Intercultural Communication
OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter you should be able to:
1. Discuss how cultural groups differ from other groups with shared characteristics, define intercultural communication.
2. State three broad communication principles that have important implications for intercultural communication.
3. Identify and explain at least three ways in which language can interfere with communication between cultures.
4. Explain how nonverbal messages, including those that express emotion, vary from culture to culture and can be misinterpreted.
5. Describe how cultural roles and norms, including norms about conflict, affect intercultural communication.
6. Discuss the effects of differences in beliefs and values on people from different cultures.
7. Explain the concepts of ethnocentrism and mass effect.
8. Describe some differences between the social and political effects of intercultural communication and its effects on the individual.
9. Discuss the concept of cultural homogenization and its implications for the future.
The 1965 revision of U.S. immigration policies is changing the character of some of our major cities. For example, during the last two decades over a million immigrants have come to New York City, most of them from the West Indies, Latin America, and Asia (Foner, 1987, p. 1). Today the other new leading immigrant city is Los Angeles, and other cities receiving large numbers of immigrants include Chicago, Houston, Miami, and San Francisco (p. 4). In The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), Bharati Mukherjee portrays some of these new immigrants "trying on their new American selves, shouldering into their new country." She is writing, she explains, of "the eagerness and enthusiasm and confidence with which the new immigrants chase the American dream. But sometimes they get the American codes wrong, by being too aggressive, for example" (quoted in Healy, 1988, p. 22).
When members of different cultures communicate, getting the codes wrong is a common experience. Throughout this book we have discussed cultural differences in connection with many aspects of communication. As we have seen, intercultural communication can occur in any of the contexts we have discussed in the past few chapters, from intimate dyadic communication to formal organizational and mass communication. Whenever intercultural communication occurs, the differences in the participants' frames of reference make the task of communication more complicated and more difficult, especially since participants may not be aware of all aspects of each others' cultures. In fact, one reason intercultural communication has fascinated scholars in the past few years is that it reveals aspects of our own communication behavior that we might not otherwise notice as distinct, such as our attitude toward time.
From another perspective, adjustment to a foreign culture often includes experiences of culture shock: "feelings of helplessness, withdrawal, paranoia, irritability, and a desire for a home" (Koester, 1984, p. 251). To compound the problem, readjustment to one's home culture after an experience in another culture produces a shock of its own: reverse culture shock. This may result from changes in attitudes, ways of interacting, and the like. In fact, those of us who are most adaptable to the foreign culture will probably experience the greatest unanticipated reentry shock (Koester, 1984).
Over twenty million people from outside the United States visit each year, and during 1988-1989, the number of foreign sjtucjents -atjgnding colleges and universities in the United States was> 366354."The -five^leadTng countries from' which these students came were China, Taiwan, Japan, India, and South Korea (Zikopoulos, 1989). As the amount of intercultural communication we engage in increases, it becomes more important for each of us to understand some of its problems and implications.
In Chapter 1 we defined intercultural communication as communication between members of different cultures (whether defined in terms of racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic differences). As this definition suggests, the divisions between cultural groups are not established or absolute; we may choose one or more of a variety of characteristics to identify a group of people as having a common culture. We may, for instance, speak of natives of California, Nebraska, and New Hampshire as being from different regional cultures (West Coast, Midwest, and New England); we may identify each of them as a member of an urban or rural culture, or as a member of a Jewish or Irish culture; we may speak of them all as members of a broader Western culture. Although scholars disagree as to which of these designations may properly be said to be a cultural group, to a certain extent all of them are.
Culture is a way of life developed and shared by a group of people and passed down from generation to generation. It is made up of many complex elements, including religious and political systems, customs, and language as well as tools, clothing, buildings, and works of an. The way you dress, your relationships with your parents and friends, what you expect of a marriage and of a job, the food you eat, the language you speak are all profoundly affected by your culture. This does not mean that you think, believe, and act exactly as everyone else in your cultural group. Not all members of a culture share all its elements. Moreover, a culture will change and evolve over time. Still, a common set of characteristics is shared by the group at large and can be traced, even through great changes, over many generations.
A popular cartoon that appeared during a period when many Americans were adopting Vietnamese war orphans depicted a woman announcing to her husband that the daughter they had adopted as a Vietnamese infant had spoken her first words that day. "English or Vietnamese?" he asked. Language, like culture, is so much a part of us that we tend to think of it as genetically transmitted, like the more physiological characteristics of race and nationality. As we attempt to communicate with people from other cultures and reconcile our differences, it is important that we remember culture is learned.
Because culture is learned, not innate, an infant born in Vietnam of Vietnamese parents but brought to the United States and raised as an American will be culturally an American. Because culture is learned, it also changes as people come into contact with one another or as their experiences change their needs. The Covenant, a novel by James Michener, describes how various cultural groups in "South Africa changed as they came in contact with one another. Influenced b:y_;the demands of the new world and by their contact with the tribes who were there before them, the early Dutch settlers and their descendants became a separate cultural group, distinct in their way of living and speaking, from the Dutch in the homeland they had left behind them.
Some of the reasons people have so many problems communicating across cultural boundaries is suggested in this definition of culture:
A culture is a complex of values polarized by an image containing a vision of its own excellence. Such a "tyrannizing image" takes diverse forms in various cultures such as "rugged individualism" in America, an individual's "harmony with nature" in Japan, and "collective obedience" in China. A culture's tyrannizing image provides its members with a guide to appropriate behavior and posits a super-sensible world of meaning and values from which even its most humble members can borrow to give a sense of dignity and coherence to their lives. (Cushman and Cahn, 1985, p. 119)
In a sense, then, it is the culture that provides a coherent framework for organizing our activity and allowing us to predict the behavior of others. People from other cultures who enter our own may be threatening because they challenge our system of beliefs. In the same way, we ourselves may become threatening to others as we enter a foreign culture and challenge the cultural foundations of their beliefs.
Distinctions among Cultures
Differences between two cultural groups range from the slight to the very dramatic. The culture of the Yanomami people, a Stone Age tribe in Brazil, has little in common wih the highly industrialized cultures of Japan or the United States. Many Americans, with their heritage of sympathy for union organization and antipathy toward big business, are amazed at such Japanese work customs as employees beginning the day by singing a company song and the expectation that employees will stay with one company for life. In the past few years many Americans have been astounded, even outraged, by the Islam-dominated political systems of some Middle Eastern countries.
Such radical differences among cultures usually occur when there has been little exchange between them or, in some cases, with other cultures in general. What distinguishes one cultural group from another, however, is not always so evident. A New Yorker and a California!! will have cultural differences and similarities. Both may celebrate Thanksgiving-and the Fourth of July with much the same sense of tradition associated with those holidays. On a day-to-day basis, however, they are likely to eat somewhat different foods, although probably with the same kind of utensils. They are likely to speak the same language, but with different accents and a few different words or phrases. Their styles of interacting are sufficiently different that the Californian may interpret the New Yorker's friendly overtures as hostile (Tannen, 1981, pp. 30-33). Both will speak more or less the same language as people who have always lived in England and Ontario, and they may even share many of the same values, but cultural differences are likely to become more evident as the Americans, Canadians, and British communicate with one another. Similarly, differences among cultures do not occur abruptly at regional or national borders but gradually, over a range (Porter, in Samovar and Porter, 1972, p. 4).