Intercultural Communication: Globalization and Social Justice, 2nd edition
Chapter 1
Opening the Conversation: Studying Intercultural Communication
Lecture Notes: Chapter Overview, Objectives, and Outline
Chapter Overview
The first chapter, “Opening the Conversation,” invites readers to engage in a dynamic relationship with the content presented in the text and with the world around them. Students are encouraged to move from passive recipients to active participants in their learning process. In the current context, globalization is a rapidly changing, deeply interdependent, and increasingly inequitable world that requires skillful, informed, and proactive intercultural communicators. To address the challenges and opportunities of intercultural communication, today, three definitions of culture are introduced: (1) the traditional anthropological definition where culture is viewed as a shared meaning, (2) the critical/cultural studies definition where culture is understood as a site of contested meaning, and (3) the globalization definition where culture is seen as a resource that is bought, sold, and capitalized on for exploitation and empowerment. Each definition provides a different yet invaluable way of understanding culture in our complex age.
Critical concepts such as positionality, standpoint theory, and ethnocentrism are introduced to understand how our worldviews, perceptions, attitudes, and actions are influenced by relationships of power. To become more effective as intercultural communicators, thinkers, and actors in the global context, intercultural praxis—a set of skills and practices for critical, reflective thinking and acting—is outlined in this first chapter. The six interrelated points of entry in intercultural praxis are (1) inquiry, (2) framing, (3) positioning, (4) dialogue, (5) reflection, and (6) action. The purpose of engaging in intercultural praxis is to raise awareness, increase critical analysis, and develop socially responsible action with regard to our intercultural interactions in the context of globalization.
Chapter Objectives
1. Identify the opportunities and challenges of intercultural communication in the context of globalization.
2. Describe three definitions of culture that influence intercultural communication in the global context.
3. Explain how our social location and standpoint shape how we see, experience, and understand the world differently.
4. Describe the goals and the six points of entry into intercultural praxis.
Key Terms *Indicated in bold and italicized letters below
Intercultural Communication: Globalization and Social Justice, 2nd edition
High culture/low culture
Intercultural praxis
Popular culture
Inquiry
Culture as a shared meaning
Framing
Symbols
Positioning
Culture as a contested meaning
Dialogue
Hegemony
Reflection
Culture as a resource
Action
Cultural identity
Positionality
Standpoint theory
Ethnocentrism
Social justice
Intercultural Communication: Globalization and Social Justice, 2nd edition
I. Introduction
Globalization is changing the ways by which we engage in intercultural communication.
b. Our lives are increasingly interconnected through technology and the global economy.
c. At the same time, the gap between the haves and the have-nots is widening.
d. The book positions the study and practice of intercultural communication within the context of political, economic, and cultural globalization with an emphasis on the role of history, power, and global institutions.
e. This chapter introduces the key concepts in intercultural communication.
II. Definitions of Culture
a. Culture is central to the way in which we view, experience, and engage with all aspects of our lives.
b. Historically, the word culture was closely linked to processes of colonization.
i. High culture: Culture of the elite class, or the ruling class, who have power.
1. To have culture means to be civilized and developed.
2. Educated at prestigious schools, they enjoy the arts like literature, opera, and ballet.
ii. Low culture: Culture of the working class.
1. Consumers of popular theater, folk art, “street” activities. Later, movies and television.
iii. Popular culture: Culture that belongs to the “masses.”
1. Over the past 50 years, struggles within academia and society legitimized the practices and the activities of common everyday people that were previously considered low culture.
c. Anthropologic definition: Culture as a site of shared meaning
i. Edward T. Hall is considered one of the originators of the field of intercultural communication.
1. In the 1950s, Hall developed training programs on culture and communication for diplomats going abroad on assignment.
2. Hall’s applied approach, focusing on the microlevel of human interaction, established the foundation for the field of intercultural communication.
ii. Clifford Geertz emphasized the role of symbols in understanding culture. According to Geertz, culture is a web of symbols that people use to create meaning and order in their lives.
iii. From an anthropological perspective, culture is a system of shared meanings.
