Contemporary Fiction

Solutions to the Crisis of

Intercultural Communication

Intercultural Communication
Holliday, Adrian, Martin Hyde and John
Kullman, Intercultural Communication. An
Advanced Resource Book, Routledge,
New York, 2004.

Identity
Otherness
Otherization
Representation

Identity
The way in which we all bring with us our
own discourses and feelings of culture and
negotiate these in communication.

Otherness
The way in which something seems
strange or different.

Otherization
The way in which we over-generalize,
stereotype and reduce the people we
communicate with to something different
from or less than what they are.

Representation
The way in which culture is communicated
in society, through the media, professional
discourses and everyday language.

Culture
A set of ideas, beliefs, and ways of
behaving of a particular organization or
group of people youth culture.
A set of ideas, beliefs, and ways of
behaving of a particular society the
Romanian culture.

What gives people the sense of belonging is

their being part either of:
Community, class, gender, occupation,
ethnic group.
or
Nationality.

Views of Culture
Essentialist
Non-essentialist

Essentialism
View of culture that presumes that there is
a universal essence, homogeneity and
unity in particular culture.

Non-essentialism
View of culture that sees culture as a fluid,
creative force which binds different
groupings and aspects of behaviour in
different ways, both constructing and
constructed by people in a piecemeal
fashion to produce myriad combinations.

 The lack of knowledge of what sort of

group a person belongs to The
tendency to stereotype and otherize.
Ethnocentrism assuming the existence
of a norm against which all difference is
seen as a deviation.

 In a non-essentialist paradigm, the foreign

Other should not be looked at as if locked
in a separate foreign place.
The foreign Other are people operating at
cultural borders and their struggle for
identity is connected with how they are
seen by people who do not know them.

 Individuals at cultural borders are not only

people moving between different societies,
but also people moving between small
cultures within a particular society.

Ethnocentrism
Placing ourselves on a position of
superiority and discarding the other as
inferior.
Imagining someone as alien and different
from us in such a way that they are
excluded from our normal, superior,
and civilized group.
We tend to define the person before we
understand the person.

 When people feel culturally threatened they tend

to draw more heavily on certain cultural
resources.
When people are in a difficult, strange
environment, they can close ranks and
exaggerate specific aspects of their cultural
identity.
Yet what people say about their cultural identity
should be read as the image they wish to project
at a particular time rather than as evidence of an
essentialist national culture.

 The multiplicity of identities.

The creation of an identity card.
The marking out of territory.

 As individuals, we are members of a vast

number of different cultural groups we have a
multiplicity of identities. With each identity, we
have a communal bond with a group of other
people.
One can define oneself as a member of an age
group, a nationality, an ethnic group, a social
class, a religion, a scout group, an aerobics
class, a sports team, a school class group.

 When playing a particular identity card,

one plays with the cultural stereotypes
expected by other members of the society.
Identity is achieved through the skilled
manipulation of discourses in the society.
(e.g. anti-slavery discourses changed the
way the Black Africans were perceived in
the American society).

 The principle at the basis of successful

communication is that we should try to
understand people before we can
communicate with them.
We should also be aware of the fact that
the tendency to reduce the foreign Other is
deep within the roots of society in general.
It is very easy to misconstruct people from
other societies.

Stereotype
Prejudice
Otherization
Culturism

Stereotyping
Ideal characterization of the foreign Other.
Acts as a template, or as an ideal type,
against which we can measure the
unknown.
It could be useful if it were not infected by
prejudice, which in turn leads to
otherization.

Prejudice
Judgement made on the basis of interest
rather than emergent evidence.
An unreasonable opinion or feeling,
especially the feeling of not liking a
particular group of people.

Otherizing
Reducing the foreign Other to less than
what they are.

Culturism
Reducing the members of a group to the
predefined characteristics of a cultural
label.

 Communication = cultural negotiation

Political correctness
Awareness of the power our words may
carry in the encounter with the Other.
Unawareness:
thinking you are being understanding
when in fact you are patronizing;
false sharing;
culturist language.

 Language has an essential role in

otherization.
(e.g. tribe or marriage practices in a
conversation between an Australian and
an African black woman)

Political correctness has been attacked

for:
1) Preventing people from speaking their
minds and stating the obvious;
2) Being over-sensitive to apparently
innocent language which carries hidden
racist or sexist references.

BUT
In intercultural communication political
correctness is necessary because everyone
should consider:
- the connections between people, their behaviour
and generalizations about the categories in
which we place people (culture, gender, race).
- the evidence which is not connected to these
categories.
- the fact that we tend to otherize and reduce a
certain person to less than what she/ he is by
means of a prescribed image of what we think
she/ he is.

 In modern society, we are constantly fed

images of the foreign Other by television,
radio and the press.
Many countries less well known to the
West, usually in the developing world, are
represented very selectively in world
media in terms of their most saleable,
sensational, exotic images.

 It is strange that while people may be

naturally cynical about much of what
media shows us, they may well be often
less critical of images of the exotic.
The representations in the media will very
largely respond to public demand. At the
heart of this demand is the desire to
essentialize.

 The representations of the media cannot

be disconnected from a political point of
view which depicts a derelict country in
need of rescue by the West.
During colonial times, images of the South
and East as deficit cultures were often
constructed consciously or unconsciously
to justify the civilizing conquest.

The role of arts and literature

To help form individual representations.
To help the individuals form their own
images and break away from the
established essentialism.
To form more critical, creative images.