitative studies to establish statistical evidence of significance.

It is only within the last half­century with the development of sociolinguistics that intercultural discourse has become a respected field of study and this Handbook is the result of it. We the editors and all the future readers owe considerable grati­tude to the authors of these chapters for making sense of and providing coherence to these fairly untilled fields of human experience. In fact, this Handbook is a new experience, and we are grateful.

Christina Bratt PaulstonScott F. KieslingElizabeth S. RangelPittsburghSeptember 2011

Introduction xix

REFERENCES

Casson, Lionel. [1974] 1994. Travel in the Ancient World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Murdock, G. P. and Douglas R. White. 1969. Standard cross­cultural sample. Ethnology 8, 329–69.

Scollon, Ron and Suzanne Scollon. 2003. Discourse and intercultural communi­

cation. In D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen, and H. E. Hamilton (eds.). The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell. 538–47.

Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cross­cultural_communication. Updated March 10, 2011.

I  Background

Part I of the Handbook contains three chapters which serve to introduce and con-textualize the rest of the contributions in the volume as well as the field itself. Of course,  an  overview  might  be  accomplished  in  one  essay.  But  Intercultural Discourse  and  Communication  (IDC)  can  be  conceived  of  in  many  ways  (and indeed is referred to in many ways), so we need views of the field that approach it from a number of perspectives. The three views represented in this section differ largely in the scope of the type of IDC work considered, although there is some overlap as one would expect. But they are also complementary in the principles used to organize each essay: critical, historical, and typological.

The Handbook of Intercultural Discourse and Communication, First Edition. Edited by Christina Bratt Paulston, Scott F. Kiesling, Elizabeth S. Rangel.© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

1  Intercultural Communication: An Overview1

INGRID PILLER

Introduction

This chapter is intended to serve as an overview of intercultural communication studies by introducing key issues and assumptions, describing some of the major studies in the field, and pointing out problematic aspects. Traditionally, intercul-tural  communication studies have been most widely understood as comprising studies,  whether  of  a  comparative  or  an  interactional  nature,  that  take  cultural group membership as a given. This predominant essentialism makes intercultural communication studies an exception in the social sciences, where social construc-tionist  approaches  have  become  the  preferred  framework  in  studies  of  identity (Piller 2011). Rather than taking culture and identity as given, social construction-ism insists that it is linguistic and social practices that bring culture and identity into being (Burr 2003). The essentialist assumption that people belong to a culture or have a culture, which is typically taken as a given in intercultural communica-tion studies, has given the field a somewhat old-fashioned, dowdy, not-quite-with-it, even reactionary image, an image which one recent commentator describes as follows:

To many teachers and researchers working . . . under the broad designation of media and cultural studies, the subfield of "intercultural communication" might seem a bit suspect. . . . there is a legacy of rather functionalist and technicist tendencies in the background, a legacy that has had its impact upon the intellectual quality of many areas of ‘communications’ research.

(Corner 2006: 155–6)

Given the frequency with which intercultural communication, usually in the form of  “culture A,  B  or  C”  and  “cultural  difference,”  is  invoked  in  a  wide  range  of 

The Handbook of Intercultural Discourse and Communication, First Edition. Edited by Christina Bratt Paulston, Scott F. Kiesling, Elizabeth S. Rangel.© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

4  Intercultural Communication: An Overview

discourses,  I  consider  the  reluctance  of  (critical)  academics  to  get  involved  in intercultural  communication  research  problematic.  Therefore,  this  chapter  also makes a case for an empirical and critical enquiry into intercultural communica-tion, which simultaneously narrows and widens the scope of the field. The scope needs to be narrowed to distinguish linguistic issues from “cultural” issues, and it needs to be widened to distinguish “cultural” issues from those where talk about “culture” serves to obscure inequality between and within groups. Throughout, I will ask how “intercultural communication” has become one of the key terms (in the sense of Bennett et al. 2005; Williams 1976) of late modernity (i.e. who invokes “culture” when, where, how, and for what purposes).

