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Summary communication culturesChapter 7: What is culture? Intercultural communication and stereotyping
How do we define “culture”?
The subject of “intercultural communication” is beset by a major problem, since there is really very
little agreement on what people mean by the idea of culture in the first place. The word “culture”
often brings up more problems than it solves. On the one hand, we want to talk about large groups
of people and what they have in common, from their history and worldview to their language or
languages or geographical location. On the other hand, when we talk about such large cultural
groups we want to avoid the problem of overgeneralization by using the construct “culture” where it
does not apply, especially in the discussion of discourse in intercultural communication. Cultures do
not talk to each other; individuals do. In that sense, all communication is interpersonal
communication and can never be intercultural communication.
We want to raise a question, which has two parts: to what extent do individual Chinese or
Americans, Koreans or British, Australians or Singaporeans personally represent their culture’s
beliefs, and do those beliefs make any significant difference in their ability to communicate
professionally? For our purposes the main concern is to see how the ideological positions of cultures
or of discourse systems become a factor in the interpersonal communication of members of one
group with members of other groups.
Before moving on, however, we want to mention that there is an intercultural problem in using the
word “culture” itself. In English there are two normal uses of this word: high culture, and
anthropological culture. The first meaning, high culture, focuses on intellectual and artistic
achievements.
In studies of intercultural communication, our concern is not with high culture, but with
anthropological culture. When we use the word “culture” in its anthropological sense, we mean to
say that culture is any of the customs, worldview, language, kinship system, social organization, and
other taken-for-granted day-to-day practices of a people which set that group apart as a distinctive
group. By using the anthropological sense of the word “culture,” we mean to consider any aspect of
the ideas, communications, or behaviors of a group of people which gives to them a distinctive
identity and which is used to organize their internal sense of cohesion and membership.
Culture an discourse systems
Ideology
The first major aspect of culture which we will consider is history and worldview. This is the most
familiar way of looking at cultures, by studying their histories and the common worldviews which
arise out of these histories. Perhaps the clearest difference between East Asian cultures (China,
Korea, and Japan) and so-called western culture is that East Asians have a sense of having a long,
continuous, and unified history, whereas westerners tend to emphasize the shorter-term political
organizations which have arisen since the Renaissance.
- Beliefs, values, and religion
We want to briefly comment on beliefs, values, and religion, because these aspects of culture
have played a very significant role in the communications between Asians and westerners
over the past few centuries. At the same time we want to caution against making too direct
an application of our ideas about cultural values and, especially, religion in discussions of
, intercultural communication. In many cases, a person’s religious beliefs will be quite
consonant with those of his or her culture in general. We still need to ask to what extent
these beliefs directly affect his or her communication, especially in intercultural situations.
Face systems
The second aspect of culture we are considering, social organization, is one of the most important in
that it refers to the way a cultural group organizes relationships among members of the group.
- Kingship
There are two aspects of kinship which are of direct importance to intercultural discourse:
hierarchy and collectivistic relationship. Kinship relationships emphasize that people are
connected to each other by having descended from common ancestors. In doing so, kinship
relationships emphasize, first of all, that ascending generations are before, prior to, and even
superior to descending generations. This hierarchy of relationship is emphasized by
Confucius and reiterated in such teaching materials as the San Zi Jing (Xu Chuiyang, 1990) or
even the public school workbooks used today in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea, and
throughout the rest of East Asia. The primary relationships are not lateral relationships, those
between brothers and sisters, for example, but hierarchical, those between fathers and sons,
mothers and daughters.
This emphasis on hierarchical relationship has a twofold consequence for discourse: from
very early in life one becomes subtly practiced in the discourse forms of hierarchical
relationship. One learns first to show respect to those above, then, in due time, one learns
the forms of guidance and leadership of those who come after. The second consequence is
that one comes to expect all relationships to be hierarchical to some extent.
The second aspect of kinship which is significant for discourse is that individual members of a
culture are not perceived as independently acting individuals but, rather, they are seen as
acting within hierarchies of kinship and other such relationships.
This emphasis on kinship relationships, which is still characteristic of East Asians to some
extent, even in contemporary and “westernized” Asian centers such as Hong Kong, is sharply
contrasted with the western emphasis on individualism and egalitarianism.
This difference in egalitarianism and hierarchy will, then, most likely play out in the choice of
strategies of interpersonal politeness, with the westerner using strategies of involvement as
a way of emphasizing egalitarianism and the Asian using strategies of independence as a way
of showing deference.
- The concept of the self
A second aspect of social organization concerns the concept of the person or of the self as a
unit within that group’s organization. The Chinese psychological anthropologist Francis L. K.
Hsu believes that the excessive individualism of the western sense of the self has led to a
general inability or unwillingness among the psychological sciences to consider the social
aspects of the development of human behavior. He says, “The major key (though never the
only key) as to why we behave like human beings as well as to why we behave like Americans
or Japanese is to be found in our relationships with our fellow human beings” (p. 414). Hsu
considers human relationships to be the fundamental unit of analysis, not a secondary,
constructed category.