1. Passed from generation to generation through symbols to allow people to communicate, maintain, and develop an approach and understanding of life.
2. Symbols: Something that represents other things.
3. Culture allows us to make sense of, express, and give meaning to our lives.
4. Example: Different cultures give varying interpretations to a man in his late 20s who lives with his parents and siblings.
d. Cultural studies definition: Culture as a site of contested meaning
i. Culture as an apparatus of power within a larger system of domination.
ii. Informed by Marxist theories of class struggle and exploitation.
iii. Culture as a site of contestation where meanings are constantly negotiated.
iv. Cultural studies is a transdisciplinary field of study that emerged in the post–World War II era in England as a challenge to the positivist approaches to the study of culture.
1. Cultural studies challenges objectivity and aims to study situated experiences of culture in everyday life.
2. It examines the broader historical and political context within which cultural practices are situated and gives attention to relations of power in understanding culture.
v. Hegemony
1. Domination through consent as defined by Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist theorist.
2. Dominance without the need for force or explicit forms of coercion.
3. Operates when the goals, ideas, and interests of the ruling group or class are so thoroughly normalized, institutionalized, and accepted that people consent to their own domination, subordination, and exploitation.
vi. From a cultural studies perspective, meanings are not necessarily shared, stable, or determined. Meanings are constantly produced, challenged, and negotiated.
1. Example: Media representations of nondominant groups in the United States are negotiated and contested.
2. Culture is a site of contestation where the social norms are negotiated.
vii. A cultural studies approach offers tools to analyze power relations, to understand the historical and political context of our intercultural relations, and to see how we can act or intervene critically and creatively in our everyday lives.
e. Globalization definition: Culture as a resource
i. Culture as embodied difference
1. Arjun Appadurai (1996) suggests that we need to move away from thinking of culture as a thing, a substance, or an object that is shared.
2. The concept of culture as a coherent, stable entity privileges certain forms of sharing and agreement and neglects the realities of inequality, difference, and those who are marginalized.
3. Culture is not something that individuals or groups possess but rather a way of referring to the dimensions of situated and embodied difference that express and mobilize group identities.
ii. Culture as a resource
1. George Yúdice (2003) suggests that culture in the age of globalization has come to be understood as a resource.
2. Culture is conceptualized, experienced, exploited, and mobilized as a resource.
3. Culture is utilized as a resource to address and solve social problems like illiteracy, addiction, crime, and conflict.
4. Culture is also used discursively, socially, and politically as a resource for collective and individual empowerment, agency, and resistance.
iii. Example: Symbolic goods, such as TV shows, movies, music, and tourism, are a resource for economic growth in global trade. Mass culture industries in the United States are major contributors to the gross national product.
iv. Example: African American urban culture has been appropriated, exploited, commodified, and yet it operates as a potentially oppositional force.
v. Example: How tourism in many parts of the world utilizes the resource of culture to attract foreign capital for development.
vi. Example: Indigenous Front of Binational Organization, an organization of indigenous Mixteco and Zapoteco immigrants from Oaxaca, Mexico, has become a transnational network that reclaims indigenous forms of knowledge and cultural practices to resist discrimination, reframes colonization, and reinvents their cultural identities (Mercado, 2016).
vii. Example: How hip-hop culture uses music, dance, style, and knowledge to give voice to the silenced, challenge discrimination, and create platforms for activism that support cultural empowerment.
viii. Textbox: Communicative dimensions: Communication and culture
1. The textbox discusses the relationship between culture and communication based on three different definitions of culture.
III. Studying Intercultural Communication: Key Concepts
a. Cultural identity: Our situated sense of self that is shaped by our cultural experience and social location.
i. Our identities develop through relationships with others.
1. Our cultural identities are constructed through the languages we speak; the stories we tell; the norms, behaviors, rituals, and nonverbal communication we enact; the histories passed along without our cultural group; and the representations of our group by others.
2. Cultural identities serve to bond us with others and provide a buffer protecting us from groups we see as different—or serve as a bridge connecting us to others we view as different.