“Having a Culture”

Each year, I begin my university course on intercultural communication with the question  “What  do  you  expect  to  learn  in  this  class?”,  and  each  year  students  will tell me that they want to learn how people from different cultures communi-cate or how misunderstandings between cultures can be avoided. These under-standings  are  in  line  with  textbook  definitions  such  as  these:  “a  transactional, symbolic process involving the attribution of meaning between people of different cultures” (Gudykunst and Kim 2002: 14) or “the exchange of information between individuals who are unalike culturally” (Rogers and Steinfatt 1999: 1). What the student expectations, the textbook definitions – and maybe your reader expecta-tions? – have in common is the implicit assumption that people somehow have culture  (to  be  of  a  culture)  and  that  they  somehow  are  culturally  different  or similar to others. The next question I ask my new students is usually something along the  lines, “So, what  is your culture?”, and at  the University of Sydney  in Australia where I have done this exercise most often, I typically get a few straight-forward  answers  like  “I’m  Australian”  or  “I’m  Chinese,”  some  also  relatively straightforward but combinatorial answers  like “I’m Vietnamese-Australian” or “I’m  Chinese  from  Singapore,”  and  a  fair  number  of  people  who  struggle  to answer the question, as in this response: “Well, I don’t know, my mother is from Austria, my father  from Japan, and I was born  in New Zealand but  I’ve grown up  here.”  While  these  answers  exhibit  different  levels  of  complexity,  they  have one thing in common: culture is taken to be a national and/or ethnic category in all of them. Again, the students’ usage of “culture” as more or less coterminous with  “nation”  and/or  “ethnicity”  is  mirrored  in  most  academic  work,  where  the following examples – titles of papers in two widely used readers in the field –  can  be  considered  typical:  “Conflict  management  in  Thai  organizations” (Rojjanaprapayon et al. 2004), “What is the basis of American culture” (Aldridge 2004),  “The  Chinese  conceptualizations  of  face:  emotions,  communication,  and personhood” (Jia 2003) or “Communication with Egyptians” (Begley 2003). Thus, there is clear evidence that culture is widely understood as nation and/or ethni-city, even if the readers I have just mentioned, along with most other textbooks in the field, also tend to include, albeit to a much smaller degree, cultures that are not nation- nor ethnicity-based, such as faith-based cultures (Chuang 2004; Irani 

Intercultural Communication: An Overview  5

2004), gender-based cultures (Tannen 1990; Wood and Reich 2003; Mulvaney 2004) or  sexuality-based  cultures  (Bronski  2003;  Thurlow  2004).  Whether  culture  is viewed as nation, as ethnicity, as faith, as gender, or as sexuality, all  these “cul-tures”  have  one  thing  in  common:  they  are  imagined  communities  (Anderson 1991). That means that members of a culture imagine themselves and are imagined by others as group members. These groups are too large to be “real” groups (i.e. no group member will ever know all the other group members). Therefore, they are best considered as discursive constructions. That means that we do not have culture but that we construct culture discursively. In the examples I quoted above, “culture” is constructed as a static, internally homogeneous entity different from other such entities (i.e. it is reified and essentialized). As I pointed out above, this understanding of  culture as a discursive construction  is not widely used  in  the field  of  intercultural  communication  studies,  where  essentialist  understandings predominate. I consider the following definition of “culture” to be typical for the field:

[C]ulture is ubiquitous, multidimensional, complex, and pervasive. Because culture is so broad,  there  is no single definition or central  theory of what  it  is. Definitions range from the all-encompassing (‘it  is everything’)  to the narrow (‘it  is opera, art, and ballet’). For our purposes we define culture as the deposit of knowledge, experi-ence, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, social hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial  relationships, concepts of  the universe, and material objects and pos-sessions acquired by a group of people  in  the  course of generations  through  indi-vidual and group striving.

(Samovar and Porter 2003: 8)

This  definition  is  typical  in  a  number  of  ways:  first,  it  goes  to  great  lengths  to  stress  the  complexity  of  “culture”;  second,  it  is  at  pains  to  acknowledge  the  diversity of definitions of “culture”; and third, it  links “culture” to group mem-bership.  In  a  way,  such  definitions  are  hard  to  disagree  with:  it  is  obvious  that culture is somehow tied to group membership, it is undisputable that culture is complex,  and,  given  that  people  have  been  thinking  about  culture  and  group membership for millennia, probably since the dawn of  time,  it  is also clear  that different  thinkers  have  come  up  with  a  great  many  different  understandings. Unfortunately, however, from a research perspective a definition of “culture” as “complex, differently defined, and tied to group membership” is useless because it  cannot  be  operationalized.  That  means  that  it  cannot  be  studied  empirically  and  culture  becomes  an  a  priori  assumption.  In  contrast,  anthropologists  and sociologists  insist  that  belonging  to  culture A,  B,  or  C  can  never  be  an  a  priori assumption: “Ethnographers’ uses of the word culture have established one essen-tial  point  of  consensus:  culture  is  not  a  real  thing,  but  an  abstract  and  purely analytical notion. It does not cause behavior, but summarizes an abstraction from it,  and  is  thus  neither  normative  nor  predictive”  (Baumann  1996:  11).  Because many writers  in  intercultural communication do not heed this basic point,  they end up using the term “culture” as if it were coterminous with “nation” and/or “ethnicity” (e.g., “Thai,” “American,” “Chinese,” or “Egyptian” in the examples above).  If researchers use predefined cultural categories that are salient to them 