In place of the idea of the individual self, Hsu suggests a concept based on the Chinese
concept of person (ren or jen), which includes in his analysis not only interior unconscious or
pre-conscious (“Freudian”) levels and inexpressible and expressible conscious levels of the
person but also one’s intimate society and culture. In this analysis of the self, such
, relationships as those with one’s parents and children are considered inseparable aspects of
the self. Where a western conception of the self places the major boundary which defines
the self between the biological individual and that individual’s intimates, Hsu argues that the
Chinese concept of person (ren or jen) places the major boundary of the person on the
outside of those intimate relationships.
We believe that in any society human individuals must have close relationships with other
humans as well as the freedom to operate independently. It is hard to imagine a human
society in which either one of these extremes was practiced to the exclusion of the other.
What is important in studying cultural differences is not whether a society is individualistic or
collectivistic in itself, but what that society upholds as its ideal, even when we all recognize
that we must all have some independence as well as some place in society.
For professional discourse, the question we want to consider is the relative difference
between two people in their concept of the self as an individual or as part of a larger social
group.
From an individualistic point of view, face relationships are very much a matter of individual
face. From a collectivistic point of view, however, one’s face is really the face of one’s group,
whether that group is thought of as one’s family, one’s cultural group, or one’s corporation.
It is quite likely that in intercultural communication, a person from a highly individualistic
culture would pay more attention to his or her own personal face needs, whereas a person
from a more collectivistic culture would always have the face of others foremost in his or her
mind.
- Ingroup-outgroup relationships
The third aspect of social organization we want to consider is the problem of establishing
relationships between members of the group and members of other groups. One
consequence of the cultural difference between individualism and collectivism has to do with
the difference between speaking to members of one’s own group and speaking to others. In
an individualistic society, groups do not form with the same degree of permanence as they
do in a collectivist society. As a result, the ways of speaking to others are much more similar
from situation to situation, since in each case the relationships are being negotiated and
developed right within the situation of the discourse. On the other hand, in a collectivist
society, many relationships are established from one’s birth into a particular family in a
particular segment of society in a particular place. These memberships in particular groups
tend to take on a permanent, ingroup character along with special forms of discourse which
carefully preserve the boundaries between those who are inside members of the group and
all others who are not members of the group.
In some cases even the language or the register within that language will be associated with
the distinction between ingroup and outgroup communication. In this case, as in others,
members of an ingroup feel that it is a kind of ingroup betrayal to use ingroup forms of
language to non-members. In cultures where the distinction between ingroup and outgroup
is a significant distinction, this is often paralleled by the use of different forms of discourse
such as a special set of personal names or the use of particular registers for ingroup and
outgroup communication.
- Gemeinschaft and gesellschaft
One of the major and foundational insights of the field of sociology was that there are two
very different ways in which society can be organized. In 1887, in a book called Gemeinschaft
und Gesellschaft the German Ferdinand Tönnies, argued that the problems of modern
society have arisen because of a split with the traditional, communitybased social
organization of the Middle Ages. He argued that such an organic, community form of social
, solidarity, which he called Gemeinschaft, was based on the fact that individuals shared a
common history and common traditions. In contrast to the Gemeinschaft or community
organization of social relationships, in modern society relationships are more contractual,
rational, or instrumental. This form of society by mutual agreement and to protect mutual
interests – one might say corporate society – which developed as part of the industrialization
of Europe, Tönnies called Gesellschaft.
There are two major types of discourse system: those into which one becomes a member
through the natural processes of birth and growth within a family and a community, and
those into which one chooses to enter for utilitarian purposes such as one’s professional
specialization or the company for which one works. The social structure of the first kind of
discourse system is more like what the sociologists would call Gemeinschaft, and the goal-
directed discourse systems such as corporations are rather strong examples of the
Gesellschaft form of social organization.
This distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft is also useful for talking about how
people learn to be members of their discourse systems.
In intercultural communication many problems arise, particularly in professional contexts,
when people make different assumptions about whether Gemeinschaft or Gesellschaft forms
of organization are most appropriate.
No modern culture or discourse system, of course, is purely organized as either
Gemeinschaft or Gesellschaft alone. In any social structure we will see a mixture of elements
of both forms of organization. What is important in understanding intercultural
communication is to understand in which contexts one of these forms of organization is
preferred over the other. It is also important to understand that conflicts and
misinterpretations may arise where participants in a discourse do not come to agreement
over which mode of organization should predominate.
Forms of discourse
functions of language
A cultural group may have quite distinctive ways of understanding the basic functions of language,
and therefore we will take up the question of the functions of language as the third major aspect of
culture which plays a role in intercultural communication.
For our purposes, however, the most important aspect of language from a cultural point of view is
how a particular culture conceives of the function(s) of language.
- Information and relationship
Communication theorists, linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists all agree that
language has many functions. When we communicate with others we simultaneously
communicate some amount of information and indicate our current expectations about the
relationship between or among participants. At the two extremes of information and
relationship, there are often cases in which one or the other function appears to be
minimized.
What is of concern for us is not to establish whether or not the purpose of language is to
convey information or relationship; the use of language always accomplishes both functions
to some extent. From an intercultural point of view, we can see that cultures often are
different from each other in how much importance they give to one function of language
over the other.
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