3. Cultural identities intersect with and are affected by our other social identities, including our ethnic, racial, gender, class, age, religious, and national identities.
4. Our identities are not fixed; they are complex, multifaceted, and fluid.
ii. In recent years, many students find it highly challenging to articulate what their culture is.
1. For students who come from the dominant culture, the response is often “I don’t really have a culture.”
A. Since their culture is pervasive and “normal” in the United States, European American or White students don’t recognize the language, stories, values, norms, practices, and shared views on history as belonging to a culture.
2. For those students from nondominant groups, responses that point to their ethnic, racial, or religious group identification come more readily, and yet their replies are often accompanied by some uneasiness.
3. Typically, people whose culture differs from the dominant group have a stronger sense of their culture and develop a clearer awareness of their culture.
4. When the culture of individuals is closer to the dominant norm, they tend to see their culture as “just the way things are,” while marking other cultures as “different” or “deviant” from the norm.
IV. Positionality
a. One’s social location or position within an intersecting web of socially constructed hierarchical categories (i.e., race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, and physical abilities).
b. Positionality shapes different experiences, understanding, and knowledge of oneself and the world.
c. Positionality is a relational concept.
i. Shows how we are positioned in relation to others within these intersecting social categories.
ii. Shows how we are positioned in terms of power.
d. The socially constructed categories of race, gender, class, sexuality, nationality, religion, and ableness are hierarchical systems that often define, connote, and confer material and symbolic power.
V. Standpoint Theory
a. Standpoint: A place from which to view and make sense of the world around us.
b. Our standpoint influences what we see and what we cannot, do not, or choose not to see.
c. Feminist standpoint theory claims that the social groups to which we belong shape what we know and how we communicate.
i. Based on the Marxist position that economically oppressed classes can access knowledge unavailable to the socially privileged and can generate distinctive accounts, particularly knowledge about social relations.
ii. G. W. F. Hegel suggested that while society in general may acknowledge the existence of slavery, the perception, experience, and knowledge of slavery are quite different for slaves as compared with the masters.
iii. One’s position within social relations of power produces different standpoints from which to view, experience, act, and construct knowledge about the world.
d. People from oppressed or subordinated groups must understand both their own perspective and the perspective of those in power to survive.
e. The standpoint of marginalized people or groups is unique and should be privileged as it allows for a fuller and more comprehensive view.
f. Patricia Hill Collins’s (1986) notion of “outsiders within” points to the possibility of the dual vision of marginalized people and groups.
g. Standpoint theory offers a powerful lens through which to make sense of, address, and act on issues and challenges in intercultural communication. It enables us to understand how
i. we may see, experience, and understand the world quite differently based on our different standpoints and positionalities.
ii. knowledge about ourselves and others is situated and partial.
iii. knowledge is always and inevitably connected to power.
iv. oppositional standpoints can challenge and contest the status quo.
VI. Ethnocentrism
a. The idea that one’s own group’s way of thinking, being, and acting in the world is superior to others.
b. Derived from two Greek words, ethno, meaning group or nation, and, kentron, meaning center.
c. Conceptualized by William Sumner (1906).
d. Ethnocentrism leads to negative evaluations of others and can result in dehumanization, legitimization of prejudices, discrimination, conflict, and violence.
e. Ethnocentrism has combined with power—material, institutional, and symbolic power—to justify colonization, imperialism, oppression, war, and ethnic cleaning.
i. Can blind individuals, groups, and even nations to the benefits of broader points of view and perceptions.
ii. Often marked by an intensely inward-looking and often near-sighted view of the world.
iii. Negatively affects intercultural communication on both interpersonal and global levels.
iv. Example: In a 2001 poll, 58% of global opinion leaders considered U.S. policies to be a major cause of the September 11 attacks, compared with just 18% of U.S. respondents.
f. Ethnocentrism has no long-term benefits for effective or successful intercultural communication in the context of globalization.
g. Positionality, standpoint, and ethnocentric views are closely tied to our cultural identities.
i. Our positionality gives us a particular standpoint. Ethnocentric views may emerge if we have limited understanding of others’ positionalities and standpoints.