6  Intercultural Communication: An Overview

as the basis for their investigations, they can only reproduce the discourses avail-able to them (i.e. those circulating in society at large), rather than analyzing those discourses  critically.  It  is  therefore  unsurprising  that  culture  oftentimes  gets equated with nation and/or ethnicity, because the discourses of national identity and national belonging are powerful ones that have been around for a consider-able period and are powerfully supported by a range of state, media, and other institutional practices.

Let me provide some examples: at the time of writing the original version of this  chapter,  I  lived  in  Basel,  a  Swiss  city  that  borders  France  and  Germany. Mundane activities such as grocery shopping (cheaper in Germany) or attending a children’s birthday party (school friends of my child living in France) reminded me of national borders on an almost daily basis. They also reminded me of, and inscribed, my identity as a German citizen because this was the passport I carried, and this was the passport I had not to forget to put in my car in case I was checked as I crossed one of those borders. Furthermore, in comparison to an Indian friend of mine, these reminders and ascriptions of my national identity were relatively benign:  Indian citizens cannot  just  cross  these borders by “only” showing  their passport. Rather, whenever they want to cross these borders, they will first need to travel to Berne, the Swiss capital, and apply for a visa to the Schengen area – the  union  of  fifteen  European  countries  who  form  one  “visa  area,”  of  which Switzerland is not a member – at one of the embassies there. This involves paying fees, completing paperwork, providing various types of evidence, queuing for a significant amount of time outside the embassy, etc. These and many related state practices  obviously  powerfully  constructed  me  and  my  friend  as  German  and Indian, respectively, and both of us as non-Swiss, and they made national identity a salient aspect of our identity to us.

Another pervasive context for the construction of national identity is the range of practices that Billig (1995) has termed “banal nationalism.” By “banal national-ism”  Billig  means  the  myriad  practices  that  make  the  nation  ubiquitous.  Such practices include: the daily weather forecast on TV that is presented against a map of our country; the celebration of our nation on a regular basis, such as the daily Pledge of Allegiance in many US schools, or national holidays such as Australia Day in Australia, Independence Day in the USA, or the Day of German Unity in Germany; the use of national symbols in consumer advertising (e.g. chocolate with the  Swiss  Cross  on  the  packaging);  and  sports  events  where  national  teams compete  against  each  other  and  which  are  often  reported  and  viewed  as  if  the whole  nation  were  involved  (see  Bishop  and  Jaworski  2003  for  an  informative  case  study).  These  examples  do  not  reflect  national  identity  but  rather  they  construct  national  identity.  Given  the  ubiquity  of  discourses  about  national  identity, it is thus not surprising that intercultural communication studies have a hard  time  going  beyond  these  discourses.  However,  it  is  unsatisfactory  when research in intercultural communication ends up being little more than yet another instantiation of the discursive construction of national identity.

Informed by anthropology, discourse analysis, social psychology, and sociolin-guistics, critical studies in intercultural communication have dealt with the twin problems of essentialism (“people have a culture”) and reification of national and 

Intercultural Communication: An Overview  7

ethnic identity as culture (“people from group X behave in ways that are static, internally similar and different  from other groups”)  in  two different ways. One solution is to argue that “all communication is intercultural” (Holliday et al. 2004: xv). The other is to develop theories and understandings that make “culture,” and consequently “intercultural communication,” amenable to empirical analysis as, for  instance,  Blommaert  (2005),  Piller  (2011),  and  Scollon  and  Scollon  (2001a)  have done.

Beyond “Having a Culture”

Some of the students I quoted above describe themselves as belonging to two or more cultures. Similarly, we hear of migrants who learn not only a new language but also a new culture and thus become “bicultural” (e.g., Paulston 2005). Children born to expatriate parents have recently gained their own label, TCK for “Third Culture Kids” (e.g., Tokuhama-Espinosa 2003). Although the star of “multicultur-alism” has started to wane somewhat, countries and cities that have seen signifi-cant immigration are often called “multicultural” and Kramsch (1998: 82) describes “persons who belong to various discourse communities, and who therefore have the  linguistic  resources and social  strategies  to affiliate and  identify with many different cultures and ways of using language” as multicultural. There is a large literature  on  the  processes  of  cultural  hybridization  (e.g.,  Bhabha  1994),  on  the cultures of the diaspora and of migration (e.g., Brah 1996; Gilroy 1997; Hall 1997) and on cultural crossings (e.g., Rampton 1995). The obvious point  is that, given the state of connectedness of our world, no culture exists in isolation. In a recent magazine  article  in  CNN Traveller,  for  instance,  a  Thai  informant  explains  Thai culture to an American journalist as follows: “The Thai people like cowboy films. We identify with them. We grew up with Stagecoach and Wyatt Earp. The first film I  ever  saw  was  a  Wayne  –  Rio Grande.  ‘You  must  learn  that  a  man’s  word  to anything, even his own destruction, is his honour,’ he quotes” (Taylor 2006: 54). The example is banal: I could have chosen any number of examples making the same point, and each reader will be able to add their own examples to show that “culture” is  in a constant state of flux and cross-fertilization. Given that each of us  belongs  to  many  cultures  in  this  sense,  and  that  all  these  combinations  are slightly different, it is thus possible to argue that, in this sense, all communication is intercultural.

Additionally, there is a second way in which the argument against static views of culture can be made. Explorations of multiculturalism, third cultures, hybridity, and crossing are often conceived as challenges to dominant accounts of a uniform culture.  However,  as  Holliday  (1999)  argues,  these  accounts  still  take  the  nation and/or ethnicity as their point of departure. Holliday (1999) refers to these as  “big  culture”  and  argues  for  a  shift  of  focus  to  “small  culture,”  which  he  defines as “relating to cohesive behavior in activities within any social grouping” (Holliday 1999: 241), for example, a “company culture” or a “family culture.” As I  have  done  above,  Holliday  (1999)  takes  issue  with  the  essentialism  and  reification of culture that mars much writing and discussion about  intercultural 

8  Intercultural Communication: An Overview

communi cation,  both  inside  and  outside  academia.  His  concept  of  “small  cul-tures”  is  inspired  by  the  one  of  “community  of  practice.”  Drawing  on  work  in education by Lave and Wenger (1991), Eckert and McConnell-Ginet  (1992: 464), who  first  introduced  the  concept  into  sociolinguistics,  define  a  community  of practice (CofP) as follows:

An  aggregate  of  people  who  come  together  around  mutual  engagement  in  an endeavor. Ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations – in short, practices – emerge in the course of this mutual endeavor. As a social construct, a CofP  is different  from the  traditional community, primarily because  it  is defined simultaneously  by  its  membership  and  by  the  practice  in  which  that  membership engages.

In  language  and  gender  studies,  this  dynamic  and  complex  understanding  of group  practices  has  proved  immensely  useful  and  influential  in  transcending essentialist and reified notions of gender identity (Holmes and Meyerhoff 1999). As  a  consequence,  language  and  gender  scholars  no  longer  ask  how  men  and women  speak  differently  but  rather  how  gender  is  produced  in  discourse.  In analogy, I will now proceed to ask how culture and intercultural communication are produced in discourse.

Empirical Intercultural Communication

When it comes to talking about “intercultural communication,” “misunderstand-ing” and “miscommunication” are never  far away. A typical example would be an intercultural communication title such as When Cultures Collide  (Lewis 2000). Academic publications tend to be more guarded in their language; the pervasive association  of  “intercultural  communication”  with  “misunderstanding”  can  be found there, too, although the aim tends to be a positive one, such as to contribute to bridging cultural conflicts (LeBaron 2003) or to developing intercultural com-petence (Byram et al. 2001). The good will  that emanates from numerous cross-cultural and intercultural communication texts is best expressed by the often-quoted Deborah Tannen (1986: 43) dictum: “the fate of the earth depends on cross-cultural communication.”  Somewhat  provocatively,  I  am  tempted  to  re-formulate  this statement as “Cross-cultural communication is part of the world’s problems.” Our contemporary obsession with “culture” and “cultural difference” and “intercul-tural  communication”  is “a way of  seeing”  (Berger 1972).  In  thrall  to a cultural worldview,  we  see  “culture”  where  linguistic  proficiency  and  communicative competence (or their lack) and inequality and injustice would explain much more. Hinnenkamp (1987: 176) compares cultural ways of seeing in the field of intercul-tural  communication  to  an  imaginary  joke  up  the  researcher’s  sleeve:  “Culture  as  adapted  in  most  linguistic  subdisciplines  has  unfortunately  become  a  passe partout-notion: whenever  there  is  a need  for  a  global  explanation of  differences between members of different  speech communities  the  culture-card  is played –